Faculty

Cláudio Bueno is an artist and curator from Sao Paulo, Brazil, mainly focusing on collective and communitarian art and cultural practices. He is an Assistant Professor in Social Design at the UCSC Art Department, teaching at the Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA. Bueno is also an affiliated professor of Visualizing Abolition Studies. He has engaged in several collective practices committed to social and environmental justice, such as ‘Explode! Platform’, ‘Intervalo-Escola,’ and ‘O grupo inteiro.’ Throughout these groups, he has worked in collaborative, dialogical, and interdisciplinary political-aesthetic propositions, projects, and processes in art, design, education, activism, architecture, and technology. Bueno has a Ph.D. in Visual Arts from USP, University of Sao Paulo. In 2022, he was the director of Participation and Culture at Tomie Ohtake Institute, São Paulo. From 2019 – 2021, he was a visiting professor at the graduate program of the School of Arts from FAAP (Fundação Armando Álvarez Penteado). 

Ben Leeds Carson’s music is performed at wide-ranging venues for experimental music; recently at SUNY Buffalo’s 2023 Visiting Artist Series, Blurred Edges (Hamburg 2020); the Smithsonian Institute’s Meyer Series (Washington DC 2019); the Foro Internacional de Música Nueva (Mexico City 2018). He has been Artist/Researcher-in-Residence for the Perception Laboratory at IRCAM (Institute de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique), where his collaborations focused on the perception of complex rhythm. Carson’s opera merging a Star Trek teleplay with historical renderings of the Orpheus myth was premiered (June 2016) in a workshop performance directed by acclaimed opera director and Star Trek—Next Generation actor John de Lancie.

Since 2003, Ben has served as faculty in Music at UCSC, where he is Professor, and Inaugural Director of Creative Technologies. He is a recipient of grants and awards recognizing excellence in teaching.

A.M. Darke is an artist and game maker designing radical tools for social intervention. Still in the class war. Now in the pandemic. He’s in the combination class war and pandemic. Assistant Professor of Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Art & Design: Games & Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz, Darke also directs The Other Lab, an interdisciplinary, intersectional feminist research space for experimental games, XR, and new media. She’s recently released ‘Ye or Nay?, a Kanye West-themed game about Black culture, and is currently developing the Open Source Afro Hair Library, a 3D model database for Black hair textures and styles.

Darke holds a B.A. in Design (’13) and an M.F.A. in Media Arts (’15), both from UCLA. Her work has been shown internationally and featured in a variety of publications, including Kill Screen, Vice, and NPR.

Kristen Gillette’s first encounter with UC Santa Cruz happened when she made the trek up from UCLA to UCSC for a one-quarter UC Intercampus Exchange Program. The school and its beautiful surroundings turned out to have an impact that would charter the course of her future career.

“I was really interested in puppetry at the time, and requested to attend UCSC in order to take Theater Arts’ Muppet Magic course taught by Distinguished Professor Emerita Dr. Kathy Foley,” said Gillette. “Outside of academia, I was also considering a creative career in the surf/skate industry, so UCSC seemed like an ideal place to check-out for a few months.”

After completing her undergrad courses in the Design Media Arts program at UCLA, she moved back to Santa Cruz, and, after several years and professional pursuits, attended graduate school at UCSC, earning an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media, in 2015. “Something about the school’s structure, opportunities, and faculty made it so much more conducive to creative collaboration, activist organizing and community building compared to what I had been able to figure out at UCLA,” she says. “And that view from the East Field, and being so close to redwoods and the ocean – that was a huge draw as well.”

Yolande Harris is a composer, sound and video artist focusing on the transformative potential of sound and listening in times of environmental change. She creates audio-visual installations, walks and performances, approached through a sonic sensibility. Originally from the UK, Yolande has lived and worked throughout Europe and the US, presenting her projects worldwide in venues ranging from intimate concerts and walks to international museums including, Issue Project Room (New York), Sonic Acts Festival (Amsterdam), Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt), the House of World Cultures (Berlin) and the Exploratorium (San Francisco). She studied with pioneers of experimental music and sound art Lou Harrison, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, David Dunn, Peter Sculthorpe, Louis Andriessen and Michel Waiswisz. Yolande studied music at Edinburgh University and Dartington College of Arts, holds an MPhil in Architecture and Moving Image from Cambridge University, and a PhD in music from Leiden University titled ‘Sound, Environment and Sonic Consciousness’.

Sal Moreno (he/him) is a Chicago-based creative technologist, artist, and performer whose work spans creative computation, sound, performance, and new media. Through free-drumming and emerging technology, Sal deconstructs the regimented traditions of marching band, challenging its origins in Western military and music ideologies while exploring his own Chicano heritage. With a strong fluency in game engines, motion capture, and coding languages, he crafts animations, visual effects, and generative sounds that supports this experimentation. Sal’s work has been featured at Ars Electronica, EXPO Chicago, Mana Contemporary, and on virtual platforms. Sal currently teaches at UI Chicago, SAIC, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Cruz. He also serves on the board of the Video Game Art Gallery and is part of the New Media Caucus Planning Committee for their 2025 Symposium.

Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, media scholar, and educator. She earned her Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Computational Media and a certificate from the Science and Justice Research Center from the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. She is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Art and Principal Founding Faculty for the Creative Technologies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Her creative and research interests include voice recognition, speech technologies, assistive tech, radio, sound production, feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, race, and gender. In 2022, she received the Mozilla Creative Media Award to develop her interactive, docu-poetics work The Cyborg’s Prosody (2022). Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Rewire Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Natalie and James Thompson Gallery, and the GLBT Historical Society.

Abram Stern, MFA. Ph.D., (they/he) is an artist and scholar whose work builds upon collections of government-produced media and metadata. They interrogate the material produced by public bureaucracies and the infrastructures that mediate our experiences of them. Their artwork has been exhibited at / (Slash), the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art and Design, Real Art Ways, the Beall Center for Arts and Technology, Works|San Jose, and New Langton Arts. Abram served as an education fellow for the Visualizing Abolition initiative at the Institute of Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, a public humanities fellow for The Humanities Institute, and a research fellow for the CITRIS Data and Democracy Institute. Their work has been published in Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus and Information Polity. Abram’s projects and collaborations have been supported by funding from the Sunlight Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. They hold a Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz, a Master’s in Fine Art of Digital Art and New Media, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Digital Media from the San Francisco Art Institute.