Arts Research Center

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Reminiscing on our week with artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell! Last month @artsresearchctr & @berkeleytdps welcomed dancer & choreographer Sam Aros-Mitchell (@samarosmitchell ) as the fourth artist-in-residence of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) program. Sam led students through an energetic master class and offered a lecture-performance for the general public. Here are photos and videos from both events, held in Bancroft Dance Studio. Playing with light and breath work, Sam graced us with thought-provoking movement and generous teachings during this memorable week! ABOUT IPAR: The Indigenous Performing Arts Residency is a multi-year collaboration between the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and the Arts Research Center to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and create ongoing support for Indigenous performing artists, so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future. Images: © Laurie Macfee, Arts Research Center 2026

We’re thrilled to welcome #BayArea poet, playwright, and Nez Perce scholar Beth Piatote to Pegasus Books Downtown at 7pm next Thursday, May 14th for a reading and craft talk in conversation with fellow #Berkeley poet and scholar Alex Saum-Pascual. We’ll be celebrating the release of Piatote’s new collection of poems, “distant water”, from Milkweed Editions @milkweed_books 🦋 Free & open to the public. See you there! “distant water” is an exquisite debut poetry collection exploring the way Nez Perce language embodies the inseparable connection of land, sound, and spirit. Piatote is the author of the 2020 short story collection The Beadworkers, which was longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is the director of UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center, and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature. @artsresearchctr @ucberkeleyofficial @ucberkeleyenglish 📍2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley @dwntwnberkeley @ucberkeleylife

Sam Aros-Mitchell has arrived at UC Berkeley for the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency! Yesterday the Yaqui dancer & choreographer led @berkeleytdps Professor & Chair SanSan Kwan's Choreographies of Space course in a masterclass diving into Muscle/Bone technique. Aros-Mitchell led students across the dance floor stepping, reaching, crawling, and jumping in a river of movement. Tomorrow at 4pm, @samarosmitchell will present a free & public lecture-performance, aligned with his ongoing work in Performance as Ceremony. He will dance two short José Limón solos—El Indio (from Danzas Mexicanas) and the Deer Dance (from The Unsung)—in a hybrid format that weaves together movement passages and commentary on Indigenous futurisms, embodied archives, and the resonances between José Limón’s choreography and Native epistemologies. You don't want to miss this this! Taking place at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Studio, it rounds out the 2026 Indigenous Performing Arts Residency and is the last of ARC's events for the academic year! How wonderful to close out with dance and connection to the body.

“To write poetry, especially political poetry, is to lay both oneself and the grief of the modern world bare, and do it time and time again. Difficult conversations allow us to learn about ourselves and our craft, and this conversation between Long Soldier and Sharif showed that poetry can exist in questioning and in exhaustion.” (Taline Hagopian, @dailycal ) It’s been two weeks since poet Layli Long Soldier visited UC Berkeley for two days of well-attended events, including a reading introduced by Geoffrey G. O’Brien and conversation with poet Solmaz Sharif. Us at ARC are still processing Long Soldier's effervescence, generosity, and unique perspective on writing and creating in this day and age. Click the link in bio to read an article on Layli Long Soldier & Solmaz Sharif’s conversation by Daily Californian reporter Taline Hagopian. pc: Anjalie Butte/ @dailycal

