College of Liberal & Creative Arts News & Stories

While studying in community college, Daniel Hernandez became a construction worker to pay tuition and bills. Today, he has transferred to SF State and is a major in the Bilingual Spanish Journalism program—the first program of its kind at a public university in the U.S.—where he focuses on producing journalism that is relevant to his community. Recipient of the Otto J. Bos Memorial Scholarship and the Vincent Constantino Scholarship, he no longer works in construction and can focus on his award-winning journalism.

A $100,000 donation from Anthem Blue Cross to The Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University has established a new scholarship fund to support education-related expenses for students with disabilities who have committed to future healthcare work, whether as direct healthcare practitioners or working in the field of health justice. This initiative is part of Anthem’s broader commitment to address California’s healthcare worker shortage and to close the gap in health disparities across the state. 

QCP recently received a $27,000 donation from the estate of alumni and noted filmmaker Barbara Hammer and executor Florrie Burke, an international human-rights advocate and Hammer’s spouse of 31 years. The gift is a match to a 2018 challenge grant from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which made an additional $25,000 grant to QCP in 2018. 

San Francisco State University has named Joseph Cassara and Tonya M. Foster the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chairs in the Creative Writing department. Cassara, who most recently taught in the department of English at Fresno State University, joined San Francisco State as an assistant professor of creative writing. Foster most recently taught writing and literature at the California College of the Arts in Oakland. She is currently an assistant professor of poetry at SF State.

Dr. Artel Great is the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in African American Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. His scholarly work delves into the intellectual history, critical discourse, and aesthetics of Black cinema and visual culture. His piece in The New Republic highlights the visionary efforts and extraordinary diversity of Black cinema long before the rise of Hollywood.

Millet joined SF State’s Department of Jewish Studies in 2004. Previously, she taught in the University’s Comparative and World Literatures Department. The Marcus Transformative Research Award is made possible by the George and Judy Marcus Funds for Excellence in the Liberal Arts, established with a $25-million gift to SF State in 2018. The award helps tenured faculty pursue transformational research and professional development.

Beck, who studied fine arts at San Francisco State University and graduated in December, was one of nine artists selected for Recology’s 2019 Artist in Residence (AIR) Program. Once a year, the program selects six professional artists and three art students from a pool of applicants. The artists receive a small stipend, studio space and access to materials — junk — that they’re expected to incorporate into their art and then exhibit in a final public showcase.

San Francisco State University’s Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program, one of the first of its kind in the nation, is also one of the top programs producing U.S. State Department English Language Fellows (ELF). The ELF program turns 50 this year and as part of the milestone they’re recognizing five universities for continually producing fellows, colleges that will be given an award at a Nov. 5 birthday celebration in Washington, D.C.

This fall, Dennis O’Donnell appeared on air on San Francisco State University’s student radio station for the first time in decades. The broadcast journalist and San Francisco State Alumni Hall of Famer, a fixture on the Bay Area airwaves for four decades, sat behind a KSFS microphone alongside students as they all gave their takes on the day’s top sports stories.

A panel of faculty experts chose Maga and nine other fellows for the inaugural awards, with projects including a documentary on transgender representation in film, a photography exhibit about climate change and an ethnographic study of the veteran experience at SF State. Students will work closely with faculty mentors over the coming academic year to complete their projects and then present them in some fashion at the end of the Spring semester. 

In 2017 Frank and Linda attended a large SF State event called “Collaboration Through Differences: Campus Dialogue”. The event was organized by Professor Victoria Chen of the Communication Studies Department, in partnership with the 80 students enrolled in her class “Dialogue Across Difference”. Moved by the positive approach towards managing conflict that they saw in this event, they began talking with Professor Chen about creating smaller intensive workshops for students on campus.

A Southern California native in his early 50s, Haynes has played in different bands over the years and released several records between the 1990s and mid-2000s. He’s also worked as a recording engineer and producer for a recording studio in Hollywood. Some of the noteworthy artists he’s worked with include New Wave legend Gary Numan, DJ Me DJ You and Lydia Lunch. He’s also performed with Nik Turner’s Hawkwind and Can member Damo Suzuki.

San Francisco State University’s Queer Cinema Project (QCP), a program that encourages the production, study and promotion of queer cinema, has received a generous $25,000 grant from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, a philanthropic organization that advances social justice through supporting works in journalism, the arts, the environment, documentary film and more.