UC Berkeley Web Feature
 Computer rendering of architecture award winner Jess Field's project for Romeo Pier. |
Snapshots of the artists: 27 students win Eisner Awards celebrating campus creative talent
BERKELEY – UC Berkeley is often described proudly as one of the nation's top research universities, but some forget that there are plenty of "right brains" to balance out the left ones on this campus. As evidence, look no further than the 27 students below, recipients of an Eisner Award bestowed for the "highest achievement in the creative arts."
Sometimes talents for the humanities and science even coexist peacefully in the same head. Ian Cheng, for example, who won an Eisner for Film and Video, is an art practice and cognitive science double major whose projects employ software and art in harmonious — and hilarious — combinations. And Mark Massoud, a Boalt Hall graduate who is now a graduate student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, won an Eisner for his prose — a collection of short stories written while in Sudan on a legal internship.
The Eisner Awards got their start in 1963 with a $250,000 grant from Samuel Marks to promote the arts at Berkeley. Marks named the prize for his stepdaughter, Roselyn Schneider Eisner, an artist and sculptor who graduated in 1933. Although the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on the Arts flirted with the idea of using the money to commission a monumental sculpture by Picasso for the campus, it decided instead to recommend that prizes be given in each of the creative arts. Eisner Awards range in size from $2,000 to $6,000; $62,000 was awarded total this year. Departments determine their prize criteria individually, except for Literature, Film and Video, and Photo Imaging, which are handled by a central Committee on Prizes. There will be an award ceremony for the winners on May 7 at 4 p.m. in the Great Hall of the Faculty Club.
Read about the students who won Eisner Awards in:
This page: Architecture | Art | City
and Regional Planning | Film
and Video | Landscape
Architecture | Literature
Page
two: Music | Performing
Arts (Dance and Theater) | Photo
Imaging
ARCHITECTURE
Gary T. Ku, fourth-year
architecture major
Hometown: Anaheim, CA
Past projects: "My
fall 2005 studio project was an East Asian Library
for UC Berkeley" [interior
perspective rendering, right]
Now working on: "My
studio project for a winery in Napa Valley. The
project's focus is the integration of the landscape
with the built
intervention, by designing both according to an underlying
site-wide
formal logic."
Plans
for the Eisner prize money: "A
one-way ticket to some far-off place for some crazy
post-graduation exploration … or a new MacBook
Pro."
Jess Field, graduate student, architecture (May 2006)
Hometown: Half Moon Bay, CA
Past projects: "Working
in Los Angeles and Vienna with Tom Wycombe for the
past year, as project designer on the micro multiple
tower project exhibited at the School of Architecture
at UCLA, and on the international ideas competition
for the Seoul Performing Arts Center, which won second
place."
Now working on: "My
graduate thesis in architecture, focusing on Romeo
Pier, a deteriorating
pier sitting in the Pillar Point Harbor in San Mateo
County, to be redesigned as a marine rescue station.
My design proposes preservation of a central axis of
existing piles which reveal the structure of the new
program as they decompose over time."
 |
 "The Arboreal Goatbarn," from Smith's Eisner portfolio. |
Erik Karstan Smith, fourth-year architecture major
Hometown: Santa Clara,
CA
Past projects: "At
nine years old I was on the job site picking up scrap
lumber. I spent my evenings after school and summers
framing houses from 9 to 16 years old.
I love the smell of moist fresh sawdust in the morning."
Now working on: "A
project about
the Del Monte Cannery #3 in San Jose, CA. The building
is significant and historical, yet the city of
San Jose is allowing a developer to demolish
it. My project deals with the reuse of the building
as a landscape preserve, while simultaneously reaching
out into the community with walls of water and images."
Plans for the Eisner prize
money: "To purchase a new camera and take
a road trip to the Southwest to document indigenous
sites."
ART
Jonn Herschend,
MFA candidate, Art Practice (May 2006)
Hometown: San Francisco,
CA ("for the last 13 years; I was raised in a Midwestern
amusement park")
Past projects: A
video PowerPoint
presentation called "What a Man Really Is, and
What He
Is Not" from 2005 [still
at left] is currently
showing at the Lab in San Francisco until May 6. "That's
me in the wolf/rat suit; the photo
was taken by Shane King."
