CalArts Podcasts

Bijan Berahimi (Art BFA 13) is a Graphic Design graduate and founder of Fisk, a design firm based in Portland, OR. Fisk has worked with CalArts on the Strategic Framework website and the 50th anniversary website and logo. They also assisted with the design for the 2022 gala and other projects, including the REDCAT website.

Want more?

• Check out this profile from the Portland Monthly 
• Check out this profile in Willamette Week
• Check out this Q&A in atoms

Beyond the Blue Wall's original theme music was composed and performed by 2020 Music alumnx, Socks Whitmore. You can learn more about Socks at sockswhitmore.com

To learn more about Emara Neymour-Jackson (Dance BFA 20) and her practice, as well as to view some of her work, visit emaraneymourj.com

Check out this 2020 profile of Emara in VoyageLA

Learn more about the CalArts School of Dance

Beyond the Blue Wall's original theme music was composed and performed by 2020 Music alumnx, Socks Whitmore. You can learn more about Socks at sockswhitmore.com

Chad Hamill/ čnaq'ymi (Music BFA 93; MFA 97 ) is the Executive Director for Indigenous Arts and Expression and Senior Advisor to the President on Indigenous Affairs at CalArts. During the 2021-22 academic year, Chad was named the inaugural CalArts Presidential IDEA Fellow. Chad led the effort to establish a partnership between CalArts and the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA). He has also developed and taught the first Indigenous Studies and Native arts course in CalArts history, as well as organized numerous cultural events across the CalArts community.

Chad previously served as chair of the Department of Applied Indigenous Studies and Vice President of Native American Initiatives at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff. While at NAU, where he began teaching in 2007, Chad led innovative and impactful initiatives focused on a variety of areas, including tribal leadership, K-12 engagement with Native-serving schools, global Indigenous partnerships, wifi infrastructure on Native lands, and environmental sustainability in Indian Country. 

Chad received his BFA in World Music Performance and his MFA in North Indian Classical Music from CalArts and went on to earn his PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Colorado.

A descendant of the Spokane Tribe of Indians, Chad is the co-founder of the Spokane Language House, a nonprofit tribal organization focused on language revitalization. 

Chad’s research and publications focus on music and sovereignty, music and spirituality, Indigenous ecological knowledge, performative scholarship, and the Indigenization / decolonization of academic structures. 

His book, Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau (OSU Press), explores song as a vehicle for spiritual power among tribes of the interior Northwest. Chad continues to write, record, and perform musical works centered on Spokane ways of knowing and being in the world.

Learn more

• To learn more about Chad Hamill’s music and scholarship, and to listen to his music and watch him perform, visit motherearthsongs.com.
• Learn more about qey’s (Dream) Scholarship for Indigenous Artists, established by Chad, which provides full tuition support for students at CalArts.
• Learn more about Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access (IDEA) at CalArts.
• Learn more about CalArts’ Land Acknowledgment.

Beyond the Blue Wall's original theme music was composed and performed by 2020 Music alumnx, Socks Whitmore. You can learn more about Socks at sockswhitmore.com

The REEF Residency is a collaboration between the School of Critical Studies, School of Film/Video, and School of Art.  Learn more about the REEF Residency. 

In this episode, we speak with 2022 REEF Residents, Fía Benitez and Simone Zapata. Their exhibition, Tense Renderings: the will and won’t of spatial logics, opened at The REEF Los Angeles, June 24–July 24, 2022. Tense Renderings interrogates the motivations, conditions, and limitations of maps and mapmaking. The range of works include axonometric projection drawing; feminist, communally-woven textile; speculative sea and space colonization; and interventions into legal language delineating exclusion and belonging.

Tense Renderings features 14 artists across time zones and disciplines: Jumanah Abbas, C. Bain, Amy Chiao, Natan Diacon-Furtado, Jen D’Mello, Alexsa Durrans, Christine Imperial, sj kim-ryu, Wesley Larios, Julia Saenz Lorduy, Sonya Merutka, Amanda Teixeira, Sarah Sophia Yanni, and Bz Zhang.

View Tense Renderings

Press:
24700: New Exhibition Interrogates Mapmaking in Tense Renderings: the will and won’t of spatial logics

Simone Zapata is a poet and educator from San José, CA. Her work can be found, or is forthcoming in Foglifter, The Quarterless Review, Tiny Spoon, Reed Magazine, and The Vassar Review. She serves as Managing Editor for The Beat Within, and as a poetry editor for MAYDAY. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California Institute of the Arts. 

Fía Benitez is an artist and educator living in Los Angeles. Their ongoing body of work, Root Rot, encompasses large-scale graphite drawings, collage, turn of the century artifacts, and bisque-fired ceramics. Incorporating research from public archives, works in Root Rot index the legacies of the California citrus industry and its history of indigenous dispossession, erasure of immigrant labor, and privatization of land management practices. Fía is a 2022 REEF Artist-in-Residence and a 2020 Research & Practice Fellow, with recent solo and group exhibitions at The Consulate General of Mexico in Los Angeles, NÉVÉ, The Reef, Tin Flats, Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, 7313 Melrose, Newhall Crossings, Other Places Art Fair, and CalArts. Publications include re:connections, water / relic / spices, as well as Baest Journal, Sublevel Magazine, The Kitchen Blog, and The Vassar Review. Fía holds degrees from Vassar College and CalArts.

