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Meet the 2025 Art + Science Graduate Fellows

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    Congratulations 2025 Norris Center Art + Science Collaborative Graduate Fellows!

    This Fellowship is designed to support graduate students engaging with Art and/or Art + Science Collaborative research projects that relate to Natural History or the Natural World. Each fellowship award of $2500 is made possible by the generous gifts of private donors to the Norris Center.

    Kate Jaffe (Environmental Art and Social Practice graduate student) faculty sponsor Jonathan Jackson. Matte Hewitt (MFA, Film and Digital Media graduate student) faculty sponsor Irene Gustafson. Rodrigo Diaz Barriga Lopez (DMA, Music Department graduate student) faculty sponsor Ben Leeds Carson. Tyler Rai Abramson (MFA Candidate - Environmental Art and Social Practice) faculty sponsor Laurie Palmer.

    • Rodrigo Diaz Barriga Lopez

  • No alternative textPracticing Attunement through Musical Performance: Three Pieces for Natural Spaces. The project that Rodrigo Diaz Barriga Lopez is conducting explores its participants’ relationships to natural space through sensory awareness and musical performance. A period of creative exploration and documentation at the Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve at Big Sur will inform the composition of three musical scores, each based on a different element: ground, water, and air. Using a combination of text instructions and graphic notation, the scores will guide performers through a series of prompts involving sensing, movement, and sound-making, which they will use to respond to their surroundings. The final project will include documented performances of each score at the Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve, documentation of the creative process along with the scores, and a live performance of the work.

    • Tyler Rai

  • No alternative textTyler Rai. Through the Norris Center Art + Science Fellowship, I plan to research the caves, abandoned quarries, and lime kilns on campus to uncover what cultures of life thrive in voids of geologic rupture and the aftermath of historic extractivist projects. What do these sites have to teach us about refuge, collaboration, resilience, and fugitivity? Engaging with the UCSC campus as my primary site, I will develop modes of embodied research that will include singing and movement – using my body as a sensor and archive on site. In addition, I will employ methods of recording the acoustics of these sites and surveying soil samples to better understand the sounds, signals and life (from minerals, to microbes, and invertebrates) that are already present and what they can teach us. These methods of recording and engagement in artistic field methodology will be shared through site-specific workshops where I will lead participants through movement and sound activities that activate our capacity to collaborate with the underground.

    • Kate Jaffe

  • No alternative textKate Jaffe is in her second year of the Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA at UCSC. Kate is the founding Director of Santa Cruz KIN (Kids in Nature). Kates project investigates three hidden freshwater springs in Santa Cruz, using them as a case study to explore broader issues of ecological disruption, historical erasure, and water management. These springs, once a vital lifesource for native Uypi communities and later a central tool for violent colonial expansion, have been systematically altered over time, reflecting global patterns of environmental exploitation. Through an art-science approach, the project will produce a field guide featuring hand-processed film photography, ecological research, and narrative storytelling to document the springs’ enduring presence. By examining the species that inhabit these riparian corridors, the project asks how deeper relationships with unseen water sources might transform public engagement with conservation. Ultimately, it seeks to reclaim these springs as part of a shared environmental and cultural heritage, challenging the ways in which natural resources are controlled, obscured, and forgotten as well as paying homage to their long term original stewards.

    • Matte Hewitt

  • No alternative textMatte Hewitt is in their second year of the Social Documentation MFA program at UCSC. Their work is influenced by research from the fields of Environmental Humanities, Queer Indigenous Studies, Critical Race Science and Technology Studies. In collaboration with the Norris Center, Matte will be able to complete their thesis film, which investigates local Indigenous and place-based knowledges through the trans figure of Hummingbird, the trickster figure of Coyote, and the life-giving figure of a Tick. Grounded in a Mutsun Ohlone telling of a creation story, the film also addresses the development of military drone technology, which used biological studies of hummingbird wings and their flight patterns. Through recorded conversations, observational footage, archival material, radio transmissions, and sound design, the multispecies film essay offers audiences a new way to meet hummingbirds and our more-than-human relatives.