| WORLD ARTS AND CULTURES In March, professor Judith Baca was presented with a Local Hero of the Year Award, Honoree for the Arts, in celebration of Women’s History Month. The program was presented by KCET-TV.
Last December in Washington D.C., adjunct associate professor John Bishop received a Lifetime Achievement Award for his work in ethnographic filmmaking from the Society for Visual Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropology Association.
Adjunct assistant professor Dan Froot performed his theatre piece, “Shlammer,” in March at The Colony Theater in Miami Beach.
“Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places,” an exploration of the cultural, spiritual and ecological significance of our landscape by professor Peter Nabokov, was published in January by Viking.
Professor Peter Sellars was awarded a Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize last fall. The award recognizes innovators in the arts with $250,000 and a silver medallion.
Last fall, professor Cheng-Chieh Yu presented her first evening of choreography in Los Angeles, “She Said He Said, He Said She Said” and “Trade,” at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica.
 Cheng-Chieh Yu and Johnny Tu in “She Said He Said, He Said She Said,” photo by Lilian Wu | New Faculty 
Lucy Burns, photo by Lilian Wu
LUCY BURNS Lucy Burns has joined the faculty of the Department of World Arts and Cultures as an assistant professor. Her research interests include Asian American theater, race and performativity, feminist performance theory and Filipino studies. She has a split appointment with the UCLA Department of Asian American Studies.
Burns worked for many years as the education and outreach coordinator and as the literary manager at the New WORLD Theater in Amherst, Massachusetts. During her time there, she coordinated the summer youth theater project with Southeast Asian refugee youth and Latino youths of western Massachusetts.
In 2002, she co-founded the Critical Filipino and Filipina Studies Collective, a national network of community-engaged scholars, professors and educators that seeks to inform and provide exacting analysis and new understandings of global, social and economic justice issues impacting the Filipino diaspora.
She co-edited a collection on performance and race, “The Color of Theater,” with Roberta Uno. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, BlackTheatreNews Network, and the Asian Theatre Journal, as well as in “Asian American Playwrights: A Bio-Bibliography.” She is currently working on a manuscript on the Filipino performing body.
Burns was a UC President’s
Postdoctoral Fellow in the history of consciousness department (2004-05) and in the American studies department (2003-04) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. | In Memoriam 
Sherman Ferguson, photo courtesy of Overture, Los Angeles
SHERMAN FERGUSON, JAZZ LECTURER Sherman Ferguson, a jazz drummer and lecturer in the UCLA Jazz Studies Program, died from complications of diabetes on Jan. 22 at his home in
La Crescenta, California. He was 61. He is survived by his wife, Anni, and his sister, Dolores. He joined the UCLA faculty in January 2001 and taught a jazz ensemble class and also gave private drum lessons.
Born in Philadelphia, Ferguson performed on the East Coast before moving to Los Angeles in 1976. He performed and recorded with a virtual who’s who of jazz musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Burrell, Benny Carter, Ahmad Jamal, Buddy Collette, Joe Williams and George Shearing. He toured extensively throughout the United States, as well as Europe, Japan, Brazil, Martinique, Malta and Greece.
His discography numbers more than 80 recordings. He collaborated with John Heard and Tom Ranier on the LP “Heard, Ranier and Ferguson.” With his band, JazzUnion, he released the CD “Welcome to My Vision” on his own label, Jazz-a-zance Records.
Ferguson also taught at the University of California, Irvine; the California Institute of the Arts; Long Beach Community College; the Los Angeles Music Academy; and Jackson State University in Mississippi. He taught privately and performed at many schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District under the auspices of “Jazz America.” |
