Best of... Awards for 2024-2025 AEPG Projects
Congratulations to the 2024-2025 AEPG Best of... Awardees!
These projects and their public programming are a small slice of the 500 events that H&A faculty and staff produce each year. (Read more here about the initiative.)
In this moment when the Humanities and Arts are being defunded, we are proud to offer the Artistic Excellence Programming Grants that allow the College to provide funds across our broad disciplines to amplify all kinds of artistic excellence projects. The goal is to support innovative ideas that expose our students to new perspectives on the arts and humanities, and invites them to meaningfully participate in the production of these activities. In the many years of leading this initiative, I am always wonderfully captivated by the generosity, verve, and incredible community created by each AEPG cohort through their projects. If you don鈥檛 read the Monday Mailer, be sure to check it out next year for the wonderful array of weekly events.
This is the third year that we have presented these two awards from among this year鈥檚 AEPG projects for best accomplished Community Engagement, and another for Interdisciplinary Practice. This year, we are continuing with our three new awards to recognize additional, amazing work by our AEPG faculty.
Community Engagement
For our Community Engagement award, we are delighted to recognize Belen Moreno for her San Antonio Festival! Alongside her students, Belen created an incredible street festival that hosted not only our own 鲍鱼直播 President but also Mayor Matt Mahan. With a local pop up market, community workshops, seminars for small businesses, live performances, and immersive art expenses, Belen鈥檚 project lit up the Paseo area between campus Cesar Chavez Park. Attendees marveled at the unique culture of downtown San Jose and said it reminded her of her childhood. Others commented that the diversity of the booths and the celebration of various cultures made them feel at home. Working with her students on branded content, they beta tested this large festival idea among 鲍鱼直播 students with a mini-festival on 7th Street and invited students to brainstorm on what a community festival might look like. Students designed posters and social media content, offered guidance to community collaborators, supervised workshops, collaborated with businesses, and applied theories they studied in Advertising 123 to a real world event 鈥� quite successfully! The festival had more than 500 attendees from the community! Congratulations!
Interdisciplinary Practice
For our Interdisciplinary Practice Award, we are delighted to present this to Sukanya Chakrabarti for her project, which just wrapped last weekend, 鈥�What鈥檚 Your Story: Telling Stories of Identity and Immigration from South Asia.鈥� Sukanya writes in her final report that 鈥渟ince it was a devised piece, students were involved in the co-creation of the content of the piece - contributing their stories, and their dance and musical talents, for the realization of the project. Most of these students came from engineering, science and business backgrounds, and it was also the first time most of them were working on a devised performance on topics of identity and immigration. Students not only felt heard and seen in the process of developing the piece, because the stories they were telling were theirs, but also felt a sense of ownership and agency towards the piece!鈥� Interdisciplinary for this project came from various modes of storytelling and performance, collaboration with two professional dancers who were active choreographers and devisers in addition to the inclusion of poetry, spoken word, documentary film, and movement-based storytelling. The event completely packed Hammer4. On a side note, this is one of our events that we had to consider safety precautions given the atmosphere around immigration these days. Sukanya carefully and purposefully renamed her title and worked with the Hammer to ensure that all of the performers felt safe in articulating their stories. In an interview, Sukanya notes that 鈥淭he only way to combat a monolithic idea is to encourage people from the community to share their experiences. Telling stories about engaging with home, nostalgia, loss and longing humanizes a community.鈥� Congratulations on this success.
