Best of... Awards for 2024-2025 AEPG Projects

Congratulations to the 2025-2026 AEPG Best of... Awardees!

Community Engagement Award:  Hildegard Festival

From the first moment of this event, while literally walking into the lobby of the Hammer Theatre, it was inspiring how much Corie Brown had engaged with the community, including our Title IX Office, the SJSU Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, as well as the League of Women Voters.  But the performance itself extended beyond these amazing partners to include the Young Women’s Freedom Center and the astonishingly talented Monta Vista High School Choir.  Along with our College Choirs, our students and Monta Vista’s students engaged with what suffrage is, how hard certain groups had to work to attain it, and why it is so important that we all retain our right to vote–something that is clearly under attack at this very moment nationally. Thank you Corie, for such a beautiful event that was a call to action to never let our voices be silenced and to never abdicate our right to participate in our democracy.

Interdisciplinary Award: Shadowlines

This year’s Interdisciplinary practice award goes to Teresa Veramundi's hybrid theater dance project Shadowlines. Teresa, who is from the Department of Film, Dance, and Theater collaborated with the Department of Philosophy’s Riana Betzler, whose work on the ethics of empathy and moral psychology ties into Teresa’s own practice of the Theater of the Oppressed. They facilitated workshops and practice spaces where participants felt safe and supported as they created powerful affecting vignettes based on their own lived experience. The participants and performers, writers and stage managers likewise brought a diversity of  interdisciplinary backgrounds to the project, including one Engineering major, one Dance major, five Communication Studies majors, three Theatre majors, and one Philosophy major from San Jose State. The resulting vignettes offered a searing exploration of the parts of our lives that are silenced, made all the more affecting because the audience, following their friendly Virgil from space to space, is always aware that they are witnessing the innermost and most often silenced thoughts of the real people behind the performance. Teresa described the success of the project as expressing the “transformative power of community and of building bridges of understanding across lines of difference.” Shadowlines also included collaborations with Sukanya Chakrabarti and Raja Shojaei from  Film, Theater, and Dance, and J. Michael Martinez from English alongside members of the Faculty in Residence program, making it an exemplary testament to the generative power of interdisciplinary projects.

Artistic Excellence Award: wolf play

This year's AEPG award for Artistic Excellence goes to ​​Will Detlefson’s production of Jansol Jung's wolf play. This is Will's first year as an incoming faculty member in the Department of Film, Dance and Theater, and we have been so delighted to welcome him to SJSU and to see the astonishing results of his collaboration with students in this production. Audience members were struck by the concentrated intensity of the players in Wolf Play as they immersed themselves in a script that leaves much to the interpretive powers of the actors. The staging demonstrated a creative use of the black box Hal Todd theater that flowed with the action, and was delightful in its own right. The character of the wolf boy/narrator was performed by Ri-Ri Manio, psychology major and theater arts minor, who not only inhabited a child's physicality and voice, but also deftly animated an uncanny boy puppet that underscored the interiority of the character, all while breaking the fourth wall to address the audience with childlike candor. The open ending left audience members gasping, some of us in tears. Will, it was such a pleasure to share in witnessing your ability to create a space that trains our students to inhabit vulnerable and complex characters fearlessly. 

Visionary Award: Design in Process: Evolving with AI and Beyond

This year's visionary award goes to the Symposium entitled Design in Process: Evolving with AI and Beyond, arranged by Dana Raguezeou and Josh Nelson. Dana and Josh organized this impactful event to explore the future of AI across the fields of design. First, they successfully arranged to hold this event at Adobe, which was a fantastic venue.  But placing the event there also showed how much the Design community was ready to engage with the future of Design in the context of AI.  The speakers were amazing, intellectually challenging while  offering important caveats about how we need to think about the ethical futures of AI, both in Design and beyond.  Thank you so much to Dana and Josh for thinking not just about AI, but what the ethical futures of our fields can look like in the context of AI.  It was a symposium that explored the very ideas all of us need to be engaging:  the ethical components of AI, artists’ IP,  AI’s environmental implications, its effect on a future workforce, and more generally what the future looks like to us humans.  Dana and Josh asked the hard questions, and they asked us to do so as well.

