“[DIS]COMFORT” is a multidisciplinary exhibition featuring student work that explores the shifting boundaries between comfort and discomfort as they relate to identity, culture and current events. The exhibit celebrates emerging artists as they approach graduation and step into the next phase of their creative careers.

The free exhibition is open to the public and will offer a space for reflection, contemplation and dialogue on the ways we navigate instability, how we comfort ourselves and how discomfort can be a catalyst for growth and transformation.

Visit the exhibition website for more information.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim assistant director of editorial and external affairs
ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Samarasinghe was honored with the Truer Than Fiction Award, which is presented to “an emerging director of nonfiction features who has not yet received significant recognition.” The award includes a $25,000 unrestricted grant; it’s one of only three Independent Spirit Award categories that offer cash prizes in addition to trophies.

The 41^st annual awards ceremony took place Feb. 15 at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles.

A lecturer in CSUSM’s art, media and design department since 2021, Samarasinghe is a Sri Lankan filmmaker and visual artist who left his native country during its civil war and is now based in Southern California.

He was recognized for his feature film debut, “Your Touch Makes Others Invisible,” which was released last year. In the film, he blends interviews, news footage and reenactments to explore the painful history of the 26-year Sri Lankan civil war, in which tens of thousands of people (mostly from the nation’s Tamil minority) are believed to have disappeared, often at the hands of military forces.  

“I’m deeply honored, Samarasinghe said. ”More than recognition of a single project, the award feels like an affirmation of the sustained, often difficult work that politically engaged filmmakers do to sit with difficult histories and keep bringing them into view."

Of the cash prize, he said: “It helps me keep making the kinds of films I want to make – work that isn’t always embraced with open arms, whether because it leans toward the avant-garde or because it confronts difficult, often heavy subjects. It's truly an incredible gift that gives me some freedom and stability to keep taking risks.”

Samarasinghe previously has directed multiple award-winning short films. He earned a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from UC San Diego and a master’s in film and video from the California Institute of the Arts.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist
bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Last year, Ellis was a student in AMD 409: Advanced Graphic Design and Visual Arts, an upper-division class taught by Ghazal Foroutan. The assignment: Using only typography, create a promotional poster for a hypothetical California architecture conference being hosted by CSUSM.

The twist: Some of the posters that resulted would be displayed as part of a new student art gallery in Kellogg Library. Ellis made a poster about acclaimed Israeli-Canadian-American architect Moshe Safdie, and hers was one of 19 selected for the exhibit.

“I was thrilled and honored to have my work chosen to be displayed in the library and kept in the archive,” said Ellis, an art, media and design major who’s scheduled to graduate this spring. “It gave a greater sense of purpose to the project.”

The 19 posters compose the first installment of the Cougar Gallery, which is located on the library’s second floor, occupying the wall space between the Makery’s entrance and the stairwell down the hall. Foroutan said the idea came from a conversation with fellow art, media and design professor Kristin Moss, and it was brought to fruition through a collaboration with multiple employees of the library: associate dean Char Booth, outreach librarian Irma Ramos Arreaga, arts and humanities librarian Torie Quiñonez, and administrative coordinator Arely Ayala.

The initial exhibit has adorned the library’s walls since the start of the fall semester.

“Seeing the students’ work displayed in a prominent campus space has been incredibly meaningful,” Foroutan said. “As a professor, I am proud to share their work with the broader campus community and to see it recognized by the department and the library.

“For students, the exhibition validates their efforts beyond the classroom. Many have already photographed their posters and plan to list the show as a group exhibition on their CVs, as well as include the work in their portfolios.”

The Cougar Gallery, Booth said, fulfills a longstanding desire to increase the presence and visibility of student art in the library. As a prominent display of creative student work, it joins the Data Stacks on the library’s fourth floor.

"By establishing this new gallery, we are showcasing the creative talents of CSUSM student artists and designers and dedicating a highly visible area of the library to School of Arts students and faculty as a much-needed supplementary gallery space,” Booth said.

Once she was assigned Safdie as her subject (other famous architects featured include Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry), Ellis set out to make a poster that would promote a hypothetical discussion with the architect at the conference while also channeling the style and philosophy of that architect. In researching Safdie’s life and work, Ellis was drawn to his design theory, “For Everyone a Garden.”