This week kicks off ARC & @berkeleytdps ’s Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) with artist-in-residence dancer & choreographer Sam Aros-Mitchell (@samarosmitchell )! Now in its fourth cycle, we thought this would be the perfect time to take a trip down memory lane and shine some light on the incredible artists we’ve hosted through IPAR during our partnership with @altertheater . In 2023, playwright Dillon Chitto (@dchitto ) premiered “Pueblo Revolt,” an equally hilarious and poignant play that wove together history and Indigifuturism to examine queerness, family, religion, and survival. Chitto was also joined by Laurie Arnold of Gonzaga University for a public lecture, Theater as a Site of Public History. (photos 1-3, pc: David Allen) In 2024, playwright Blossom Johnson (@squashblossomofficial ) fine-tuned the script and oversaw staged readings of “Diné Nishłį, (i am a sacred being) or, A Boarding School Play,” visited TDPS Professor Timmia Hearn DeRoy's directing class, and participated in a talkback alongside Director Daniel Leeman Smith. Johnson’s comedic and sincere play was exuberant, sunny, and just a little bit haunted, celebrating the dreams, hopes, and confidence of young Native women as they each find their own way to honor their cultural traditions and live their dreams in a modern world. (photos 4-6, pc: David Allen) In 2025, playwright and UC Berkeley alum Drew Woodson (@woodsondrew ) held a series of open script development workshops with local Indigenous actors, visited TDPS Professor Philip Kan Gotanda’s scriptwriting class, gave an artist talk with TDPS Lecturer Patrick Russell and ARC Director Beth Piatote, and presented a public reading of his new play “From Above.” Woodson’s “From Above” opened in a lone church just at the edge of a desert town and unfolded to tell a tale of calamity, religious reckoning, and a perilous decision that threatened to tear a community apart. (photos 7-9, pc: Joanna Wong) This year we are pivoting from playwriting into dance! Join us at 4pm this Thursday for artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell’s lecture-performance hybrid “Performance as Ceremony” at Bancroft Dance Studio on UC Berkeley’s campus.

The most fabulous trio! Snapshots from February's Loft Hour with Chris Batterman Cháirez + Cathy Lu in conversation with Alex Saum-Pascual. In this session, our packed audience received crash courses on ethnomusicology, Chinese creation mythology, and the importance of location in artistic research. ✨Join us at noon TOMORROW as we offer up the final Loft Hour for this academic year! Shiben Banerji (@ha_ucb ) + Alexandra Lossada (@ucberkeleyenglish ) will be in conversation with Estelle Tarica (Spanish & Portuguese). ✨ Free and open to the public! Can't believe we're at the end already...

Learn more about artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell! During the week of April 20th, @artsresearchctr & @berkeleytdps will welcome dancer & choreographer Aros-Mitchell (@samarosmitchell ) as the fourth artist-in-residence of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) program! Read more about and watch performances of Aros-Mitchell’s work at his website, / Videos featured: The Unsung, Performed by Sam Aros-Mitchell, Choreographed by José Limón, O’Shaughnessy Theater, St. Paul, Minnesota SOLO Concert, McKnight Foundation Juya Nokakameao, Performed by Sam Aros-Mitchell, March 2024, RSD Studios, Minneapolis, MN ABOUT IPAR: The Indigenous Performing Arts Residency is a multi-year collaboration between the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and the Arts Research Center to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and create ongoing support for Indigenous performing artists, so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future. 🔗click the link in bio for more info!

THIS THURSDAY! Our last Loft Hour of the academic year features Shiben Banerji (@ha_ucb ) + Alexandra Lossada (@ucberkeleyenglish ) in conversation with Estelle Tarica (Spanish & Portuguese). MEET THE PARTICIPANTS: Shiben Banerji joins the Berkeley community after eleven years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was an associate professor in the Department Art History, Theory, and Criticism. He earned a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture, as well as a Master in City Planning, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from Columbia University. Interested in the rhetorical and performative dimensions of architecture, Shiben’s research practice, historical scholarship, and classroom teaching focus on the work of art and design in cultivating habits of democratic judgment. Shiben is the author of Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy and the coeditor of In the Shadows of Democracy: Possibilities for Rhetoric beyond Rhetorical Studies. Alexandra Lossada works on immigration, citizenship, and language in contemporary American ethnic literatures, especially in Latinx and Chicanx writing. Her current manuscript project, tentatively entitled The Interpreter of Crimmigration and Detention, reevaluates the figure and the role of the interpreter in post-9/11 literary works that depict detention, deportation, and/or family separation via the legal apparatus of crimmigration, or the intersection of criminal law with immigration law. Her work has recently been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for 2025-2026. Before joining Berkeley, Lossada worked as an assistant professor of English at Berry College. She received her PhD in English at Johns Hopkins University. Estelle Tarica is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture. Her research and teaching cover ranging topics: colonial and modern ideologies of race and nation in Latin America; Indigenous expression in the Andes and Mesoamerica; human rights discourse after the Cold War; Jewish Latin America; Holocaust consciousness in global perspective; and the transformative power of narrative and poetry.

