UC Santa Cruz Alumni Photos
Profiles In Excellence

These profiles highlight the outstanding educational opportunities and achievements of UCSC alumni.

Those profiled are:

 

Susan Blackaby
Susan Blackaby

Susan Blackaby has always kept her eye out for the kid who can't read.

An educational writer for the past 25 years, the UC Santa Cruz alumna has written more than 120 books for children to inspire them to learn how to read.

"I'm always writing for the little kid in the back row who is afraid to raise his hand," says Blackaby. Read complete Blackaby story

 

Michael Scherer
Michael Scherer

The week before the Nov. 4 election, Time magazine Washington correspondent Michael Scherer (B.A. Oakes, 1998) wrote a cover story about voter disenfranchisement that opened with these words:

We can go to the moon, split atoms to power submarines, squeeze profits from a 99 cent hamburger and watch football highlights on cell phones. But the most successful democracy in human history has yet to figure out how to conduct a proper election.

True to his roots as a creative writing major at UCSC, Scherer strives for vivid language as compelling as the facts unearthed by his vigorous reporting. Read complete Scherer story

 

John Rickford
John Rickford

More than 100 people filled the Stevenson Fireside Lounge on October 22, 2008 to hear Stanford linguistics professor and UCSC alumnus John Rickford discuss his research on the persistent achievement gap between black and white students in reading and the language arts.

Rickford focused on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Ebonics--spoken by many African American students--and the negative responses of teachers and school administrators to this variety of language.

Read complete Rickford story

 

Robin Toma
Robin Toma

Attacks based on race, ethnicity, and national origin rose dramatically, as did crimes based on sexual orientation and religion, according to the annual report issued in July by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission.

As executive director of the commission, UCSC graduate Robin Toma (B.A., economics and sociology, Oakes College, '82) fielded media calls and interpreted the report for journalists. The report was discouraging, but Toma is committed to the fight for racial equality and social justice. He draws inspiration from the courage of those who are committed to breaking the cycles of stereotyping, violence, and retribution.

Read complete Toma story

 

Mark Headley
Mark Headley

When he graduated from UCSC in 1983, Mark Headley (B.A. politics and economics, Stevenson College) had a mean fencing game and a deep understanding of the political and economic factors shaping Asia.

The former placed him among the top 20 foil fencers in the country, while the latter propelled him to the top of a capital investment firm with more than $10 billion invested in Asia.

"Through a real accident of history, I ended up in the asset management industry, which I didn't even know existed," said Headley, who grew up in Berkeley and arrived at UCSC as "a young radical kid--cynical, confused and angry. It's been a long road to where I am now."

Read complete Headley story

 

Jesse Thorn
Jesse Thorn

Four months ago, Apple Computer flew UCSC alumnus Jesse Thorn back east to interview Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert in front of a live audience at its flagship store in New York City. Not a bad gig for a 26-year old who was thrilled to get his first show on college radio in 1999.

But Thorn has come a long way in a short time. The Sound of Young America, the irreverent arts and comedy interview show he created while a student at UCSC, was picked up in June for distribution by Public Radio International (PRI)--the same people who bring Ira Glass's award-winning This American Life and the BBC News to audiences each week across the country. So when the folks at Apple needed someone to host Colbert for a live podcast that would be posted as a free download on i-Tunes, Thorn got the call.

Read complete Thorn story

 

Nikki Silva
Nikki Silva

For eight lucky students last quarter, award winning independent radio producer Nikki Silva offered the ideal blend of inspiration, instruction, and encouragement.

A star of public radio, Silva (B.A., aesthetic studies, 1973) has produced groundbreaking programming for National Public Radio with her longtime collaborator and fellow UCSC graduate Davia Nelson (B.A., politics, 1975). Over the years, the two women have attracted devoted listeners to several series, including Lost & Found Sound and the Sonic Memorial Project, an audio archive of the World Trade Center. The duo, known as The Kitchen Sisters, are now producing radio documentaries that explore how communities come together around food, so it was perhaps fitting that Silva proposed a potluck for the class's last meeting, and showed up with a colorful tablecloth and a fresh fruit tart.

