Campus Stories - Posts
Stanford alumna wins international award for her thesis documentary about Syrian refugees
Melissa Langer, 2015 MFA graduate of Stanford’s Documentary Film and Video Program, recently won the IDFA Award for Best Student Documentary for her thesis film, My Aleppo. The film, which chronicles the experience of a Syrian refugee family that relocated to Pretoria, South Africa, was one of 15 films in eight categories to win awards in…
Artist Rick Lowe is Stanford Haas Center’s 2016 Distinguished Visitor
Artist and MacArthur Foundation grant recipient Rick Lowe will visit Stanford over winter quarter as this year’s Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor. On Feb. 4, Lowe will deliver the Haas Center for Public Service’s Distinguished Visitor Lecture, titled “Redefining Art in the Social Context.” During his time on campus he will also lead seminars…
Cantor Arts Center spotlights Richard Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks
For the very first time, the complete sketchbooks of the great American artist Richard Diebenkorn are available to view. The Cantor Arts Center recently launched a new website that gives access to the museum’s collection of 29 sketchbooks by Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), a renowned artist celebrated as both a central figure in the Bay Area…
Stanford students take listeners on a voyage of discovery
While studying “sky burials” in Mongolia, Reade Levinson amassed 20 hours of recordings, including interviews with Tibetan Buddhist lamas, conservation biologists and vulture experts, and the sound of dogs barking, monks praying and cars honking. Levinson, a senior majoring in Earth systems, spent last summer researching the funeral practice, in which monks place corpses –…
Film director Werner Herzog visits Stanford to talk about literary classic on peregrine falcons
J.A. Baker wrote The Peregrine at a precarious moment in environmental history: By the 1960s, the falcons had almost vanished entirely from the English countryside, thanks to aggressive use of pesticides. Baker’s response, an ecstatic panegyric to peregrines, stunned critics with its originality, power and beauty. The little-known 1967 masterpiece will be the subject of…
Stanford New Ensemble presents new classical music in new ways to new audiences
Joo-Mee Lee’s vision for the Stanford New Ensemble is as expansive as the “new classical music” genre. Lee, who teaches introductory violin and a course on professional development in music in the Department of Music, said she is taking the Stanford New Ensemble out of the music hall for concerts in untraditional venues around campus….
Happy 2016!
With the opening of the McMurtry Building, the new home for the Department of Art & Art History, we reached a milestone in the university’s ongoing commitment to building programs, curricula, and resources in the arts. The new building provides an architecturally exciting and inspiring home for the department, allowing it to expand its programmatic…
Adam Johnson wins National Book Award
Adam Johnson, a professor of English at Stanford and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has received the 2015 National Book Award for fiction for his short story collection, “Fortune Smiles.” Winners of the award, which recognizes the best American literature, were announced on Wednesday at the 66th National Book Awards Benefit in New York City. The award,…
Stanford performances and symposium highlight architecture
It has been weeks since the last hard-hat spotting in the arts district, but buildings remain in the spotlight at the corner of Roth Way and Lomita Drive. This weekend, architecture will be considered and celebrated through the medium of performance. Building Scene: Space Launch, performed by the Chocolate Heads Movement Band, is a dance…
![[wpbb-if post:acf type="image" name="image" size="thumbnail" display="alt"]Vintage photo of two men pulling the skin of another man](https://live-stanford-arts.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Manipulation-1-50x50.jpg)
Artistic works influence our minds and nervous systems, Stanford scholar reveals
No two disciplines could seem further apart than theater and science, but, as it turns out, they’re intimate bedfellows. As Stanford professor Matthew W. Smith has discovered, modern theater – and, by extension, film and television – basically owe their life to the scientific study of the nervous system. An associate professor of German studies…
Cantor Arts Center digitizes collection for online database
Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center has completed a 6-year project to make its collection accessible online. Students, faculty, scholars and the general public can now visit the museum’s website, type in a title, artist, theme or other search criteria, and see high-quality digital images of the majority of the 45,000-plus objects in the collection. Partial inventories…
Filmmaker Mira Nair shares the art of portraying the complexities of South Asia
“Nothing prepared me for the extraordinary hospitality, but also the ancient and deeply modern culture that I was in front of,” MIRA NAIR recalled thinking during her first trip to Lahore, Pakistan. “And that is what led me to make a film about Pakistan.” Nair, a renowned Indian filmmaker, was speaking at a film screening…
Stanford photography instructor’s work in national spotlight
ROBERT DAWSON, instructor of photography in the Department of Art & Art History, spent 21 years photographing public libraries across the United States. Now, his photos will get a national spotlight. The Library of Congress recently announced the acquisition of Dawson’s entire archive from the project “Public Library: An American Commons.” The archive, acquired through…
In the Conservation Lab of Stanford University Libraries, every story has a happy ending
Each story begins with the arrival of a university treasure – a rare book, map, serial or manuscript that needs repair, or a one-of-a-kind object that needs a custom-made box. Like all artisans, Stanford’s conservators have a deep appreciation and respect for precious objects rare to modern, from a first edition On the Origin of…
New Stanford exhibition highlights power of reinterpretation, consultation with Native American communities
In the late 1890s, the entrepreneur and former lieutenant governor of California, John R. Daggett, assembled an ethnographic collection of objects to illustrate the lives of Hupa, Karuk and Yurok communities in Northern California. Earlier he had served as commissioner for California’s pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where exhibits showcased material…
