Best of... Awards for 2025-2026 AEPG

Congratulations to the 2025-2026 AEPG Best of... Awardees!

Community Engagement Award:  Hildegard Festival

From the first moment of this event, while literally walking into the lobby of the Hammer Theatre, it was inspiring how much Corie Brown had engaged with the community, including our Title IX Office, the SJSU Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, as well as the League of Women Voters.  But the performance itself extended beyond these amazing partners to include the Young Women’s Freedom Center and the astonishingly talented Monta Vista High School Choir.  Along with our College Choirs, our students and Monta Vista’s students engaged with what suffrage is, how hard certain groups had to work to attain it, and why it is so important that we all retain our right to vote–something that is clearly under attack at this very moment nationally. Thank you Corie, for such a beautiful event that was a call to action to never let our voices be silenced and to never abdicate our right to participate in our democracy.

Interdisciplinary Award: Shadowlines

This year’s Interdisciplinary practice award goes to Teresa Veramundi's hybrid theater dance project Shadowlines. Teresa, who is from the Department of Film, Dance, and Theater collaborated with the Department of Philosophy’s Riana Betzler, whose work on the ethics of empathy and moral psychology ties into Teresa’s own practice of the Theater of the Oppressed. They facilitated workshops and practice spaces where participants felt safe and supported as they created powerful affecting vignettes based on their own lived experience. The participants and performers, writers and stage managers likewise brought a diversity of  interdisciplinary backgrounds to the project, including one Engineering major, one Dance major, five Communication Studies majors, three Theatre majors, and one Philosophy major from San Jose State. The resulting vignettes offered a searing exploration of the parts of our lives that are silenced, made all the more affecting because the audience, following their friendly Virgil from space to space, is always aware that they are witnessing the innermost and most often silenced thoughts of the real people behind the performance. Teresa described the success of the project as expressing the “transformative power of community and of building bridges of understanding across lines of difference.” Shadowlines also included collaborations with Sukanya Chakrabarti and Raja Shojaei from  Film, Theater, and Dance, and J. Michael Martinez from English alongside members of the Faculty in Residence program, making it an exemplary testament to the generative power of interdisciplinary projects.

Artistic Excellence Award: wolf play

This year's AEPG award for Artistic Excellence goes to ​​Will Detlefson’s production of Jansol Jung's wolf play. This is Will's first year as an incoming faculty member in the Department of Film, Dance and Theater, and we have been so delighted to welcome him to SJSU and to see the astonishing results of his collaboration with students in this production. Audience members were struck by the concentrated intensity of the players in Wolf Play as they immersed themselves in a script that leaves much to the interpretive powers of the actors. The staging demonstrated a creative use of the black box Hal Todd theater that flowed with the action, and was delightful in its own right. The character of the wolf boy/narrator was performed by Ri-Ri Manio, psychology major and theater arts minor, who not only inhabited a child's physicality and voice, but also deftly animated an uncanny boy puppet that underscored the interiority of the character, all while breaking the fourth wall to address the audience with childlike candor. The open ending left audience members gasping, some of us in tears. Will, it was such a pleasure to share in witnessing your ability to create a space that trains our students to inhabit vulnerable and complex characters fearlessly. 

Visionary Award: Design in Process: Evolving with AI and Beyond

This year's visionary award goes to the Symposium entitled Design in Process: Evolving with AI and Beyond, arranged by Dana Raguezeou and Josh Nelson. Dana and Josh organized this impactful event to explore the future of AI across the fields of design. First, they successfully arranged to hold this event at Adobe, which was a fantastic venue.  But placing the event there also showed how much the Design community was ready to engage with the future of Design in the context of AI.  The speakers were amazing, intellectually challenging while  offering important caveats about how we need to think about the ethical futures of AI, both in Design and beyond.  Thank you so much to Dana and Josh for thinking not just about AI, but what the ethical futures of our fields can look like in the context of AI.  It was a symposium that explored the very ideas all of us need to be engaging:  the ethical components of AI, artists’ IP,  AI’s environmental implications, its effect on a future workforce, and more generally what the future looks like to us humans.  Dana and Josh asked the hard questions, and they asked us to do so as well.

AEPG Award for Social Impact through the Humanities and Arts: Hope with Hiroshima

"Hope with Hiroshima” was a beautiful event curated by Midori Ishida and Kaoru Hollin, which asked this most imperative question:  How can we achieve a world without nuclear threats?  Beginning with a powerful, emotional, and sometimes even humorous, account of a young American-Asian child sent back to be with his grandparents in Japan  before WW2, the event utilized his astonishing story to structure our understanding of the horrific experience of Hiroshima, but also the larger cultural and historical events that lead to this disaster.  This engaging and valiant  speaker also brought a unique perspective.  His parents, who were interned in American concentration camps after Pearl Harbor, thought for many years that the two sons they sent to Japan as young children had died in the Hiroshima blast.  This moving narrative was buttressed by the interdisciplinary collaboration of a Japanese language class, a Japanese society and culture class, a political science class, the Japanese Student Association (an SJSU student organization), CAPISE, the Asian American Studies program, and the chorus class in the School of Music.   The event provided context for this history-changing event, but when combined with the artistic performances of the Concert Choir, the performances of songs from the musical “1000 cranes,” and the group effort to send 1000 cranes – a sign of peace and recognition that nuclear bombs should never be used again --  to Hiroshima, the event showed how the arts and humanities can lead us to a world that hopefully will never result in the use of  these horrible military tactics again.  Thanks to Midori and Kaoru for bringing us this event that makes us think and reflect on the implications of discarding our  ethical standards during war.  I’m so delighted to present them with this special award, Social Impact through the Humanities and Arts.