Read complete Silva story

 

Nina Grove
Nina Grove

Nina Grove's interest in public health began when she took a year off from her studies at UC Santa Cruz to travel and ended up living in Nairobi, Kenya, where she volunteered at a school for disabled children. Now, as director of the malaria program at the Institute for OneWorld Health, Grove is involved in a unique public health project that is applying the tools of the biotechnology industry to the battle against one of the most devastating diseases in the developing world.

Read complete Grove story

 

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Victor Davis Hanson

President George W. Bush awarded a 2007 National Humanities Medal to UCSC alumnus Victor Davis Hanson on November 15 during a ceremony held in the White House East Room. Hanson was one of nine Americans honored for their "exemplary contributions to the humanities" and for their scholarship, preservation efforts, philanthropy, and literary works.

The National Humanities Medal, first awarded in 1989 as the Charles Frankel Prize, honors individuals or groups whose work "has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens' engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans' access to important resources in the humanities."

Read complete Hanson story

 

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Katie Roper

Overcoming obstacles and pursuing her dreams are two of the life skills Katie Roper says she acquired at UCSC, where several professors encouraged her to take a hands-on approach to her education.

Roper had always wanted to work in Africa, and with the support of faculty mentors, she arranged two separate internships in Kenya, where she produced documentary films about environmental sustainability.

Read complete Roper story

 

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Sylvain Carton

This past January, the San Francisco Chronicle identified Sylvain Carton as the “powerhouse alto saxophone player” in one of the Bay Area’s “most provocative jazz ensembles.” It was richly deserved praise for the up-and-coming co-leader of the Mitch Marcus Quintet.

Carton, who earned a master of arts degree in music composition from UC Santa Cruz five months after the newspaper tribute, has artistic breadth that demands attention. His musical tastes run from Stravinsky and Bartok, to Mingus and Ellington . . . to Middle-Eastern surf-metal music. “I draw my influences from around the globe--Eastern European, African, Latin American--a lot of traditional music,” Carton says. “I really like mixing it up.”

Read complete Carton story

 

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Teresa Ish

Outside of global warming, unsustainable fishing is "one of the main threats facing the ocean," according to Teresa Ish, co-creator of a nonprofit that administers a color-coded system called FishWise. The program, started in 2002, helps consumers easily identify sustainable seafood choices while they're making selections at the fish counter. The colors--green for healthy populations and environmentally responsible practices, yellow to indicate some concern, and red for overfished or unsustainable--are right there on the fish, on small signs stuck into the display.

FishWise is used in 34 stores in California, and in 2007 it found roots outside the state, at Greenlife Grocery stores in Tennessee and North Carolina. The program reduced bycatch by 170,000 pounds in its first five years, according to estimates by nonprofit officials.

Read complete Ish story

 

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Reyna Grande

Born in rural Mexico, UC Santa Cruz alumna Reyna Grande grew up in extreme poverty. Before she crossed the border to live in Los Angeles at the age of eight, she lived in a cardboard shack with a dirt floor and no running water. She bathed in a dirty canal outside and survived on a diet of only beans and tortillas.

Overcoming the language barrier and her status as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, Grande made the most of her new home, eventually earning a bachelor’s degree in creative writing/film & video from UC Santa Cruz in 1999. For her senior project in UCSC’s Literature Department, she even wrote the first 80 pages of her debut novel, Across a Hundred Mountains.

Read complete Grande story

 

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Jonathan Gershenzon

As director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, Jonathan Gershenzon is still pursuing some of the same ideas that first fascinated him as an undergraduate at UCSC in the 1970s.

