• Student Recital—Maddison Ramirez, soprano

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Maddison Ramirez, soprano, presents their Bachelor of Music (B.M.) recital, with music from Renaissance, Romantic, and Modern eras. Accompanied by Luke Shepherd, piano; Faith Lanam, harpsichord, Denali Zia, cello, and various additional vocalists. Download and share the event flyer here. — ADMISSION – Attend in person at the Music Center Recital Hall at UC Santa […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • NOIZ: An Evening of Words, Sounds + Ideas

    Creative Interventions (CI) Series
    Digital Arts Research Center 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA

    Hosted by Assistant Professor and hip hop artist akua naru, the evening features live student performances, a DJ set, and an intimate conversation with guest artist/performer Edd Wheeler: pioneering Brazilian rapper, founding member of As Damas do Rap, the first female Hip Hop group in Rio de Janeiro, and practicing lawyer and organizer whose life […]

    FREE and open to UCSC affiliates
  • Night of Ideas 2026

    Institute of the Arts and Sciences 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States

    Enlightenment, Now! Join us for a nocturnal celebration of art, philosophy, and activism! Enlightenment, Now! As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its independence, the 2026 Santa Cruz […]

  • Field Trip to ALBA

    MJ Organic Farms 1700 Old Stage Rd, Salinas, California

    Join us for an opportunity to visit the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA) in Salinas! ALBA is a non-profit whose mission is to create economic opportunity for aspiring organic farmers and ag professionals — many of whom are local field workers and first-generation college students — through land-based education in the heart of the Salinas Valley. […]

  • Arts & Ecology Festival: Creative Resistance

    Digital Arts Research Center 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA

    On Earth Day, UC Santa Cruz launches the inaugural Arts & Ecology Festival: Creative Resistance, a campus-wide gathering that refuses to treat climate change as a problem of carbon alone. Instead, it brings together artists, scientists, students, and community partners to engage the deeper conditions of the crisis, and to open space for cultural, political, […]

  • Palaver Strings—April in Santa Cruz

    Kuumbwa Jazz Center 320-2 Cedar St, Santa Cruz, United States

    Kuumbwa Jazz, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and the Arts Division at UC Santa Cruz partner to present: A Change is Gonna Come, featuring Palaver Strings and tenor Nicholas Phan. Grammy award-winning tenor Nicholas Phan joins Portland, Maine-based ensemble Palaver Strings, in a program that explores our country’s rich legacy of protest songs. Repertoire includes […]

    $31.50 – $89.25
  • Harriet: Performing Anarchive

    Digital Arts Research Center 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA

    Through motion capture, immersive sound, and real-time digital systems, CHARI (Dr. Chari Smith) performs alongside Harriet, a life-scale avatar carrying a living archive of Black sonic and vernacular memory. Drawing from Black archival traditions rooted in call-and-response, improvisation, and communal stewardship, the performance understands memory as relational and alive. Together, our movements shape the environment […]

    Free
  • Harriet: Performing an Archive

    Digital Arts Research Center 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA

    Through motion capture, immersive sound, and real-time digital systems, CHARI perform alongside Harriet, a life-scale avatar carrying a living archive of Black sonic and vernacular memory. Drawing from Black archival traditions rooted in call-and-response, improvisation, and communal stewardship, the performance understands memory as relational and alive. Together, our movements shape the environment as the performance […]

    FREE; Registration Required
  • Pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi—April in Santa Cruz

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi graces UC Santa Cruz’s Music Center Recital Hall with Rippling, Resistance, and Rain, a unique concert of 21st century piano music written by composers from Japan and the United States. The program opens with an imaginative fantasy of a bird, explores the psychology of addiction and mental illness, explores a liberating sense […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • Denim Day Open Mic & Survivor Share-Out

    Namaste Lounge 615 College Nine Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Join CARE in closing out Sexual Assault Awareness Month 2026, during Denim Day, for a space where we’ll connect as a community, hand out copies of the new volume of […]

  • Percussionist Christopher Clarino—April in Santa Cruz

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Join percussionist Christopher Clarino in a concert of revolutionary work that invites listeners of all kinds to rethink hearing itself. This concert features a wide range of pieces—some well known and others newly commissioned—that explore sound, language, and gesture through electronics, field recordings, text, and American Sign Language (ASL). Framed in dialogue with these premieres […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • UCSC Orchestra

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    UCSC Orchestra

    Free – $12
  • Music on the Meadow—April in Santa Cruz

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Music On The Meadow (MOTM) presents “Episode 0: Music with the Meadow.” MOTM showcases engagement from students, artists, scientists, scholars, and culture bearers, who engage in “listening with the meadow” through genre-defying works. MOTM is a site for low-key (but not low-quality or low-impact) celebration, gathering, mourning, remembering, rethinking, unlearning. This event is presented as […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • UCSC Wind Ensemble

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    UCSC Wind Ensemble concert

    Free – $12
  • Where Cultures Bloom — We Belong here

    Oakes Learning Center

    Where Cultures Bloom is a large-scale cultural celebration centered on community, expression, and belonging, grounded in the idea that UCSC is shaped by the diverse identities and voices of those […]

  • ABC Ensemble and This Never Happened—April in Santa Cruz

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Pianists/experimentalists Amy Beal and Ben Carson, and friends in the This Never Happened Ensemble, present a concert of toys, noise, open-questions, and a love of play, including one piece involving no fewer than five concert grand pianos. Featuring the music of Shanna Sordahl, Marc Perez, Mexican composer Rodrigo Barriga Lopez, and legendary experimentalists Johanna Beyer […]

    FREE and open to the public