Culture of student voting fostered by design at U-M
The University of Michigan has incorporated design thinking informed by behavioral insights to develop voting spaces for students—aimed at creating lifelong voters.
In addition to a history of democracy-focused initiatives on campus, this year marks the third election in which the Creative Campus Voting Project, a nonpartisan initiative based at U-M’s Stamps School of Art & Design, has partnered with the Ann Arbor city clerk, U-M Museum of Art and the Duderstadt Center Gallery to design voting hubs on campus.
Co-led by Stamps associate professors Stephanie Rowden and Hannah Smotrich, CCVP’s work employs key insights from behavioral science and rigorous attention to election law, along with a range of creative approaches to create a student voter experience that is clear, trustworthy and delightful.
The registration and voting turnout among U-M students consistently exceeds national averages, according to the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, and in the last presidential election, roughly 90% of voting-eligible students were registered to vote. In the 2020 and 2022 elections, the voting hubs designed by CCVP facilitated over 9,300 registrations and collected more than 13,000 ballots.
Located on Central Campus at UMMA and on North Campus at the Duderstadt Center Gallery beginning Oct. 21, the hubs offer students and community members the opportunity to register, request and drop off an absentee ballot, and/or cast their ballot in person during the early voting period beginning Oct. 26.
Visitors encounter clear and concise information through friendly typography and playful interactive installations, and positive peer-to-peer interactions.
“From the moment a student enters the voting space, we think about what information they need, and at which point, in that process,” Smotrich said. “And instead of experiencing a fairly dry, bureaucratic space, like they might at city hall, they enter this light-filled, glass-enclosed gallery which is a beautiful, wonderful place to be. Clerks are ready to have one-on-one conversations with students. It’s really focused on making the process accessible, enjoyable and comprehensible.”
The inviting spaces and nonpartisan materials are intended to demystify the voting process by using conversational language and posing questions that young voters might be too embarrassed to ask. Their signage aims to normalize the fact that people have questions.
“What we noticed when we looked at the behavioral science research around voting participation on campus is that many of the challenges revolve around issues of clarity and comprehension for the students,” Smotrich said.
Through many conversations with students, Smotrich and Rowden learned that students felt they were already “supposed to know” things, and so they hesitate to ask questions and risk doing nothing.
To increase approachability and comfort for students, trained peer mentors are available to help guide voters through the voting process in addition to on-site city clerks.
For this presidential election, the CCVP team went to extra lengths to encourage making a voting plan and getting started ahead of Election Day.
“As artists and designers, our work is rooted in empathy,” Rowden said. “As faculty at Stamps, our work with students offers us an important window into psychological tripping points and opportunities for new student voters. This vantage point informs all the creative interventions we design.”
Their “Voter Style” personality quiz is an example of speaking a shared language with newly eligible voters. The quiz, supported by the U-M Arts Initiative, uses lighthearted questions to tap into behavioral tendencies and, based on those insights, generates a customized voter action plan with easy-to-follow steps.
The “personality styles” generated through the quiz are fun and humorous, ranging from a Party Puppy—one who wants to be a part of the action and take advantage of early voting—to a Slow But Steady Sea Turtle who might prefer to take their time via an absentee ballot.
“For us, this is really interesting creative research. It’s meaningful to have a direct impact,” Rowden said. “We feel really privileged to do this work.”
Free, open course in equitable stage makeup and hair
The University of Michigan is addressing long standing equity issues in the performing arts by offering a free, open course in stage makeup and hair for all skin tones and hair textures.
Available to anyone in the world on demand, this rigorous course is taught by career professionals and leaders at U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance, including associate professor Sarah M. Oliver and Drag artist of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame, Alex Michaels, best known as Alexis Michelle.
Created by Oliver, “Equitable Stage Makeup and Hair” seeks to address a pervasive issue she has observed throughout her career as a costume designer of shows from New York City to regional theater; too often, she believes, performers are working with makeup artists and crew who are not trained on their skin tone and hair texture. Instead of fully embodying a character, they are instead confronted with limitations that can feel frustrating and demoralizing.
