All Events
Cup of Culture
Students on Set!
Student Filmmakers
MCC Theater and Lounge
Lights, Camera, Action: The MCC presents an evening of entertainment from creatives here at UCSB! This edition of Cup of Culture centers on our student filmmakers and their diverse stories. Bringing you a range of genres, perspectives, and subject matter, we present the short films of Keala Taylor, The Waiting Room, Salim Sabbagh, Full Ice, Veronica Becerra-Santiago, Rosie, and Becky Chen, Inside Isla Vista’s Housing Crisis. The screenings will be followed by a Director’s Q&A and a reception. Keala Taylor wrote, directed, and starred in The Waiting Room, a film about a girl named Damai who struggles with her mental & physical health while hiding her issues from those around her. An unfortunate situation leaves her no longer part of this physical world, and she enters an eerie waiting room, where she revisits her mistakes and ultimately decides whether to continue on with life. Salim Sabbagh, a Syrian filmmaker and Film & Media Studies graduate student, wrote and directed Full Ice in 2018–2019 during a period of conflict in Syria. It takes place in a bar where they worked for five years, covering a university student working as a bartender in Damascus who faces a moral dilemma. The bar has since closed, and the film now serves as an unintended documentation of that era and community. Veronica Becerra-Santiago, a third-year transfer student, directed a coming-of-age film titled Rosie, which explores the sentimental value of childhood we carry into adulthood. This film explores the uncertainty of growing up, and Rosie is the guiding light. Becky Chen wrote and directed a documentary, Inside Isla Vista’s Housing Crisis, on the state of housing at UCSB.
Musicking and Listening for Stewardship, Care, and Hope
Professor Ruth Hellier
MCC Lounge
How do you music? How do you listen? How do you engage in civic artistry? Taking music as a process and not an object, musicking explicitly includes actions of listening, empowering listeners to be valued as equal participants in any sound event. Listening also extends to environmental listening, where humans are decentered. Join us at the MCC Lounge to think through some of these questions and practices with Professor Ruth Hellier. Through a lecture, followed by a discussion and activity, we will shift how we approach and understand musicking and listening as civic engagement. With this newfound understanding, we can reexamine what it means to be in community and engage in our individual and collective responsibilities to our environment. Food will be provided! Ruth Hellier, PhD, is a scholar, creative artist, and performer whose work engages in interdisciplinary ways with environmental sound, performance studies, critical and interdisciplinary music, dance, and theatre studies; community arts; cultural history; critical memory/heritage studies; and Mexican and Latin American studies. Her research and creative projects explore issues of identity, memory, and history; power relations; tourism; embodiment; experimentalisms; vocality; ecologies and environmental issues; and the ethics in/of performance and research. Co-sponsored by the Music Department.
Holistic Safety Plan Community Dinner: Carrying it Forward
MCC HSP Team
MCC Lounge
Join us for a community dinner as we wrap up two years of the MCC’s Holistic Safety Plan and celebrate the ways Disability Justice, Trauma-Informed Care, and Restorative Justice have shaped our community at the MCC and across campus. Come reflect with us, share a meal, and connect with others as we look back on what we’ve built together. We’ll also introduce the new HSP frameworks we’ll begin engaging with starting in Fall 2026 and invite you to be part of the next chapter of HSP’s expansion.