“He envisions architecture as a living, evolving environment, integrating gardens and green space into almost all of his designs,” she said. “That phrase became my guiding concept and tagline for the poster, inspiring my color palette and imagery.”

Ellis incorporated both physical art and digital design in the creation of her poster. She also designed an accompanying booklet in the same style as the poster to round out the promotional material.

“Over the weeks of working on the project, we all watched each other's concepts evolve in the studio, so seeing them printed professionally and displayed in a space where so many students pass through was very meaningful,” said Ellis, who plans to apply for the CSUSM teaching credential program, with a goal of becoming an art educator.

Foroutan hopes to work with the library to rotate the exhibition at least once a year to showcase as many as much student artwork as possible.

“While the overall framework of the project will remain consistent, I plan to subtly revise the assignment each year to introduce new constraints, tones or conceptual directions, allowing the exhibition to evolve over time,” she said.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

It was the continuation of a two-decade career turn toward venturing to – both physically and emotionally – some of the coldest, most remote places on Earth and exploring the fascinating ways that art and science intersect.

Hersko, a longtime Cal State San Marcos professor who’s chair of the art, media and design (AMD) department, is back on campus this semester as she digests the discoveries she made on her summer sojourn to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole. How far-flung is it? After traveling the 5,400 miles from San Diego to Oslo, you’re still about 1,300 miles from your destination.

In Svalbard, Hersko boarded a sailing ship called the Rembrandt van Rijn (named for the famous Dutch painter) that was chartered by The Arctic Circle, an annual expeditionary residency program for artists and scientists from around the world. With 29 other people – a mix of visual artists, writers, composers and science communicators – Hersko sailed down the west coast of Svalbard before the ship left the land behind and pointed northwest into the thick ice of the Arctic Ocean.

“That was really exciting because it was a real North Pole feeling,” Hersko said. “The captain discovered this really large chunk of ice that was 20 kilometers. We moored to it, and it was sort of like mooring to land, except it moved.”

During her time at sea and on the ice, Hersko gathered material that she will use for her unique brand of artwork that she calls performance lectures. These are tightly timed presentations of narratives grounded in historical and scientific research that are accompanied by visual images, including the artworks that she creates – her specialties are sculpture and installation that also incorporate photography and collage.

“I build complex narratives that are basically true to life, except that I weave in a fictitious character who helps hold the story together,” she said.

It’s an approach to art that was born of Hersko’s early years at CSUSM, and a life-changing trip to the globe’s opposite pole. In 2003, when she was hired at CSUSM, she sent a letter to colleagues on the science faculty telling them that she was interested in collaborating on projects. One of the most enthusiastic responses came from Victoria Fabry, a biological sciences professor whose scholarly work explored the effects of ocean acidification.

Hersko and Fabry teamed up on an exhibit titled “Shifting Baselines” that translated the scientist’s research into visual art (it proved so impactful that it has been exhibited multiple times nationally, most recently last year in the San Diego Central Library). In 2006, Fabry went on a scientific trip to Antarctica and she came back raving about it, urging Hersko to apply for a program that brought artists there.

Hersko did just that two years later. On a completely funded expedition as part of the extremely competitive National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers grant program, she spent six weeks in Antarctica, where she watched penguins hatching at her feet, studied planktonic snails and assembled the research material that guided her work for many years, exhibitions, presentations and book chapters to come.

Specifically, she crafted narratives that centered around a fictitious, unknown female explorer, Anna Schwartz, who travels to Antarctica disguised as a man on the 1939 expedition led by American naval officer Richard E. Byrd.

Though her protagonist is invented, Hersko said, “my work builds on meticulous research, and I place her in real historical events. These layered stories present the complex history of science highlighting the absence of women from the narratives of exploration as well as science.”

Hersko isn’t the only School of Arts faculty member who has been to the frigid poles on a research excursion. In 2023, AMD professor Lucy HG Solomon received a prestigious Fulbright scholarship and did part of her research on Svalbard, where she furthered her ongoing studies of microorganisms and how they connect to the world.

Solomon’s experience in the Arctic, in turn, led to a rare opportunity for one of her students. Last year, she connected AMD student Leobardo Moreno Villanueva with an ecologist at a Svalbard university, and Villanueva worked with the scientist on a graphic design project in which he helped make technical signage describing the scientific equipment used for research in the Arctic.