Even graduates of the best training programs have historically received instruction in makeup and hair that looked and sounded the same year after year, Oliver said. Instructors use the same examples, models, and teaching concepts, applicable only to the same kinds of – predominantly white – students.
Oliver wanted to create something different, inclusive of more skin tones and hair types, with expert tutorials on color theory, aging makeup, special effects makeup, and drag makeup and hair, and to make it available to not only her students at U-M, but learners worldwide.
“People are hungry for this kind of training. They just don’t know where to get it. So my goal was to build an online course where you could go to one place to get in-depth, high-level, and diverse training,” she said.
Available on Michigan Online and Coursera, the course attempts to help both performers and makeup artists fill in their knowledge gaps with techniques and instruction applicable to more complexions, gender identities, and backgrounds allowing performers to truly shine on stage and screen.
“We found that U-M alums recognized the importance of this project and the significance of what we were trying to do,” Oliver said. “They wanted to be part of making change in an industry badly in need of transformation.”
The course is a three-year passion project for Oliver. Her journey to create the course began shortly after accepting her position at U-M in 2020 and was born out of both necessity and opportunity.
Oliver accepted her U-M appointment on March 11. The next day, U-M announced it was shutting down campus and transitioning to remote instruction. That was an impossibility for someone charged with teaching makeup application — her first class would have been limited to five students. Even then, Oliver asked herself not only how she would teach in a pandemic but also whether she had any hope of scaling up to teach the 250-300 students in the theater program when in-person instruction resumed.
At the same time, there was a reckoning in the industry, and Oliver said she and her colleagues knew it was past time to meet the moment and rethink what and how stage makeup and hair were taught in schools across the U.S.
“It’s a pipeline problem. If we don’t address the problem by changing how we are instructing students, how are we going to see change in the industry?” Oliver said.
“Often, theater departments are small, and instructors wear a lot of hats. This course allows someone with more of a costume theater background, like me, to get a great understanding of how to appropriately apply, and also teach others how to apply, stage makeup and hair.”
It’s a lesson Oliver learned in her own career. She was hired to teach at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and realized she had no experience working with Asian hair.
“When I was hired, I had trained in hair for years. I walked in confidently. I went to prep everyone’s hair and couldn’t even put a pin curl in because I had never worked with anyone with the hair texture of the performers in that room. I was supposed to teach these students, and I was the least knowledgeable person in that room.”
She relied on late-night training sessions with a friend who worked at the Hong Kong Ballet to ensure she could get up to speed, but Oliver said she doesn’t want students or teachers to find themselves in that situation anymore.
“I have talked to so many students and so many people in my industry who have no access to training like this, even though they have the desire to learn. It is exciting to be able to point to this course and get this level of diversified training that touches on so many skin tones, so many techniques, and so many needs.”
The course features perspectives from several actors and teachers from the Detroit area who recount the struggles and negative experiences they have had.
Janai Lashon, a Black artist, discussed what it was like being forced to “become her own stylist” in a production which had no knowledge about how to treat her locs; this even had her considering cutting them off.
Kurt Sanchez Kanazawa, an Asian artist, reflects on the diversity of hairstyles in Asian culture and how few hair and makeup people truly understand how to style Asian hair.
While it’s been a long time in the making, Oliver said she is thrilled to finally see the course live and knows it will be hugely impactful once people find it.
“I have talked to so many students across this country who have no access to training like this. It is so exciting to now be able to point people to this opportunity.”
The University of Michigan Clements Library and the Ford School of Public Policy will dive into the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Pat Oliphant.
The Clements exhibit puts Oliphant’s cartoons in conversation with historic examples of political satire from America’s past, exploring the role that art plays in democratic culture. Within the display are caricatures of Richard Nixon, Bob Dole, Ross Perot and George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, among others, all on view through mid-December.
