DATA Students Spend The Day At UC Riverside

A campus tour, a question and answer with two playwrights, stories of challenges and success by students from two Chicano organizations, and some insight into video games and literacy by an associate professor of media and cultural studies were all on the menu Monday, May 23 when 52 Digital Arts Technology Academy sophomores and juniors spent the day at UC Riverside.

The day for the Cathedral City High School students was organized by UCR's Tony Lawrence and began with a campus tour followed later that morning by a meeting with an admissions counselor.

Playwright and UCR Professor Stu Krieger (The Land Before Time and ten original movies for the Disney Channel, including Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century and its two sequels, Tru Confessions, Smart House and Cow Belles are among his credits. He has been a story editor and writer on Spielberg’s Amazing Stories and the supervising producer on the ABC Television series Jack’s Place) told the students about his early days hustling any job he could find to be near the entertainment industry.

Associate professor Rickerby Hinds, a leading innovator in hip hop theater, talked about his recent work "Dreamscape," an interpretation of a true event based on the story of a young black women in Riverside, passed out in her car with a gun on her lap who ended up shot to death by police.

Hinds said he wrote the play from the point of view of the woman as the protagonist and the coroner as antagonist.

Later in the day, Media and Cultural Studies Associate Professor Derek Burrill talked to the DATA students about the prime importance of narrative in video games. The trip ended with a visit to the California Museum of Photography.