Villanueva, a former foster youth from Mexico for whom English is his third language, graduated from CSUSM last spring.

“Designing for the far north was an unforgettable challenge that expanded my perspective on how art and science meet in unexpected places," Villanueva said.

As for Hersko, she knows several people in the small circle of polar researchers who have traveled with The Arctic Circle program, but she could never find the right time until this year. On July 4, she landed in Longyearbyen, a small town known for coal mining (though the last mine closed a few days before her arrival) and its views of the Northern Lights. After a few days to acclimate, she boarded the Rembrandt van Rijn to begin the two-week voyage.

Among the highlights of her time at sea was up-close viewings of two polar bears, the tragic sight (and thunderous sound) of ice falling from stunning glaciers, and the discovery of tiny flowers and lichens that she thinks she will incorporate into her next output of art that results from this latest trip of a lifetime.

“When I get fascinated by something, often it turns out that things come together in a weird, magical way where it has relevance,” Hersko said. “It’s all still percolating, and I think it’s probably a story that I will develop in the next year.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

The documentary was released the following year. Now, 20 years later, Berman is marking the anniversary of the film with a new digital restoration and a national tour of screenings and interviews.

“Commune” is about an intentional community called Black Bear Ranch formed in 1968 in remote Siskiyou County just south of the Oregon border. A dozen people were expected to live there, but the number eventually swelled to 100 in what was a utopian experiment that attracted anarchists, hippies and activists seeking to get away from America and create something new. The documentary includes prominent actor Peter Coyote, who once lived at Black Bear.

At the time of its release, “Commune” received positive reviews from such outlets as the New York Times, Variety, the Village Voice and the San Francisco Chronicle. It boasts a rating of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Berman says he decided to restore the film so that it would be suitable to appear on streaming services and that he chose to embark on a nationwide tour to give fans “the communal experience of theatrical.” The tour began in May in upstate New York and will end this month back in New York. In September, it made four stops in California, including Los Angeles and the Bay Area town of San Rafael, where some former Black Bear denizens reside.

“Twenty years later, it is a warm feeling to reunite with those folks,” Berman said. “They have almost all gone on to do work that helps people; some of this can be gleaned in the film. It was almost like reuniting with relatives after a long time. I felt a little guilty for not really being in touch more, but then happy to see them again.”

In addition to the 16 theaters that have screened “Commune,” Berman has been interviewed on nearly 20 podcasts. He’s hoping to add a few more showings in Southern California, including at least one in the San Diego area.

After making “Commune,” Berman focused on teaching and consulting on other films before the release in 2018 of “Calling All Earthlings,” which examines California’s UFO counterculture cult and the Integratron, a mysterious structure in the desert north of Joshua Tree National Park. He’s now working on the third documentary in what he calls his California trilogy; titled “Gondola,” it’s about the controversial plan to build an aerial tram from Union Station to Dodger Stadium in L.A.

Berman says his film work over the years has benefited greatly from the contributions of CSUSM students and fellow faculty members, from serving internships to watching and giving feedback on test edits.

“That’s part of our mission as a university, for students to work intimately with teachers who are active in their field,” he said.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Neufeldt hosted about 40 people at her house on April 27 for a reception to unveil the third exhibition of student art in her home gallery. The exhibit features 11 pieces of art and was curated by Sarah Bricke, a professional artist and CSUSM alumna. Bricke also curated the previous display, which had hung in Neufeldt’s home for the past year.

The four student artists are Emma Dill, Adel Bautista, Kaia Pappas and Erin Wilmot.

More than 800 CSUSM students have a major or minor in the arts. A priority of the College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences and the School of Arts is to increase space to showcase student artists, and to teach, rehearse and perform.

Here’s the language that Bricke used in describing the exhibit, followed by artist statements:

This exhibition brings together four emerging artists whose practices engage forms of portraiture as a site of experimentation. Though grounded in distinct mediums, each artist reimagines the portrait as more than likeness, exploring how it can function as a record of presence and experience.  

Dill’s photographic work, while not traditional portraits, centers the experience of live music and the ephemeral intensity of performance. Her images in this exhibition can be read as a “portrait” of a moment in time and associated emotional experience. Bautista utilizes nature photography alongside self-portraiture to convey internal states over physical representation. Her compositions reflect an engagement with the landscape as an element of portraiture. 