Pat Oliphant political cartoon of George H.W. BushPat Oliphant political cartoon of Jimmy CarterPat Oliphant political cartoon of “Dick Cheney leading George W. Bush”
Oliphant participated in annual residencies at U-M’s Wallace House Center for Journalists from 1990 to 2016 and sketched, covering the presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson through Barack Obama.
“Starting in the 1990s, Pat Oliphant did an annual week in residence at Wallace House for Journalists here at U-M,” said Paul Erickson, director of the Clements Library. “During that time, he created sketches of important figures from American political life. Those sketches inspired staff at the Clements to think about how visual satire works, what it can do, and what purpose it serves in our political culture.”
The Wallace House’s collection of Oliphant’s work is much larger than what is represented in the exhibit, requiring the curatorial team to make choices based on things like content, condition and size.
“We tried to select sketches of people that would be familiar to most visitors, and that would include people from across the political spectrum,” Erickson said. “All of them are men as many of the women leaders that Oliphant sketched were not from the U.S., which was outside of the scope of the exhibit.”
“The Last Ditch of the Chivalry, or a President in Petticoats,” lithograph (New York: Currier & Ives, 1865). William L. Clements Library.Edward Williams Clay, “Set-to between the champion old tip & the swell Dutchman of Kinderhook” (New York: H.R. Robinson, c. 1836). William L. Clements Library.
The Ford Library exhibit focuses specifically on its namesake, Gerald R. Ford, through Oliphant’s lens in observance of the 50th anniversary of Ford’s presidency.
The exhibit, on view at the library through the fall, features panels loaned to the school from the National Archives and Records Administration.
According to the National Archives, the exhibit “examines how Ford rose to the challenge of the office by exploring some of the difficult decisions that defined his administration and shaped his legacy, including granting clemency to draft dodgers, pardoning Richard Nixon, providing aid for Vietnamese refugees, responding to the Mayaguez crisis, managing Cold War relations with the Soviet Union, and refusing to bail out New York City.”
“An Ungentle Art: Pat Oliphant and the American Tradition of Political Satire” will be on view at the Clements Library through Dec. 13.
Wherefore art thou … Juliet? Ann Arbor, it turns out
Parting is not such sweet sorrow when another Wolverine is waiting in the wings. One who also graduated from the University of Michigan’s School of Music Theatre & Dance.
On stage is Lorna Courtney. After spending time as an understudy in “Dear Evan Hansen,” created by EGOT-winning U-M alums Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Courtney secured the titular role in the original cast of “& Juliet” shortly after her own graduation from U-M SMTD.
The Tony-award winning production claims to “flip the script on the greatest love story ever told” by asking what might have happened had Juliet’s life continued on after Romeo, revisiting pop anthems such as Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time.”
Beside Courtney since the show’s opening, her Romeo, Benjamin Walker. Yet another U-M SMTD alum.
And now, succeeding the original U-M Juliet, is another U-M Juliet: Maya Boyd.
Boyd had a less than typical senior year.
She made her Broadway debut while still enrolled at U-M in the 2023 revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” starring Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez, as Mimi from Paramount, and the understudy for Gussie Carnegie. The production, which won four of its seven Tony nominations including Best Revival of a Musical, served as “the world’s best masterclass” for Boyd.
Determined to complete her degree even after securing the lead role in “& Juliet,” she earned her diploma in the spring of 2024 as planned, while rehearsing each day at the Stephen Sondheim Theater.
“One thing that I experienced with my professors is that they are incredibly supportive,” Boyd said. “They worked with me to make school work in addition to the show. They were completely willing.
“They saw me for the kind of student that I am, and matched that. They saw that I love learning, and I can absorb a lot, so they weren’t shy about giving me something bigger to work on; they’re really about the growth, rather than rigid curriculum. I think because of that, I was also really able to learn at a fast rate and accomplish a lot.”
Walker echoes this sentiment. Learning to be adaptable and quickly get up to speed is an aspect of their training that sets them apart, he said.
“Our classwork helped us develop the skills as an actor to take a script, or look at a character, and bring yourself into it,” Walker said. “To analyze a script, prepare it, find your character both physically and intellectually, and then explore it through rehearsals.
