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Arts

Red covered book titled Crying in H Mart is perched on a brick wall outside a modern white building
Photo Credit
Courtesy UCSB Library
“Crying in H Mart” explores self-discovery, grief and Korean-American culture through the celebratory lens of food and family.

Michelle Zauner’s “Crying in H Mart” named UCSB Reads 2026 book

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Women in bright colored dresses on stage with a blue background
Photo Credit
Luca Meyers
A play about young women on the cusp of their teenage years, “Dance Nation” portrays their conflicting impulses to stand out and blend in.

UCSB stages ‘Dance Nation,’ a play about ambition, competition and coming of age
A student looks at images of bees in the library corridor.
Photo Credit
Harrison Tasoff
Natural history collections like the one housed at UCSB’s Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration hold valuable data accumulated over 100 years.

Take a microscopic look at our native bees at the UCSB Library
Painting of a comet traveling through night sky full of stars
Rose Schlossberg, "Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinstan-ATLAS," 2024

MFA exhibition explores time, space and transformation
black and white photograph of Erico Caruso Jr. on the set of the musical film "El Cantante de Napoles"
Photo Credit
The Erico Caruso Jr. Collection
Erico Caruso Jr. (center) on the set of the 1935 musical "El Cantante de Napoles"

Opera archive honoring famed Italian tenor donated to library
Closeup of 'The Book of Delights' with a library and people in the background
Photo Credit
Courtesy UC Santa Barbara Library

Author Ross Gay caps off UCSB Reads 2025 with appearance on campus
A large group of people gathered shoulder to shoulder on a theater stage
Photo Credit
Courtesy LAUNCH PAD
The Amplify Festival brings together veteran and emerging artists to workshop news plays and present public readings.

LAUNCH PAD Amplify Festival pairs student artists with professional playwrights
woman on stage with cello and composer
Photo Credit
Courtesy
A still from UCSB student Travers Tobis's short film "The Circus Monkey," nominated for a Student Emmy Award.

Student Emmy nomination goes to UCSB team for 'The Circus Monkey'
A women sitting in a red vinyl booth inside a diner
Photo Credit
Courtesy Jason Lapeyre
Nori Muster was a devotee of the Hare Krishna movement of the 1970s and 1980s

Seeking inner peace, finding moral rot
two trucks high five

UCSB psychologist contributes to DreamWorks’ ‘Mighty Monsterwheelies,’ now on Netflix
man of East Asian descent in stadium with dramatic light
Photo Credit
Jeff Liang
Professor Sameer Pandya at UC Santa Barbara's Harder Stadium

In Sameer Pandya’s ‘Our Beautiful Boys,’ teenage secrets are the dark heart of suburbia
blue lights in shape of trees and roots
Photo Credit
Ethan Turpin & Naomi Tague
"Tree Water," detail, 2024

How an artist and a scientist uncovered hidden landscapes  
historical map of US with text in Spanish and flowers
Photo Credit
Illustration by Matt Perko
Flower picking as a metaphor for rediscovery — professor emerita Víctor Fuentes’ "Florilegio" gathers centuries of overlooked Spanish-language literature from the U.S.

Spanish-language writers and the making of a U.S. literary tradition
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