Here he was taught and inspired by a formidable group of plant scientists on the biology faculty, including Jean Langenheim, now a professor emerita of ecology and evolutionary biology, Lincoln Taiz, professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology, and the late Harry Beevers and Kenneth Thimann.

Read complete Gershenzon story

 

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Kennan Ward

When National Geographic hired Kennan Ward to photograph red tree-kangaroos, he was thrilled by the prospect of a trip to Australia. His joy quickly turned to disappointment, however, when the magazine sent him to the San Diego Wild Animal Park to shoot captive animals.

"Even for the biggest magazines, it's just not cost-effective to photograph animals in the wild," said Ward, one of the leading wildlife photographers in the world and a purist who prefers to work in nature. "I like my animals wild. That's what separates us from 99 percent of the nature photography out there."

Read complete Ward story

 

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Stephen Bruce

As a boy growing up in Santa Cruz, Stephen Bruce often played with kids whose parents were professors at UCSC, so when it came time to choose a college, he didn't look far.

"It was the best thing I ever did," says Bruce, a graduate of Santa Cruz High School. "I wanted to study. I wanted to learn how to think."

Bruce lived on campus and spent his first year playing "major-of-the month," before deciding on economics and discovering politics professor Robert Meister. For Bruce, the combination of economics, politics, math, and philosophy was the key that unlocked the door to learning.

Read complete Bruce story

 

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Sasha Su-Ling Welland

Sasha Su-Ling Welland's new book tells the stories of her grandmother and great aunt, spirited and competitive sisters who came of age in China in the 1920s.

As part of an international wave of "modern girls," these young women flouted convention as successfully as their Western counterparts, the familiar "flappers" of the Roaring '20s, and their lives reveal the international roots of feminism, says Welland (Ph.D. anthropology, '06).

Read complete Welland story

 

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Margaret Fox

Shortly after graduating from UCSC in 1975, Margaret Fox bought a cafe in Mendocino and gave locals a delicious new reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Word of Fox’s muffins, omelettes, and black bean chili quickly spread, and the cafe’s breakfasts were pronounced the best in the state by influential restaurant critic Ruth Reichl, whose review helped put the former fishing village on the culinary map.

Read complete Fox story

 

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Steven Hawley

Every astronaut is impressed by the view of Earth from space. For NASA astronaut Steven Hawley, though, the view in the other direction was just as impressive--an endless expanse of stars shining clear and bright, without the twinkling distortions of the atmosphere or the dimming effects of light pollution.

"As an astronomer, I always liked to look at the stars, but most of the other astronauts liked to look at Earth, so there was always a bit of a battle over which way we were going to point the shuttle," said Hawley, who flew on five space shuttle missions and now serves as director of astromaterials research and exploration science at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Read complete Hawley story

 

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Mostafa Ghous

Mostafa Ghous was five years old when his family fled Afghanistan in 1980 to escape the Soviet invasion. Now, Ghous is using the engineering skills he learned at UCSC to help rebuild the war-torn country where he was born.

At the same time, he is helping disadvantaged students in Solano County as director of a program that was crucial to his own academic success.

Read complete Ghous story

 

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Matt Ratto

Matt Ratto admits that his career trajectory has been a little strange. A UCSC graduate with a B.A. ('94) and fifth-year certificate ('97) in theater arts, Ratto received his Ph.D. in communications from UC San Diego in 2003.

He was also an actor/technical understudy for the infamous Beach Blanket Babylon production in San Francisco, ran a computer company that built clone computers, and worked for three years in the corporate world as a computer programmer for Digital Systems International in Seattle. Ratto now works for the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, where he studies the social implications of digital technologies.

Read complete Ratto story

 

Annette Lareau
Annette Lareau

As a sociologist, Annette Lareau wanted to know more about how social inequality gets perpetuated from generation to generation.

She wanted to identify the "mechanisms in daily life that sustain the patterns of inequality" in U.S. society.

