Arts & Humanities

“I was prepared for everything:” Highlights from Creative Careers Week in Arts & Humanities

April 23, 2024
Jennifer Monahan

How does a Film degree prepare you to launch a company that became a household name?

As part of Creative Careers week in the Division of Arts & Humanities, Jill Foley (Film ‘00) returned to campus on April 3 to speak with Dean Sara Guyer. Foley explained how the skills she learned at Cal have served her every step of the way: from her first post-college job with a North Bay theater company to co-founding and serving as VP of Apparel for Peloton.

Foley’s public speaking skills and ability to think on her feet — honed in small seminar classes...

https://artshumanities.berkeley.edu/news/%E2%80%9Ci-was-prepared-everything%E2%8…

Kappa Nu alums honor Larry Belling with young writers' award

April 15, 2024
Alexander Rony

When Nathanael Stephen Payne ’23 was developing Wrestle with Jimmy for UC Berkeley’s “Introduction to Playwriting” class, he had no idea where the project would take him. His answer came several years later, when he crossed the stage at graduation as one of two students to receive the Larry Belling Promising Writers’ Award.

“For the first time, I was receiving some sort of payment for my written work, validated by a long-standing institution like Berkeley,” said Payne. “I’m very fortunate to have been given the recognition at the time I did, on the...

Q&A: Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Sympathizer,’ reflects on libraries, UC Berkeley, and the class that ‘radicalized’ him

April 12, 2024
Tor Haugan

Viet Thanh Nguyen emerged from UC Berkeley with more than a diploma.

In fact, he earned three (but who’s counting?) — dual bachelor’s degrees in English and ethnic studies in 1992, and a doctorate in English in ’97.

But his education wasn’t confined by the walls of a classroom.

Nguyen became steeped in activism, leaving Berkeley with “four misdemeanors, three diplomas, two arrests, and an abiding belief in solidarity, liberation, and the power of the people and the power of art,” he recalls in his memoir, 2023’s A Man of Two Faces.

https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/nguyen