Now working on: "An
infomercial about the importance of ambiguity in life,
called 'Everything is
Better Now.'"
Plans for the Eisner prize
money: "Production of 'Everything,' mainly
paying actors and my cinematographer. Which is
so much better than asking everyone to do it for free."
 Joe McKay (Mike Kenny photo) |
|
Joe McKay, first-year
MFA candidate, Art Practice
Hometown: London, Ontario,
Canada
Past projects: One
of Joe's websites, Prereview [reviews
of movies that haven't been made yet], was simultaneously
named both "cool
site of the day" by Coolsiteoftheday.com and "unfortunate
site of the week" by Time Out New York. And in
the New Yorker's What's On section, McKay's installation
piece "Color
Game" was
described as "a low-tech, hands-on cross between
Nintendo and Josef Albers' color squares."
Now
working on: "Photographing UFOs that are cleverly
disguising themselves as streetlights [image at
right].
I am also creating a new computer input device with
small trampolines."
Plans for the Eisner prize
money: "It
will most likely go to the fine folks at Fry's
electronics — either
a whole bunch of little things or one really fancy
big thing, but rest assured it'll be money
well spent."
More work samples: McKay's
website
Alicia McCarthy, graduate
student
Past projects: McCarthy's
artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally.
She has been a codirecter for the "In the
Street"
street theatre festival for the past six years
and has taught numerous free art courses to
elementary and high school students in San Francisco
and Oakland since 1997.
Work samples: Jack
Hanley Gallery
Will Rogan, MFA candidate,
art practice
Hometown: Highland Park,
IL
Past projects: He has
been an artist in residence in London, Taiwan, and
Maine. He has spent most of the last two years thinking
about Anne Hodges, a woman who was hit by a meteorite
in 1954. Last year he held this meteorite, which is
heavy, almost too heavy for its size. He thinks of
himself as a sculptor and is often thought of by others
as a photographer.
Future plans: Filming
a movie he is encouraging his daughters — ages 4 and
6, "the only things that make him truly happy" — to
write. "It's
about magic, or animals, or magic animals."
Work samples: Jack
Hanley Gallery
CITY & REGIONAL
PLANNING
Jacob Licht,
graduate student in city planning
Hometown: Encino, CA
Now working on: "I
was just selected (as part of a multidisciplinary Berkeley
team) as one of four finalists in the Urban Land Institute
Gerald Hines
Urban Design competition. The
project [pictured below] was an urban infill
site near downtown St. Louis involving complex transportation,
brownfields, and community integration issues. We
placed second place, winning $10,000."
Previous
life: "My passion for the physical environment
stems from my youthful days following my father, an
architectural photographer, on photo shoots throughout
Los Angeles. I am also a graduate of the University
of Virginia School of Law and have professional hopes
of using my skills as an attorney to create
stronger connections between policy-makers and designers."
Plans
for the Eisner prize money: "My fiancée
and I are getting married this summer and traveling
around the world for a year to Asia,
Africa, and Europe. The money will definitely
help insure that we make it back home."
FILM & VIDEO
Eric Martin, fourth-year film major
Hometown: Auburn, CA
Past projects: Has
been involved in various capacities in more than 25
major productions. Directed "Unknown," a
short film that won Martin the Eisner prize (still,
left).
Now working on: "A
film about narcissism and sexual deviancy."
Plans for
the Eisner prize money: "What's a more
appropriate accoutrement for an aspiring filmmaker
than a car?"
See his work: The Pacific Film Archive will
screen the Eisner winners' work May 7.
Ian Cheng, fourth-year art practice
and cognitive science double major
Hometown: Los Angeles,
CA
Now
working on: "Several
interactive art installations that explore human physical
limitations, augmented space, and augmented reality.