Read complete Lareau story

 

Dug Stanat
Bruce Stein

As a UCSC undergraduate in the 1970s, Bruce Stein and a group of fellow students spent an entire spring quarter in the Eastern Mojave Desert doing surveys of the Granite Mountains, learning all they could about the area's natural resources, and eventually publishing their findings in a report that influenced the Bureau of Land Management's planning decisions for the area.

Read complete Stein story

 

 

Bruce Stein
Dug Stanat

As a child, Dug Stanat didn't watch much television, and his parents frowned on cartoons. So it's a little ironic that Stanat now makes his living bringing movies like Shrek 2 and Madagascar to the screen.

Stanat is a digital puppet maker, transforming static computer-generated models into virtual marionettes.

Read complete Stanat story

 

 

Bonnie Rose Hough
Bonnie Rose Hough

It seems now that Bonnie Rose Hough was destined for a career in law.

One of the first classes she took at UCSC was Constitutional Law. During an internship her freshman year, she visited nursing homes to identify the legal needs of senior citizens and even represented them during administrative hearings on Social Security issues.

Read complete Hough story

 

 

Hector Tobar
Hector Tobar

A top reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Hector Tobar takes pride in telling the stories of people who are often overlooked by the media.

One of his best days on the job was actually a night he spent under the stars on the war-torn Iraq-Syria border.

Read complete Tobar story

 

 

Julie Packard
Julie Packard

The Monterey Bay Aquarium, which Julie Packard helped found and has led as executive director since it opened 20 years ago, is among the world’s most popular attractions. A recent national survey ranked it the best aquarium and one of the top family destinations of any kind, ahead of Disneyland and the San Diego Zoo.

Read complete Packard story

 

 

Katy Roberts
Katy Roberts

From pundits to presidents, regular readers of the New York Times rely on the paper’s Sunday “Week in Review” section to tell them what they need to know. One of the most influential publications in journalism, the section provides context for the week’s top stories, combining insight and analysis with fine writing on topics from politics and religion to science and the symphony. In short, section editor Katy Roberts shoulders the burden of sifting through mountains of news and information so we don’t have to.

Read complete Roberts story

 

 

Francisco Rosado-May
Francisco Rosado-May

Francisco Rosado-May’s path to the presidency of a public university in Mexico began in the rural village of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, where he and other eager Mayan youngsters gathered in a hallway to take classes. “I vividly remember the end of my first year, when my teacher called me to her house and gave me a big can of cocoa—my first cocoa ever—for having very good grades,” recalls Rosado-May.

Read complete Rosado-May story

 

 

Ted Goldstein
Ted Goldstein

Ted Goldstein has built a successful career in the computer industry by combining expertise in programming with an appreciation for the human side of technological innovation. Now a vice president at Apple Computer, Goldstein oversees the development of programming tools for Apple’s highly acclaimed new operating system, Mac OS X.

Read complete Goldstein story

 

 

Cheryl Scott
Cheryl Scott

Tourists come from around the world to witness the wonders of Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, but Dr. Cheryl Scott has never been able to slip off with friends or family to see the wildebeests and cheetahs herself. Her job running the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) office in the East African nation of about 34 million people—where an estimated 10 percent of the population has HIV—leaves little time for sightseeing.

Read complete Scott story

 

Wayne Horvitz
Wayne Horvitz

Composer, pianist, and keyboardist Wayne Horvitz has performed on more than 100 albums and CDs over the past 25 years. He has written for theater, dance, and film, and collaborated on a mind-boggling variety of musical projects—in styles ranging from rhythm & blues and improvisational jazz, to classical minimalism and urban noise.

Read complete Horvitz story

 

 

Kelvin Filer
Kelvin Filer

Kelvin Filer grew up in the Compton neighborhood of Los Angeles in the 1960s, and he says his home was always abuzz with conversations about civil rights and the struggle for racial equality.