People's Choice
For this next award, the People鈥檚 Choice award, it鈥檚 apparent that this recipient has not only lent her expertise to the selection of a year-long series of incredible authors, but also has engaged audiences, students, and the community in timely and interesting conversations through the Center for Literary Arts. Selena Anderson this offered authors an opportunity to meet students directly during craft talks and then programmed incredible readings and interviews at the Hammer with Jaime Cortez & Dino Enrique Piacentini, Tommy Orange, Carvell Wallace, and Lauren Groff. She has created opportunities to connect our diverse student body with innovative literary practices that reflect and honor their unique stories. All of this work fosters cross-cultural understanding and encourages students to see themselves as active participants in the nation鈥檚 evolving literary tradition. The featured works and conversations prompted students to reflect on pressing issues such as threats to democracy, the suppression of artistic expression, and the increasing prevalence of book banning. These themes challenged students to consider how literature can be a vehicle for resistance and dialogue鈥攁nd how they personally can effect change. To this end, one attendee responds that 鈥淢y responsibility as a human is to protect the beautiful and good in this world. I've been allowing the current narrative to drown the truth of this.鈥� Another attendees comments that the author events 鈥渙pen their horizons鈥� 鈥� a sentiment expressed by many, many others who appreciated Selena鈥檚 careful and thoughtful selection of this year鈥檚 invited authors. Congratulations!
Visionary
In AEPG projects, we sometimes have unusual methods for engaging our students, as is demonstrated with the Visionary award to Janet Stemwedel, Nathan Osborne, Andrew Delunas, Casey Smith, and Kyle Hertsch for Philosophy鈥檚 Dungeons and Dragons series of 12 play sessions across the entire academic year, often attended by 20-30 players at each session. Participants played compact adventures (of about 2 hours) that heightened their awareness of ethical dangers and opportunities and provided them with a treasure-trove of strategies for moving through this fantasy world with fellow players. Participants learned how the in-game strategies offered helped them tackle real-world ethical decision-making. Janet notes that table-top role-playing games like D&D immerse the players in the roles of characters quite unlike themselves (including not just warriors, clerics, and magicians, but also elves). The year started off with play sessions focused on dragon hunting, future crimes, that soon escalated in the Spring semester to focus on lost lovers, the ethics of protest, and the final adventure played on the Hammer Theatre rooftop! Students responded overwhelmingly positively with comments such as 鈥淚t was well organized. I felt valued as a member of the campus community and safe to express myself and get to meet new people.鈥� Another notes that 鈥淚t was fun, enjoyable, and it provided me the ability to engage with others. It's a way to not only be flexible but be able to see how others' opinions/beliefs/values can reshape one's own way of thinking.鈥� Shenanigans seemed to make the players joyous, even when they found out that the final foe revealed at the Hammer game session was Janet herself! Congratulations!
Innovation
Our next award refers back to 鲍鱼直播 in its original form as a Normal school for teachers before expanding into what we see now on our campus. 鲍鱼直播 is home to several single subject credential programs and prepares a large number of K-12 teachers to the Bay Area. This next award for Innovation goes to Eleni Duret and Erica Colmenares for the year-long series, The EmpowerED: Reconceptualizing Teaching. The series brought together 鲍鱼直播 students, faculty, researchers, and local community educators for movie screenings and panel discussions to critically examine public depictions, perceptions, and expectations of public education teachers in the United States. By hosting five movie screenings in the Student Union Theater and the Digital Humanities Center followed by panel discussions with 鲍鱼直播 alumni, students, faculty, and local community educators, audience members were treated to an innovative pathway into discussing innovative educational opportunities. For instance, they screened the popular film, 鈥淒ead Poets Society,鈥� to explore the theme of 鈥渉ero teachers鈥� in the media and problematize ideas of saviorism within the teaching field. And the film, 鈥淣o Excuses,鈥� that follows the transformation of the physical education program at the Storefront Academy in Harlem as they go from a 鈥榬oll out the ball,鈥� 鈥榞ym class鈥� approach to a quality physical education program鈥� with a follow up discuss that offered an opportunity to reimagine narratives of teaching physical education, exploring both its problematic aspects as well as avenues for regeneration. The innovation also came with the development of relationships with pre-service teachers and providing them with an outlet to explore their careers as educators. One attendees notes the importance of these events because 鈥渢here are very few spaces that provide opportunities for educators to be honest in sharing their experiences.鈥� Attendees were especially appreciative of the bonus event to celebrate and hear from Black educators, with one remarking that they 鈥淟oved the solidarity space created for high impact black educators.鈥� Congratulations!
Thank you for allowing us to celebrate each of these projects as well as all of the AEPG projects over the years!
-Author: Katherine D. Harris (May 15, 2025)
