Marlene Bennett’s project, “Confronting the Homelessness Crisis Through Art,” uses visual art to bring attention to homelessness and housing insecurity in Silicon Valley. Coordinated through SCU’s Unhoused Initiative, it will bring artists with lived experience of the housing crisis to campus and feature two displays, an educational talk, and an artist reception. The exhibitions aim to challenge assumptions about people experiencing homelessness, highlight artists’ perspectives, and connect campus audiences with the broader community. Planned displays will include QR codes linking attendees to additional resources about homelessness and ways to get involved locally. Students will have opportunities to hear directly from artists and reflect on how art can make a complex, often overlooked issue more visible.

Renee Billingslea’s “The Memory Project” pairs students in SCU’s ARTS 155  photography course with members of the Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop who are currently incarcerated in the Washington, D.C., jail. Free Minds participants will share written memories as poems, and students will translate them into photographs. The project treats memory as something that can be shaped into a visible image, creating an exchange between people whose experiences are often kept apart. 

A presentation by Free Minds co-founder Kelli Taylor and a public exhibition will accompany the collaboration. 

By bringing writing and visual art together into conversation, the project aims to build mutual understanding, challenge stereotypes about incarceration, and will give students an experience of making art that responds to another person’s story.

Benjamin Gillespie’s project brings Split Britches—the internationally acclaimed, OBIE Award-winning lesbian-feminist theatre company founded in 1980 in New York City—to Santa Clara for a five-day residency in spring 2027. Featuring performances of their most recent award-winning show, Last Gasp, alongside workshops and participatory dialogue, the residency will explore how elder queer artists challenge ageism, preserve LGBTQ+ histories, and build connections across generations. Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver’s experimental performances use humor, personal storytelling, and audience engagement to affirm aging as a source of creativity and resistance. Coinciding with the release of Split Britches: Fifty Years On, edited by Gillespie, the program will bring students, campus audiences, local artists, and LGBTQ+ organizations, including the Billy DeFrank LGBTQ+ Community Center, together for performance-making and conversations about identity, aging, and belonging.

Led by Mythri Jegathesan with collaborators across Anthropology, English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Center for the Arts and Humanities, “Writing and/as Survival” will bring novelist and journalist V.V. Ganeshananthan to campus in spring 2027. The program centers on her historical fiction novel Brotherless Night, which portrays civilian experiences of political violence and the impacts of war on family relationships in 1980s Sri Lanka. Ganeshananthan will participate in a speaker event and various classroom visits, including a workshop, which will prompt students to consider how literature can represent conflict, whose stories get told, and what ethical responsibilities come with writing about violence. The project also includes a session on disability justice in the literary arts, to be developed with campus disability groups. By joining literary discussion with questions of justice and accessibility, the events aim to foster thoughtful, compassionate dialogue about the power of justice-driven storytelling.

Maura M. Tarnoff and English faculty collaborators are expanding their ongoing partnership with Marin Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare at San Quentin through “Shakespeare and Social Justice.” The project combines close reading with drama therapy-informed performance exercises in workshops for SCU students and system-impacted performers at San Quentin. Participants will use Shakespeare’s texts to examine mass incarceration, systemic racism, economic inequality, justice, and reconciliation. On campus, a talk and workshop on October 28 will introduce students to the work and prepare them for a later visit to San Quentin on January 31. Through performance, reflection, and writing, participants can build tools for mindful dialogue and connection across institutional boundaries while considering how literature speaks to current social issues.