"My parents were both civil rights activists, and as a child, I'd listen in when the adults were talking strategy," recalls Filer. "Their discussions always ended the same way, asking 'What do the lawyers say? Let's run this by the attorneys.' That's when I decided I wanted to be a lawyer."

Read complete Filer story

 

 

Belle Yang
Belle Yang

A remarkable new book by UCSC alumna Belle Yang taps into the hopes and fears all immigrant children must experience when they try to grab hold of the American dream.

Drawn from Yang’s own saga of coming to San Francisco from Taiwan at the age of seven, Hannah Is My Name tells the story of a Chinese family’s new life in a brightly illustrated 32-page children’s book published by Candlewick Press.

Read complete Yang story

 

 

Drew Goodman
Drew Goodman

Goodman and his wife, Myra, didn't know they would contribute to a culinary revolution when they cofounded Earthbound Farm in 1984, planning to grow organic raspberries and greens for local restaurants.

Today, Earthbound Farm's signature organic salad mix is available in more than 70 percent of supermarkets in the United States. With annual sales expected to top $300 million in 2004, Earthbound Farm is the largest organic produce brand in North America.

Read complete Goodman story

 

 

Merrill Feitell
Merrill Feitell

UCSC alumna Merrill Feitell is on a roll. Her debut collection of short stories, Here Beneath Low-flying Planes, received the 2004 Iowa Short Fiction Award--an honor described by the New York Times as “among the most prestigious literary prizes America offers.”

She was named one of “fifteen of the world’s best new writers” featured as “Fiction’s New Luminaries” in the Summer 2004 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Read complete Feitell story

 

 

Lawrence Weschler
Lawrence Weschler

For the past two decades, longtime New Yorker magazine staff writer and UCSC alumnus Lawrence Weschler has written about unexpected relationships between art, culture, war, and peace.

Weschler is the author of 11 books including Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, which was short-listed for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Currently the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, he is a widely honored political and cultural journalist and a regular contributor to such publications as McSweeny's, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly,Threepenny Review, and National Public Radio.

Read complete Weschler story

 

 

Katherine Lebaric
Katherine Lebaric

It takes a few years for most college graduates to establish a career and begin making a name for themselves.

Not Katherine Lebaric. After graduating with honors from UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering in 2002, Lebaric promptly launched her own company based on software she had developed in her "spare time."

Read complete Lebaric story

 

 

Damon Kluck
Damon Kluck

As a member of the United States Postal Service professional cycling team, UCSC alumnus Damon Kluck is among the top athletes in the country. But his sport remains largely unknown in the United States.

Under the leadership of Lance Armstrong, the USPS team has captured five consecutive Tour de France victories and become the most accomplished and highest-profile cycling team in the world.

With the exception of the annual Tour de France race, though, cycling rarely gets a headline in U.S. newspapers. And that's fine with Kluck, who is preparing for his second year on the team after finally triumphing over a hip problem that has bothered him since high school.

Read complete Kluck story

 

 

Larry Cornman
Larry Cornman

Alumnus Larry Cornman has always resisted doing what was expected of him, a trait that seems to have served him well. Even the high school teacher who gave him a "D" in physics for refusing to do the assigned work said he thought Cornman would make a good scientist, and he was right.

But Cornman followed a round-about path to a career in science, trusting his own intuition more than conventional wisdom. "I like to do things my way," he says.Cornman dropped out of graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1986 to take a job at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), also in Boulder.

Read complete Cornman story

 

 

Mark Teague
Mark Teague

Mark Teague, best-selling children's author and illustrator of more than 40 books, including the now-classic How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night?, is a doodler who credits his success to "dumb luck."

But his fans know better. Take the premise of his most recent--and favorite--book, Dear Mrs. LaRue: Letters from Obedience School, about a wirehaired terrier named Ike whose pranks prompt his owner to temporarily banish him to a "canine academy."