AEPG Award for Social Impact through the Humanities and Arts: Hope with Hiroshima

"Hope with Hiroshima” was a beautiful event curated by Midori Ishida and Kaoru Hollin, which asked this most imperative question:  How can we achieve a world without nuclear threats?  Beginning with a powerful, emotional, and sometimes even humorous, account of a young American-Asian child sent back to be with his grandparents in Japan  before WW2, the event utilized his astonishing story to structure our understanding of the horrific experience of Hiroshima, but also the larger cultural and historical events that lead to this disaster.  This engaging and valiant  speaker also brought a unique perspective.  His parents, who were interned in American concentration camps after Pearl Harbor, thought for many years that the two sons they sent to Japan as young children had died in the Hiroshima blast.  This moving narrative was buttressed by the interdisciplinary collaboration of a Japanese language class, a Japanese society and culture class, a political science class, the Japanese Student Association (an SJSU student organization), CAPISE, the Asian American Studies program, and the chorus class in the School of Music.   The event provided context for this history-changing event, but when combined with the artistic performances of the Concert Choir, the performances of songs from the musical “1000 cranes,” and the group effort to send 1000 cranes – a sign of peace and recognition that nuclear bombs should never be used again --  to Hiroshima, the event showed how the arts and humanities can lead us to a world that hopefully will never result in the use of  these horrible military tactics again.  Thanks to Midori and Kaoru for bringing us this event that makes us think and reflect on the implications of discarding our  ethical standards during war.  I’m so delighted to present them with this special award, Social Impact through the Humanities and Arts.

Congratulations to the 2024-2025 AEPG Best of... Awardees!

These projects and their public programming are a small slice of the 500 events that H&A faculty and staff produce each year. (Read more here about the initiative.) 

In this moment when the Humanities and Arts are being defunded, we are proud to offer the Artistic Excellence Programming Grants that allow the College to provide funds across our broad disciplines to amplify all kinds of artistic excellence projects. The goal is to support innovative ideas that expose our students to new perspectives on the arts and humanities, and invites them to meaningfully participate in the production of these activities. In the many years of leading this initiative, I am always wonderfully captivated by the generosity, verve, and incredible community created by each AEPG cohort through their projects. If you don’t read the Monday Mailer, be sure to check it out next year for the wonderful array of weekly events.  

This is the third year that we have presented these two awards from among this year’s AEPG projects for best accomplished Community Engagement, and another for Interdisciplinary Practice. This year, we are continuing with our three new awards to recognize additional, amazing work by our AEPG faculty.   

Community Engagement

For our Community Engagement award, we are delighted to recognize Belen Moreno for her San Antonio Festival! Alongside her students, Belen created an incredible street festival that hosted not only our own SJSU President but also Mayor Matt Mahan. With a local pop up market, community workshops, seminars for small businesses, live performances, and immersive art expenses, Belen’s project lit up the Paseo area between campus Cesar Chavez Park. Attendees marveled at the unique culture of downtown San Jose and said it reminded her of her childhood. Others commented that the diversity of the booths and the celebration of various cultures made them feel at home. Working with her students on branded content, they beta tested this large festival idea among SJSU students with a mini-festival on 7th Street and invited students to brainstorm on what a community festival might look like. Students designed posters and social media content, offered guidance to community collaborators, supervised workshops, collaborated with businesses, and applied theories they studied in Advertising 123 to a real world event – quite successfully! The festival had more than 500 attendees from the community! Congratulations! 

Interdisciplinary Practice

For our Interdisciplinary Practice Award, we are delighted to present this to Sukanya Chakrabarti for her project, which just wrapped last weekend, “What’s Your Story: Telling Stories of Identity and Immigration from South Asia.” Sukanya writes in her final report that “since it was a devised piece, students were involved in the co-creation of the content of the piece - contributing their stories, and their dance and musical talents, for the realization of the project. Most of these students came from engineering, science and business backgrounds, and it was also the first time most of them were working on a devised performance on topics of identity and immigration. Students not only felt heard and seen in the process of developing the piece, because the stories they were telling were theirs, but also felt a sense of ownership and agency towards the piece!” Interdisciplinary for this project came from various modes of storytelling and performance, collaboration with two professional dancers who were active choreographers and devisers in addition to the inclusion of poetry, spoken word, documentary film, and movement-based storytelling. The event completely packed Hammer4. On a side note, this is one of our events that we had to consider safety precautions given the atmosphere around immigration these days. Sukanya carefully and purposefully renamed her title and worked with the Hammer to ensure that all of the performers felt safe in articulating their stories. In an interview, Sukanya notes that “The only way to combat a monolithic idea is to encourage people from the community to share their experiences. Telling stories about engaging with home, nostalgia, loss and longing humanizes a community.” Congratulations on this success. 

