Chancellor's Breakfast Guests to Hear About UCSB Media Center and Research on Issues of Media Ownership

The University of California, Santa Barbara will not break ground on the building that will house its state-of-the-art Center for Film, Television and New Media until 2005, but center researchers are already very busy.

Guests at a Chancellor's Community Breakfast, hosted by UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang and the UCSB Affiliates at 7:30 a.m., Wednesday, Dec. 10,will hear a report from Director Constance Penley and Associate Director Miriam Metzger on the new center's vision, goals, and many interdisciplinary projects.

The center includes faculty representing 15 university departments.

Special emphasis will be placed on the center's already prominent position in the national policy debate over media ownership.

The program will also include a brief video, "Alumni Achievements in Film and Video."

The breakfast will be held in the Cabrillo Pavilion Arts Center, 1118 East Cabrillo Boulevard, Santa Barbara. Tickets are $10 per person and payment must be made in advance. For reservations, contact the UCSB Office of Community Relations at (805) 893-4388.

Formation of the Center for Film, Television and New Media was announced in July 2002.

UCSB is now working to raise $15 million in private donations for construction of a multi-media home for the center that would serve the campus and wider community with research facilities and a public film theatre.

In addition to her post as the center's director, Penley is a professor of film studies at UCSB. She is the author or editor of eight books; the most recent is "The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science" (1998). She is also a founding editor of "Camera Obscura," the longest-running English-language journal of feminist media studies, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2005.

Metzger is an assistant professor of communication at UCSB, where she studies the social uses and effects of computer-based media. Her current research projects include studies of trust and information disclosure in the online environment, Web credibility and the digital divide.