I just finished a piece called "Harmony Club" [still,
right] in which a participant speaks into a microphone,
and that audio data is analyzed for pitch, duration,
and volume. Depending on these variables, the spoken
input gets mapped to one of four barbershop character
heads projected on screen — a
bass, a tenor, an alto, and a soprano. The corresponding
head repeats that audio indefinitely and sporadically
until some other participant (whose vocal range activates
that same barbershop head) overrides the sound. Together,
the four heads on loop create a humorous musical composition
that doubles as an evolving archive of participant input."
Plans for the Eisner prize money: "It
has given me a more comfortable resource pool from which
I was able to recently purchase more video and audio
equipment for personal experimentation. A lot of times
I think resource limitations can lead to highly creative
solutions, but just as well, this new spending freedom
has afforded me an opportunity to think and create with
more sophisticated tools.
See his work: The Pacific
Film Archive will
screen the Eisner winners' work May 7.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
Jordan Zlotoff, third-year
graduate student, landscape architecture
Hometown: Dillsburg,
PA
Past projects: Zlotoff
worked as a field ecologist, a plant nurseryman,
and in various other trades before beginning graduate
school at Berkeley.
Now working on: "A proposal
for new levee design alternatives for certain islands
within the California delta to address seismic
risk of flooding, create new wildlife habitat, and
provide new recreation opportunities."
Plans for the Eisner prize
money: "A trip to Europe this summer. I
will bicycle along the Rhine River from its headwaters
in the French Alps to the delta in the Netherlands."
More info: "Reclaiming
Urban Wasteland For Urban Ecology" in Philadelphia [PDF
of Eisner submission]
LITERATURE: POETRY
Hillary
Gravendyk Burrill, third-year Ph.D. candidate,
English
Hometown: Carnation,
WA
Past projects: Co-curates
the campus reading series "Poems against War." Her
poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in
"The Colorado Review," "1913: A journal
of forms,"
"The Eleventh Muse," "Fourteen Hills," "The
Bellingham Review," and other publications.
Now working on: "A
poetry manuscript called "The Sensible Horizon." Using
experimental poetic forms, the work is concerned
with the intersection of nature, sentiment, and
perception in the body of the lyric. Many
of the poems thematize the limits or breakdown of
language at the moment of poetic articulation. I'm
also translating the German-language poems of my
great aunt, Erna Hummel, who lived and published
in Russia."
Plans for the Eisner prize
money: "Taking the summer off from
working/teaching in order to finish writing and
revising my poetry. My goal is to have the
book-length work complete by September. Of
course, the money will also allow me to buy lots
of other poets' books, which is a treat!"
LITERATURE: PROSE
Elaine
Castillo, third-year comparative literature
major
Hometown: San Francisco,
CA (currently)
Past projects: This
is Castillo's third Eisner Award.
Now working on: A
collection of stories and novellas, tentatively
titled "Postcard from the Volcano." (Read
a poem from Castillo's work in progress)
Plans for the Eisner prize
money: "Paying for the Tin House Summer
Writer's Workshop, where I will work on my collection
with the author Jim Shepard."
|
 Massoud with a shepherd in Sudan last summer. |
Hometown: San Jose, CA
Recent projects: "The collection of short stories that received the Eisner Prize was written primarily in summer 2005, when I was in Sudan on a legal internship with the Rule of Law Unit of the United Nations Development Programme."
Now working on: "Researching and writing my Ph.D. dissertation on how grassroots nongovernmental legal organizations build the rule of law in failed states. Most research on the topic comes from political science and focuses on advanced and emerging democracies. My goal is to apply that work to the case of a failed state. I will use Sudan as a primary source, and existing literature on advanced and emerging democracies as secondary sources. The project is also exciting because it builds on existing — primarily American — literature in critical race theory and political theory around law; two areas of scholarship rarely seen in tandem. My focus for this project is Sudan, where I plan to return next year for further research."
Plans for the Eisner prize money: "I spent it on the war in Iraq, social security, Medicare, highways, and — some would cynically argue — torture. In other words, I paid federal taxes. I donated the remainder to my parish in San Jose, the St. Elias Melkite Greek Catholic Church, which is about as strapped for cash as Berkeley graduate students are."
Website: www.markmassoud.com
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