Community Connections Fellowship
The UC San Diego Arts and Community Engagement initiative offers an annual fellowship for graduate students to create meaningful partnerships with community organizations, with an eye toward education, engagement and divergent experiences with the visual and performing arts.
Student initiated, the fellowships enable students to carry out clearly defined projects related to their area of interest, providing students with an opportunity to build community through the arts while also gaining practical experience that may influence their research, academic focus or career trajectory.
“The arts offer a unique way to understand the world that connects and surrounds us. We experience different perspectives; we are moved, inspired and renewed. More than this, the arts can be a key element in bringing people from divergent viewpoints together to create vibrant communities, in which many voices are heard and welcomed, and society itself can be transformed.” — Susan Narucki, Arts and Community Engagement inaugural director
The 2022 – 2023 Fellows
David Aguila, Department of Music
Community partner: San Diego Youth Symphony
Project: As project lead for Creative Notation for Creative Performance, David Aguila will work with members of in^set to present a series of four sessions to groups within the San Diego Youth Symphony program. During the workshops, students will have the opportunity to develop a unique compositional concept, singular mode of graphic notation and explore deeply personal ideas/artistic content. in^set will help guide them through a process of experimentation and problem solving with the ultimate goal of providing a safe space to refine their scores and musical ideas for a final performance, held at UC San Diego.
David Aguila is a performer and composer currently based in San Diego, where he is pursuing a doctorate in music in trumpet performance. Aguila’s multifaceted practice focuses on trumpet, electronics and music production; working in the fields of contemporary, experimental, electro-acoustic and improvised music. His current research is focused on parametric and gestural notations, sound projection practices and alternative methods to trumpet pedagogy.
Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres, Department of Visual Arts
Community partner: Asian Art Coordinating Council
Project: Insight Asian Arts will be an online platform that will potentially list all future events related to Asian art, focusing primarily on webinars, online symposia, digital exhibitions and public discussions. Anyone would be able to create listings for, browse, and search for the latest happenings in the Asian art field. The platform itself aims to become a self-generating online community for Asian art where users from all over the world might be able to go, to take part in essential cultural conversations.
Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres is an Asian contemporary art specialist and art historian. As a Ph.D. student, her area of research is modern Chinese painting, with a special focus on visual culture in its global context. She has worked as a curator and exhibition planner with museums and institutions around the world, such as the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery, the Pagoda Paris in France, the Today Art Museum in Beijing, and many more.
Elba Irma Emicente Sanchez, Department of Theatre and Dance
Community partner: Ballet Incluyente
Project: Lights On! Is a screen, dance and design lab for people with disabilities that partners with Ballet Incluyente of Puebla, Mexico. This project proposes to make a 24-hour workshop for a group of 20 amateur dancers with disabilities from Mexico and California, guided by one choreographer and one designer. They will deeply explore choreographic language through the camera, in a process adapted for different needs. As a result, they will create a dance, done from participants’ own homes, utilizing available resources.
Elba Emicente is a first-year MFA lighting design student. She was born in Mexico and holds a bachelor’s degree in dance from Universidad de las Américas Puebla. In 2010, she founded her own lighting company, “iluminicente.” Since then, she has participated in several national and international festivals such as Performatica (Mexico), Festival Internacional de Teatro México in Montreal (Canada), Festival Internacional Cervantino (Mexico) and The Bates Dance Festival (USA), among other participations.
Chanell Stone, Department of Visual Arts
Community partner: African American Museum and Library at Oakland
Project: “Taproot” is a proposed artist-in-residence project in partnership with the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO) that will utilize the institutional archives to re-embody the lived histories of African Americans in California. Consisting of three major touch stones: research, artwork production and community programming, Chanell Stone will create opportunities for contemporary discourse via a community digitization workshop & artist talk.
Chanell Stone is an artist living and working between Oakland and Southern California. Through self-portraiture, collage and poetry, Stone investigates the Black body’s intersectional states of being and connection to the natural world. Her practice negotiates potentialities for reconciliation and reprieve by upending historical and ancestral memories within the American landscape. Stone earned her BFA in photography from the California College of the Arts, and has exhibited in galleries across the United States and internationally.