Pappas approaches the portrait through the labor-intensive process of woodblock printmaking. Her repeating images distort photographic clarity, reconfiguring familiar forms into graphic abstractions that invite multiple interpretations. Wilmot pushes the boundaries of the photographic portrait, layering found objects and expressive mark-making over photo substrates. Her tactile surfaces mirror the nonlinearity of childhood cognition, rendering portraiture as a fragmented, sensorial field of discovery. 

Together, these artists challenge conventional boundaries of the portrait, privileging intuition, memory and material play over realism. Their works collectively demonstrate how portraiture can serve as a flexible and generative framework for exploring identity, environment and the ever-shifting relationship between self and other.

Emma Dill

Music has been a constant presence for Dill – from singing pop and punk with a sibling to listening to alt-rock in the car with her parents – ultimately inspiring an eclectic taste that continues to evolve through college. With over a decade of experience in photography, she focuses her work on both live performance and conceptual image-making. By photographing concerts, she aims to capture the joy of shared musical experiences, offering fans the chance to relive the energy of their favorite artists. Her experimental and creative projects seek to introduce reflection and variation within an increasingly saturated visual culture. Whether through the thrill of live music or the stillness of constructed imagery, her practice explores the emotional and aesthetic dimensions of sound, performance and visual storytelling. 

Adel Bautista

Baustista is a photographer and digital media artist based in Vista. Her work draws from travels across the United States and internationally. These journeys serve as emotional outlets, offering opportunities for reflection, clarity and well-being. Her practice is rooted in emotional awareness and the pursuit of balance – socially, emotionally, spiritually, environmentally, intellectually and physically. The resulting images are shared with the intention of encouraging positive ways to manage the stresses and challenges of daily life. As a survivor of physical and emotional abuse, she makes art that’s a declaration of resilience and strength. Bautista’s work champions emotional mindfulness as a foundation for personal health and communal empowerment.

Kaia Pappas

Pappas is a woodblock printmaker based in East Los Angeles. Her work explores photographic, posterized imagery translated through the tactile and deliberate process of hand carving. Influenced by artists like Shepard Fairey and Barbara Kruger, Pappas draws inspiration from portraiture, everyday life and the subtleties found in seemingly ordinary moments. Her compositions – often rendered in black and white – embrace ambiguity and interpretation, inviting viewers to engage with the image beyond surface clarity. Some works intentionally obscure their subject matter, reflecting the artist’s belief that little in life is ever truly black and white. Her work challenges perception while celebrating the emotional and visual power of contrast, process and reinterpretation. 

Erin Wilmot

Wilmot is a mixed media artist whose recent work explores the emotional landscape and imaginative depth of childhood, inspired by a single moment captured at a family celebration. A spontaneous encounter with a child’s uninhibited play – particularly in the aftermath of a piñata explosion – served as the catalyst. Photographic prints from that day were later translated into hand-painted compositions. To foreground the painted medium, Wilmot first converted the photographs to black and white, creating a quiet visual pause for color, shape and texture to speak more vividly. Working intuitively, she incorporated found and local materials – spray-painted feathers, broken ornaments, string beads – to construct layered, tactile surfaces. With no strict blueprint, the process unfolds organically, reflecting the way children assign meaning to even the most ordinary objects. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

From a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants, Samarasinghe is one of 198 individuals across 53 disciplines who were chosen for the fellowship for both prior career achievement and exceptional promise. This marks the 100^th class of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to professionals who have demonstrated outstanding ability by publishing a significant body of work in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and the creative arts.

Samarasinghe was recognized under the discipline of “Film-Video.” A lecturer in CSUSM’s art, media and design department since 2021, he’s a Sri Lankan filmmaker and visual artist who left his native country during its civil war and is now based in Southern California.

“This is an incredible honor that will enable me to continue pursuing my creative work, especially during such uncertain times,” Samarasinghe said. “I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has supported me throughout my career, and it’s a privilege to share this recognition with such an inspiring cohort of artists, scholars and innovators across so many disciplines.”

Each Guggenheim Fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under the “freest possible conditions.” Samarasinghe said he plans to dedicate his time primarily to his second feature film, “The Moment,” a hybrid documentary filmed in China, as well as several other projects.

