UCLA Arts’ “Shared Practices” connects communities through research, dialogue, and interdisciplinary exchange

The UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture (UCLA Arts) has launched “Shared Practices,” an initiative that creates opportunities for students, faculty, alumni, and community partners to exchange ideas, share research, and develop creative practices across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

The initiative’s inaugural projects span a range of subjects and approaches, including community organizing on and off campus, choreography and robotics, the relationship between technology and the human body, and the overlooked architects and materials that have shaped Los Angeles.

Together, the projects reflect UCLA Arts’ commitment to collaboration, experimentation, and engagement with the world beyond the university. 

The “Shared Practices” series is funded by the dean’s office in the School of the Arts and Architecture. 

Robot Choreography Hackathon: Designing Expressive Motion
Fridays, Nov. 6 and 13, 2026
Kaufman Hall, Room 208

Assistant Professor Kate Ladenheim (World Arts and Cultures/Dance) and Associate Professor Ankur Mehta (UCLA Samueli School of Engineering) will host “Robot Choreography Hackathon: Designing Expressive Motion.” When a robot's body doesn't look like any living thing that we know, what could make its movement feel curious, hesitant, playful, or alive? This cross-disciplinary hackathon will find out.

Each day will open with a public talk from 11 a.m. to noon by Naomi Fitter, an expert in expressive robotics from the SHARE Lab at Oregon State University, followed by a Q&A with Ladenheim and Mehta.

On November 6, students will design modular robotic components that can be assembled into a menagerie of movable robotic bodies. On November 13, they will assemble and choreograph these modules to create robots capable of performing motions that are engaging and expressive. The day will culminate with a public performance featuring the robots in motion from 5 to 6 p.m.

Group Suspension
Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2027, 5–7 p.m.
EDA, Broad Art Center

The UCLA Art|Sci Center, led by Professor Victoria Vesna (Design Media Arts) and supported by Lecturer Anuradha Vikram (Art), will welcome pioneering Australian artist Stelarc to the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and the David Geffen School of Medicine for a lecture and solo performance.

For more than five decades, Stelarc has created provocative performances that investigate the possibilities and limits of the human body through technology, cybernetics, and physical endurance. His visit to UCLA will bring together students and faculty from the arts, medicine, and sciences to consider how emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and bioengineering, are changing the ways we understand, augment, and treat the human body and our environment.

The program will include meetings with graduate students, a keynote lecture and performance, and a symposium featuring UCLA faculty and students across fields including medicine, physics, astronomy, and nanoscience.

The UCLA program is presented in partnership with the Performance Art Museum, which has opened a new exhibition and performance space in Los Angeles’s Chinatown and has invited Stelarc to create a live performance for the occasion on January 15, 2027, complementing the UCLA presentation.

80 Buildings in the 80s
Mondays, April 12 and 19, 2027, 5 p.m.
Perloff Hall Gallery, Room 1318

A fourth event will turn students’ attention to the seemingly ordinary details that helped shape Los Angeles during the 1980s and remain embedded in the city today. The events will be presented in parallel with an experimental course, “Ubiquitous Details,” which will be taught by Associate Professor Michael Osman (Architecture and Urban Design) in spring 2027. The course will investigate the less visible materials, technologies, and design practices that formed the urban backdrop of late-20th-century Los Angeles, including the 1984 Olympic Games.

A public lecture by Gary R. Fox, Assistant Curator of Architecture at the Getty Research Institute, and one by alumna Jia Yi Gu, Assistant Professor at Harvey Mudd College, will explore “80 Buildings in the 80s.” This project takes the city’s celebrated architectural and cultural landmarks as a starting point but shifts attention toward the ubiquitous details that undergird L.A.’s seemingly mundane landscapes. One such landscape—deemed the “oil vernacular”—identifies Los Angeles architecture's dominant architectural language as a response to available local practices and resources centered on oil extraction and petroleum-based product manufacture.

Students will investigate these and other elements of L.A.’s built environment such as reflective glass, silicone sealants, and other building materials developed in the 1980s, asking how technologies and materials shaped the city and influenced the environments people inhabited.

Art for Social Change
Winter Quarter 2027

Associate Professor Candice Lin (Art) will bring together a panel of faculty and alumni who will discuss how their artistic practices live alongside a parallel engagement with community organizing, on and off campus. Together, they will share their experiences with organizing while exploring how artistic practice can be a vital contribution to social justice and community action.

The conversation will be followed by a collaborative printmaking workshop, where students and community members can translate ideas from the panel into silkscreen posters and other printed materials.

A subsequent presentation of the resulting prints and t-shirts is planned for later in the academic year.