People's Choice

For this next award, the People’s Choice award, it’s apparent that this recipient has not only lent her expertise to the selection of a year-long series of incredible authors, but also has engaged audiences, students, and the community in timely and interesting conversations through the Center for Literary Arts. Selena Anderson this offered authors an opportunity to meet students directly during craft talks and then programmed incredible readings and interviews at the Hammer with Jaime Cortez & Dino Enrique Piacentini, Tommy Orange, Carvell Wallace, and Lauren Groff. She has created opportunities to connect our diverse student body with innovative literary practices that reflect and honor their unique stories. All of this work fosters cross-cultural understanding and encourages students to see themselves as active participants in the nation’s evolving literary tradition. The featured works and conversations prompted students to reflect on pressing issues such as threats to democracy, the suppression of artistic expression, and the increasing prevalence of book banning. These themes challenged students to consider how literature can be a vehicle for resistance and dialogue—and how they personally can effect change. To this end, one attendee responds that “My responsibility as a human is to protect the beautiful and good in this world. I've been allowing the current narrative to drown the truth of this.” Another attendees comments that the author events “open their horizons” – a sentiment expressed by many, many others who appreciated Selena’s careful and thoughtful selection of this year’s invited authors. Congratulations! 

Visionary 

In AEPG projects, we sometimes have unusual methods for engaging our students, as is demonstrated with the Visionary award to Janet Stemwedel, Nathan Osborne, Andrew Delunas, Casey Smith, and Kyle Hertsch for Philosophy’s Dungeons and Dragons series of 12 play sessions across the entire academic year, often attended by 20-30 players at each session. Participants played compact adventures (of about 2 hours) that heightened their awareness of ethical dangers and opportunities and provided them with a treasure-trove of strategies for moving through this fantasy world with fellow players. Participants learned how the in-game strategies offered helped them tackle real-world ethical decision-making. Janet notes that table-top role-playing games like D&D immerse the players in the roles of characters quite unlike themselves (including not just warriors, clerics, and magicians, but also elves). The year started off with play sessions focused on dragon hunting, future crimes, that soon escalated in the Spring semester to focus on lost lovers, the ethics of protest, and the final adventure played on the Hammer Theatre rooftop! Students responded overwhelmingly positively with comments such as “It was well organized. I felt valued as a member of the campus community and safe to express myself and get to meet new people.” Another notes that “It was fun, enjoyable, and it provided me the ability to engage with others. It's a way to not only be flexible but be able to see how others' opinions/beliefs/values can reshape one's own way of thinking.” Shenanigans seemed to make the players joyous, even when they found out that the final foe revealed at the Hammer game session was Janet herself! Congratulations! 

Innovation

Our next award refers back to SJSU in its original form as a Normal school for teachers before expanding into what we see now on our campus. SJSU is home to several single subject credential programs and prepares a large number of K-12 teachers to the Bay Area. This next award for Innovation goes to Eleni Duret and Erica Colmenares for the year-long series, The EmpowerED: Reconceptualizing Teaching. The series brought together SJSU students, faculty, researchers, and local community educators for movie screenings and panel discussions to critically examine public depictions, perceptions, and expectations of public education teachers in the United States. By hosting five movie screenings in the Student Union Theater and the Digital Humanities Center followed by panel discussions with SJSU alumni, students, faculty, and local community educators, audience members were treated to an innovative pathway into discussing innovative educational opportunities. For instance, they screened the popular film, “Dead Poets Society,” to explore the theme of “hero teachers” in the media and problematize ideas of saviorism within the teaching field. And the film, “No Excuses,” that follows the transformation of the physical education program at the Storefront Academy in Harlem as they go from a ‘roll out the ball,’ ‘gym class’ approach to a quality physical education program”  with a follow up discuss that offered an opportunity to reimagine narratives of teaching physical education, exploring both its problematic aspects as well as avenues for regeneration. The innovation also came with the development of relationships with pre-service teachers and providing them with an outlet to explore their careers as educators. One attendees notes the importance of these events because “there are very few spaces that provide opportunities for educators to be honest in sharing their experiences.” Attendees were especially appreciative of the bonus event to celebrate and hear from Black educators, with one remarking that they “Loved the solidarity space created for high impact black educators.” Congratulations!

Thank you for allowing us to celebrate each of these projects as well as all of the AEPG projects over the years!

-Author: Katherine D. Harris (May 15, 2025)