Read complete Teague story

 

 

Randall Nichols
Randall Nichols

When Randall Nichols recently received a major award for his achievements as a high school classics teacher, it brought back fond memories of his former professors at UCSC. In fact, the Cowell '80 alum firmly believes that his experience at UCSC significantly changed the course of his life.

"Whenever I am asked why I became a high school classics teacher, I remember three professors from my undergraduate days at the University of California at Santa Cruz: John Lynch, Mary-Kay Gamel and Gary Miles," Nichols wrote in a recent issue of the classics journal Amorpha. "The excellence of their teaching drew me to classics. They encouraged me along the way and their educational beliefs and practices have influenced mine."

Read complete Nichols story

 

 

Engineering Graduates
Engineering Graduates

Graduates of the School of Engineering are helping to build its reputation through their own accomplishments in industry and academia. Four of those graduates--KIMMEN SJÖLANDER, AMAN SHAIKH, MIKE TZAMALOUKAS, and RANDAL BURNS--represent the school's founding departments, computer science and computer engineering.

The quality of their work, however, speaks to the promise of the school's new departments and programs in applied math and statistics, biomolecular engineering, electrical engineering, information systems management, network engineering, and software engineering.

Read complete Engineering Graduates story

 

 

Dana Priest
Dana Priest

Timing is everything. Just ask Washington Post reporter Dana Priest--if you can catch her. Her first book, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military, arrived in bookstores this past spring just as jittery Americans prepared for war in Iraq.

She then headed out on a book tour, with stops in eight cities in two weeks, interviews on morning TV shows and C-SPAN, and Council of Foreign Relations speeches. Her vivid account of life with America's military--much of it based on her reporting for the Washington Post--struck a chord. "The reception was just great," she says. "A lot of that had to do with the timing of the book--a lot of people were trying to read about and were wondering about the military."

Read complete Priest story

 

 

Maya Rudolph
Maya Rudolph

As a little girl in the late 1970s, Maya Rudolph begged her parents to stay up late to watch her favorite show, Saturday Night Live. "I remember crawling into my parents' bed when they were watching it. I fell in love with Gilda Radner; I just wanted to be her when I grew up," recalls Rudolph. "It was just one of those things where I thought 'I want to do that when I grow up; I want to do that when I grow up'--and the feeling never went away."

Today, the performer who as a 5-year-old wowed her Los Angeles family with impersonations of Roseanne Roseannadanna--one of Gilda Radner's signature characters--is living her childhood dream as a Saturday Night Live cast member. Rudolph treats viewers to an eclectic mix of characters--from fictional high schooler Megan to buttoned-down presidential adviser Condoleezza Rice to over-the-top fashion designer Donatella Versace. And though this is her third full season with the show, she's "still kind of shocked" at the way things have turned out.

Read complete Rudolph story

 

 

Alexander Gonzalez
Alexander Gonzalez

"I didn't start out to be a university president," observes Alexander Gonzalez. What the president of California State University, San Marcos, did start out as was the son of Mexican immigrants in East Los Angeles, the middle child of seven. After graduating from Garfield High School--the school made famous in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver--military service, not college, was in Gonzalez's immediate future.

"My friend and I were going to join the Navy, but the recruiter had gone out to lunch, so we joined the Air Force," he remembers. After a four-year stint, including service in the Philippines, Gonzalez began to consider college. No one else in his family had gone to college, and his parents had received just a few years of schooling. But when he was recruited by Pomona College, he enrolled, earning a degree in history.

Read complete Gonzalez story

 

 

Kent Nagano
Kent Nagano

The muted chaos of low voices quiets as the houselights come down. A shimmer of high strings forms in the dimness, a faint luminous veil over the audience, gathered on a Saturday afternoon last September in Los Angeles's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The passage is charged with promise and risk - the opening of the overture to Richard Wagner's Lohengrin.