His first feature, “Your Touch Makes Others Invisible,” is scheduled to be released next month. He also has directed multiple award-winning short films.

Samarasinghe earned a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from UC San Diego and a master’s in film and video from the California Institute of the Arts.

Many Guggenheim Fellows’ projects respond to timely themes and issues such as climate change, Indigenous studies, identity, democracy and politics, incarceration and the evolving purpose of community. Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded more than $400 million to more than 19,000 fellows.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist
bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

“I am incredibly honored to have received an Emmy this early in my career,” Parra said. “I am thankful for the time I spent at CSUSM, as it has taught me profound knowledge.”

Parra earned her bachelor’s degree in art, media and design in 2021.

“A special thank you to the AMD department for the guidance as I started my foundation in this field,” said Parra, who went on to earn a video and media design certificate at MiraCosta College in 2022. “Another thank you to my family, professors, mentors, and alma maters, as well as FOX 5 San Diego, for shaping who I am today.”

A first-generation college student, Parra credited her mom for encouraging her to pursue higher education. She also praised  TRIO Student Support Services for playing an important role in her success at CSUSM.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim assistant director of editorial and external affairs
ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

They first connected a few months later. Bricke, an art, media and design major, was the co-curator of a student art exhibition titled “Juncture,” and Neufeldt dropped in on the opening event to express her admiration.

Neufeldt, it turned out, was an art lover, to the extent that she converted a room in her Escondido home into a gallery space. And when, during her first year at CSUSM, she decided to display student art in that space, sure enough, it was Bricke’s art that was chosen (along with that of Kimberly Lopez, her co-curator for the student exhibit).

Four years later, Bricke’s relationship with the university and its president has come full circle. In January, the art created by Bricke the student was removed from Neufeldt’s home gallery. In its place was installed art by two current or recent CSUSM students that was selected by Bricke, now a professional artist and curator.

“I’m really happy to have been asked to curate the exhibition,” Bricke said. “It brings together all of these things that are intensely personal and specific to me, but that also resonate with the larger community at CSUSM, including the faculty of the art department and the president’s office, and hopefully the president herself. It’s a beautiful thing and, for me, it’s really what makes this worth doing.”

After being hired to curate the exhibition last fall, Bricke opened a submissions process for CSUSM arts faculty to recommend students whose work was especially accomplished. From a group of almost 20 students, Bricke chose five oil paintings each by Karolina Lopez and Esther Rodriguez. The exhibition’s theme, Bricke says, relates to the “intersection of landscape and lived experiences of these two women who are navigating life as students, set against one of the most contested borders in the world.”

Rodriguez said she created her paintings last spring during an independent study course leading up to her May graduation, under the direction of lecturer Heidi Brar.

“It was a great surprise when Sarah gave me the news, and I never could have imagined my pieces being displayed in the home of President Neufeldt,” said Rodriguez, who’s now pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at National University. “This exhibition means a step further in my career as an artist. Also, I am representing the CSUSM arts faculty, which makes me feel very proud of this accomplishment.”

Brar actually mentored both selected students, first in her AMD: Advanced Painting course and then in the independent painting projects that evolved into the exhibited paintings. She said the students have different approaches to painting – Rodriguez “uses bright colors and personal imagery to interweave personal narratives with larger cultural themes,” while Lopez shows a “remarkable ability to capture the essence and color palette of iconic landscape locations in San Diego" – but are equally deserving of the recognition.

“Both students’ perseverance and hard work distinguished them among the AMD majors, and I feel they are very relevant choices for the president’s collection,” Brar said. “Their work presents an opportunity to appreciate the impact the college makes and celebrate the talents of these wonderful students.”

Bricke’s model of resilience and determination since her time at CSUSM is one that the student artists might hope to emulate. Graduating just as the COVID-19 pandemic was heating up in 2020, she hoped to obtain an MFA degree but didn’t get into any of the four graduate programs she applied to. Feeling lonely in isolation and discouraged by the setback, she rededicated herself to her art, and when she applied to nine programs the following year, she was accepted by eight of them and chose one of the most prestigious in the nation – the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“SAIC was my reach school. I really felt like it was a long shot,” Bricke said. “When I got the big envelope in the mail, I was over the moon. I couldn’t believe it.”