And we fly right into April! This final month of programming is rich with visits from poet Layli Long Soldier and artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell. We invite you to wrap up the academic year with ARC, celebrating poetry, dance, and music together. Can April showers give way to April flowers? We think so! °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ APRIL EVENTS･:*࿔.ೃ⋆❀° 4/1: Layli Long Soldier Poetry Reading introduced by Geoffrey G. O’Brien 5pm • Maude Fife Room 315 Presented by ARC in collaboration with @ucberkeleyenglish , with support from @berkeleyartshumanities and media co-sponsorship from @ucbnasd 4/2: In Conversation: Layli Long Soldier & Solmaz Sharif 5pm • Maude Fife Room 315 Presented by ARC in collaboration with @ucberkeleyenglish , with support from @berkeleyartshumanities and media co-sponsorship from @ucbnasd 4/9: The Loft Hour: Shiben Banerji (@ha_ucb ) + Alexandra Lossada (@ucberkeleyenglish ) in conversation with Estelle Tarica 12pm • Arts Research Center Hosted by ARC with support from @berkeleyartshumanities and co-sponsored by @ucberkeleyenglish 4/10: Art & Activism: Composition Colloquium with Simone Browne, Cathy Park Hong, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Ken Ueno 3pm • Wu Performance Hall Presented by @ucberkeleymusic and Center for New Music and Technologies with co-sponsorship from ARC 4/21: Dance Master Class with Sam Aros-Mitchell part of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency closed to the public, open to UC Berkeley dance students Co-presented by ARC and @berkeleytdps , with support from @berkeleyartshumanities 4/23: Performance as Ceremony performance-lecture hybrid by Sam Aros-Mitchell part of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency Co-presented by ARC and @berkeleytdps , with support from @berkeleyartshumanities

"the grief the grief the grief the grief" – Layli Long Soldier Whiting Award and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Layli Long Soldier will grace UC Berkeley for a poetry reading tomorrow and conversation on Thursday! Join us and kick off National Poetry Month perfectly. Layli Long Soldier Poetry Reading introduced by Geoffrey G. O'Brien 📍 Wed April 1 • 5pm • Maude Fife Room 315 In Conversation: Layli Long Soldier & Solmaz Sharif 📍 Thurs April 2 • 5pm • Maude Fife Room 315 ***** 🎟️ both events free & open to the public presented by the Arts Research Center in collaboration with @@ucberkeleyenglish , with support from @berkeleyartshumanities and media co-sponsorship from @ucbnasd

Announcing artist-in-residence Sam Aros-Mitchell! During the week of April 20th, @artsresearchctr & @berkeleytdps will welcome dancer & choreographer Aros-Mitchell (@samarosmitchell ) as the fourth artist-in-residence of the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency (IPAR) program! SCHEDULE: Masterclass: Choreographies of Space 📅Tues April 21 at 3:30pm 🎟️closed to the public, open to UC Berkeley dance students Lecture-Performance Hybrid: Performance as Ceremony 📅Thurs April 23 at 4pm 📍Bancroft Dance Studio 🎟️free & open to the public 🪢Sam Aros-Mitchell will weave together short movement passages, video from recent works, and commentary on Indigenous futurisms, embodied archives, and the resonances between José Limón’s choreography and Native epistemologies ABOUT THE ARTIST: Sam Aros-Mitchell is a Yaqui choreographer, cultural producer, scholar, and performer based in Minneapolis. His work moves between Indigenous cosmologies, experimental dance, and performance installation, activating space as a site of ceremony, resistance, and collective witnessing. He is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a McKnight Dance Fellow, and the founder of SAROS field/works, a platform for Indigenous and BIPOC-led performance. For over eight years, he has been a core collaborator with Rosy Simas Danse. Aros-Mitchell’s choreography dissolves the boundaries between dance, theatre, and visual art. He is among the first Yaqui artists to reconstruct and perform José Limón’s The Unsung (Deer Solo) and Danzas Mexicanas (Indio Solo), infusing these historic works with Indigenous embodiment and recontextualization. Recent original works include Juya Nokakamea, a multi-sensory performance drawn from Yaqui creation stories, and Entering Aniam, an immersive sound and movement installation. ABOUT IPAR: The Indigenous Performing Arts Residency is a multi-year collaboration between the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and the Arts Research Center to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and create ongoing support for Indigenous performing artists, so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future. 🔗click the link in bio for more info!