Beyond the Blue Wall's original theme music was composed and performed by 2020 Music alumnx, Socks Whitmore. You can learn more about Socks at sockswhitmore.com

On Saturday, June 5, 2021, a cooling tower on the fifth floor of CalArts’ A-block overflowed, flooding several locations  below and causing much damage to the Character and Experimental Animation areas. This is the story of that flood, as well as the resurrection of this critically important space on the CalArts’ campus. 

To follow the progress of construction in A-block, visit this page on the School of Film/Video website.

Learn more about CalArts’ Character Animation and Experimental Animation programs.

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Beyond the Blue Wall's original theme music (the intro and outro) was composed and performed by 2020 Music alumnx, Socks Whitmore. You can learn more about Socks at sockswhitmore.com. 

Additional music in this episode includes:

• “Zion” by Salmon Like the Fish from the Free Music Archive and Creative Commons
• “Midnight” by Lexin Music from Pixabay 
• “Light Chilled Music Backgrounds” by ComaStudio from Pixabay
• “Mountain Pass” by Lobo Loco from the Free Music Archive and Creative Commons
• “Flying Minimal” by Coma-Media from Pixabay

Ochion Jewell (Music MFA 07) is a jazz saxophonist and composer from Appalachian Kentucky. He studied classical music as an undergraduate at the University of Louisville and studied jazz, free improvisation, and composition at CalArts.

Ochion's debut album "First Suite for Quartet'' was released by Mythology Records in 2010 to positive acclaim. The album was heralded by the New York City Jazz Record as "an ambitious, beautifully rendered album...exhilarating in every facet." His followup, with the Ochion Jewell Quartet, “Volk,” was released in 2015.

Ochion lives in Brooklyn and  teaches at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. He is also the co-host of the Brooklyn Living Room Sessions video podcast, which was partially funded by a CalArts Alumnx Seed Grant.

Our original theme music was composed and performed by 2020 Music alumnx, Socks Whitmore. You can learn more about Socks at sockswhitmore.com. 

As The New York Times noted in a 2021 profile, “for a quarter-century, through the ever-changing social and cultural climate, [Andrea] Bowers has forged lasting bonds with queer and trans folk, fighters for abortion rights, radical environmentalists, immigration advocates, Native activists and scholars across generations.”

In its 2022 retrospective of Bower’s work, the Hammer Museum said that she “has built an international reputation as a chronicler of contemporary history, documenting activism as it unfolds and collecting research on the front lines of protest.”

Bowers (Art MFA 92) sat down with host Henderson Blumer at her Highland Park studio for a conversation about her experience at CalArts as well as her work as an artist and activist over the past three decades.

Go deeper:

• Read an Los Angeles Times profile from July 2022
• Learn more at Andrew Kreps Gallery
• Learn more about 50+50: A Creative Century from Chouinard to CalArts

Beyond the Blue Wall’s original theme music was composed and performed by Socks Whitmore (Music BFA 20). Learn more about their work at sockswhitmore.com. 

The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) is the Oscar-nominated animated sci-fi comedy directed by Mike Rianda (Film/Video 10) and co-directed by Jeff Rowe (Film/Video BFA 11). The two also wrote the script, which follows Katie Mitchell and her quirky family as their road trip to drop her off at film school is unexpectedly interrupted by a robot apocalypse.

Rianda and Rowe were the guests of honor at the 2022 Character Animation Producers’ Show on May 4 at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, addressing students in the audience where they once sat a decade before.

In this episode, Rianda and Rowe talk about the highs and lows of making the movie, their time at CalArts, and how Mike's Mom won Oscar night.

Content Warning: Language

Host: Christine Ziemba
Music: Erick "Pepper" Rivera (Music MFA 12)

Featured in CalArts' The Pool, Issue 11

In late March, podcast network CurtCo Media launched Solar, a 12-episode, immersive sci-fi drama created by CalArts alums Chris Porter (Music MFA 09) and directed by Porter and Jenny Curtis (Theater BFA 12). 

The audio drama follows crew members on the ill-fated solar research probe Aethon, who are disconnected from earth and trapped on separate parts of their spacecraft. As they face a literal and physical abyss, their painful memories, forgotten dreams and realities collide during their fight for survival. 

Listen to the 24700 podcast interview—preceded by the Solar trailer—with Porter and Curtis about the development of Solar, which  features a number of CalArtians on the mic and behind the scenes.

Host: Christine Ziemba
Music: Erick "Pepper" Rivera (Music MFA 12)

Featured in CalArts' The Pool, Issue 11

In this episode of Beyond the Blue Wall, Henderson Blumer talks with David O (Theater BFA 92) about their time at CalArts, life as a music director, and what it is like working on a Broadway production.

David O is the music director for Mr. Saturday Night, a musical comedy starring Billy Crystal. It is currently playing at the Nederlander Theatre in New York.