Wagner's operas are the kind of musical and theatrical challenge that can be a crucible for any company. It is an audacious choice for the Los Angeles Opera. The company has made only two attempts at Wagner before, only one of which was well received, although it is widely known that the opera has ambitious plans to stage the composer's Ring cycle in 2003, complete with Hollywood special effects supplied by Industrial Light and Magic.

But the opera has recently undergone a change in leadership with Placido Domingo assuming the position of artistic director and Kent Nagano the post of principal conductor. It would be an exaggeration to say the future of the company rests on this single performance of Lohengrin, but there is a lot on the line. Now the rehearsals are over, the stage is set, and the afternoon is in the hands of the performers and Maestro Nagano, making his debut.

Read complete Nagano story

 

 

Gordon WiltsieGordon Wiltsie

Sticking with chemistry might have been a lot less dangerous, but then Gordon Wiltsie would never have explored the North Pole by dogsled, survived two avalanches in Kashmir, or found that lost tomb in the jungles of Peru.

"I think that's been the luckiest thing about my career. I get to do a lot of things that people would consider a once-in-a-lifetime experience," says freelance adventure photographer Wiltsie, whose work has appeared several times in National Geographic, as well as in many outdoor-adventure magazines.

It was at UCSC that Wiltsie - a chemistry major who transferred from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1973 - abandoned that field for creative writing and photography. A creative writing course his first quarter at UCSC, taught by author James D. Houston, followed by independent study for two quarters in Nepal, ignited his new interest.

Read complete Wiltsie story

 

 

Gillian Welch
Gillian Welch

Hollywood glamour was nowhere to be found when singer Gillian Welch stepped before the camera for her cameo role in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Just getting there had been hard enough: On tour in Manhattan, she played until about 2 in the morning, boarded a plane for Mississippi at 6 a.m., then was driven to sweltering Yazoo City where the film was being shot.

"I told them I was going to look terrible, and they said, 'That's good!' " The person doing her makeup had a similar attitude. "All the woman did was darken the circles under my eyes. That's all I got for my big-screen debut."

Welch, who played a major role in the 2000 movie's often-haunting soundtrack, had a minor screen part, portraying a rural woman asking for a record by "The Soggy Bottom Boys," the film's protagonists. "My little cameo in the movie was a first–and probably last– for me."

Read complete Welch story

 

 

Nelson and Silva
Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva

Thomas Edison cracking jokes. Tennessee Williams making recordings at a penny arcade. The whir, whistle, and hum of electric fans. Carnival talkers. Vietnamese manicurists. Voices of long-lost sisters, fathers, and grandfathers. Answering-machine monologues.

These are just a few of the sounds and subjects Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva have brought to life for millions of radio listeners nationwide on Lost & Found Sound. Launched two years ago, the award-winning series will air on National Public Radio's popular program All Things Considered through 2001.

Lost & Found Sound weaves together archival recordings, interviews, and music with journalistic storytelling to chronicle how recorded sound shaped and captured the 20th century. Much of the material for the series comes from the listeners themselves, who have scoured their attics, basements, and garages for personal recordings of historic events, audio letters, and other sonic artifacts.

Read complete Nelson and Silva story

 

 

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Visionaries of the Visual

While crowds fill many of this country's museums and galleries each day to appreciate the soul-stirring qualities of exhibition art, a very small number of individuals-curators and directors-make momentous decisions about the works we stand in line to see. UC Santa Cruz alumni fill many of these important positions, and the half-dozen graduates profiled here make the critical judgments that determine the art that their institutions buy or borrow, which artists to feature, and in what contexts the works will be displayed.

With past and present affiliations at some of the nation's most respected art museums and galleries, Jeremy Strick, Karen Moss, Philip Brookman, Keith Christiansen, Ada Takahashi, and Jock Reynolds not only influence how art is viewed today, but how it will be remembered tomorrow.

Read complete Visionaries of the Visual story

 

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