SAIC is a low-residency program, which means that students aren’t expected to live full-time in the city where the institution is located. That made it an ideal fit for Bricke, a single mother who didn’t want to uproot her daughter, Crimson (now 10), from their home in Vista. Bricke would travel to Chicago for in-person work toward her degree over the summer, but otherwise she was free to stay in Southern California, interrupted by a couple of trips with Crimson to places like Berkeley and New York City to tackle projects related to artists’ archives.

“I felt this confidence as a scholar and an academic and an artist,” she said. “But the setup also gave me greater confidence as a mother.”

Bricke uses multiple terms to describe her art, including “conceptual” and “research-based.” The one she prefers, though, is “transdisciplinary.” She describes it as combining academic disciplines, materials and methods in an attempt to make something new that hasn’t been done before.

For Bricke, transdisciplinary art manifests itself in novel and subversive ways. She will attend academic conferences and present what she calls performative lectures, in which she adopts the traditional role of an academic while simultaneously challenging the conventions of the higher education system.

Her website is another example. A page that on a traditional site might be titled “About Me” is instead called “forms of refusal,” and in place of the typical artist bio is a paragraph that reads: “Sarah … believes that biographical content is largely unnecessary and generally uninteresting. Alternatively, this placeholder for formulaic recitations of academic degrees, artistic achievements and prestigious awards offers an opportunity to test parafictions and substitute narratives.”

“I think of my website as a work, and its function isn’t to present objects that I’ve made so that curators can see them and put me in an exhibition,” Bricke said. “It functions more as a thing to talk about. Curation was a natural extension of this concept, where I thought, ‘I want to gather objects and people and images so that we can have dialogue around them.’ And for me, that dialogue, that exchange between the art, the person who made the art and anyone else, like the viewer, that is where the art resides.”

Bricke graduated from SAIC last July, and for the last year she has been juggling art projects like the curation for Neufeldt’s home with preparations to begin a doctoral program this fall. She's pursuing a Ph.D. at UC San Diego in contemporary art history with a focus on gender and sexuality, and artists’ archives.

“I've come to see that I have an artist/scholar, scholar/artist practice,” she said. “I would love to teach because I've had such incredible mentorship from faculty at CSUSM and at SAIC, which has changed me as an artist and an academic and a scholar, but also as a person. I'd like to pass that on.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Last fall, students in the art, media and design class “Art and Social Change” completed a beautification project with community partner Encinitas Union School District Farm Lab, a 10-acre property and working organic farm that houses multiple components supporting health, wellness and enviro-literacy. 

After pitching a design idea to the EUSD Farm Lab teaching team, the CSUSM students painted the site’s court for gaga (a variant of dodgeball) with colorful mural panels that coordinate with the farm’s environmental messaging. After encountering a rat on their first visit to the property, the students also had fun adding some stenciled rats around the property in the style of Banksy, the famed British street artist.

The course, AMD421, is taught by Kristin Moss, an associate professor in the art, media and design department. Moss said she wanted to collaborate with EUSD Farm Lab and site coordinator Julie Burton because of the strong alignment between the mission and values of the organization and CSUSM.

“Both of our institutions place a strong value on environmental sustainability and education, so I thought it would be a natural fit and a great opportunity for my students to get creatively involved with the community in North County,” Moss said.

Farm Lab is also home to the DREAMS (Design, Research, Engineering, Art, Math and Science) campus, which provides sustainability education to the more than 5,000 elementary students in the school district.

Though most of the students did not have experience in painting murals, Moss used a framework of personal leadership for them to work together and learn from each other.

“Though we had some setbacks with weather and supplies, overall I think students loved the unique opportunity to work outside together and create something that will be enjoyed by so many people,” she said. “It feels great to be able to be a part of something that has an impact in the community.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Tal’s documentary, “1341 Frames of Love and War,” is about celebrated Israeli war photographer Micha Bar-Am, who allowed Tal access to his vast archive of negatives taken over more than 50 years. The film had its U.S. premiere during the 49^th Telluride Film Festival from Sept. 2-5 in Telluride, Colo.

Tal, who’s from Israel, is a visiting Murray Galinson San Diego-Israel Initiative (MGSDII) faculty member in the AMD department this fall. He’s teaching documentary production.

Tal also will be a speaker in the fall Arts & Lectures series on Oct. 3, when he will screen his 2012 film “The Garden of Eden” and discuss his work.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist
bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306