Your workload is so much that it kind of mirrors the preparation that goes into auditioning constantly and rehearsing.”
The pair share a favorite scene in the show. A quiet moment between the two of them, sitting at the edge of the stage, contrasting with the loud, over-the-top energy of the rest of the show. They agree that it gives them a chance to connect, and that it differs slightly every night depending on where they are emotionally, requiring them to really check in and match each other.
The biggest contributor to this on-stage connection is trust.
“There is definitely a sense of, ‘Oh, I’m with Ben on stage. I know I can be present with Ben on stage.’ We are able to take things as they go, and just kind of listen to each other. And I think that, the big word that comes to my mind is just being super present and trust. I trust Ben with whatever is going to happen,” Boyd said.
Their greatest moments have come from the most earnest of places.
For Boyd, feeling the trust she received from her castmates and production team on “Merrily,” and truly feeling that she could now call herself an actor; a singer, was a meaningful turning point for her. The importance of representation for a younger generation of future Broadway performers is also a responsibility she does not take lightly.
And for Walker—who points out that while you are performing, you are working and very focused, and therefore not in a “pinch me” state of mind—those meaningful moments come from watching back the cast’s Tony performance from last year, or performing for young students whose aspirations matched his own as a child.
He had always been steadfast in his dream to perform. Originally from Delaware, but with close family from Michigan, auditioning for SMTD became an ideal option for the next step in his journey to a career in the performing arts.
For Boyd, as an Ann Arbor native, applying to the University of Michigan was always part of the plan. However, her path to the stage was historically through dance. A classically trained ballerina who danced pre-professionally with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Boyd decided to take a chance and stretch her abilities into acting and singing by auditioning for SMTD.
She surprised herself by getting accepted to the program, but took it as a sign of things to come.
“My mom said ‘you know you shouldn’t have gotten in, right?'” Boyd joked.
“I think because I had no expectations, it really just allowed me to be myself in a way that people always tell you to be, but can be really hard to do when you are placing a lot of pressure on yourself. I think because I didn’t have any of those expectations, I really did show up as myself and just had fun, because I ended up being accepted into the school.”
On May 12, 2024, as Lorna Courtney took her final bow, she gestured to the Wolverine in the wings.
“This is Maya—this is the next Juliet! I’m so proud to say that our next Juliet is someone who is also an alum of the University of Michigan, and who is also fearless … I can’t wait for her to find her voice, just like I have. To be confident. To roar!”
Using art to aid well-being with Take Care programming
The University of Michigan’s Arts Initiative, Wolverine Wellness and other campus partners have joined forces to center personal and community well-being in the 2024-25 academic year with a focus on the theme Take Care.
Take Care explores the power of art and art making to help people process the current moment: caring for oneself and others during challenging times; personal and community healing as a means of collective resilience; and how artistic expression can help create a world everyone wants to live in.
Take Care programs will include exhibitions, concerts, performances, workshops and more.
“This is such a fantastic opportunity to highlight the importance of both art and well-being in our daily lives,” said Mary Jo Desprez, director of health promotion and Wolverine Wellness.
“When someone engages in a creative practice, however small, they experience an immediate improvement in their overall well-being. Partnering with the Arts Initiative on this theme is a perfect fit for Wolverine Wellness’ work.”
Wolverine Wellness has long served as the health promotion hub for the Ann Arbor campus, offering wellness coaching, sessions with therapy dogs, free safer sex supplies and other wellness supplies, and many other programs and resources that focus on both the individual student and the community at large.
The Arts Initiative shares much of the same mission in its efforts to strengthen connection, community and equity through the arts. The launch of the Take Care theme recognizes that well-being may look and feel different for each person, much like artistic expression.
“More than 3,000 studies summarized by the World Health Organization show that the arts can contribute positively to mental health and well-being,” said Mark Clague, executive director of the Arts Initiative.
“I hope staff, faculty, and students alike will take some time out of the hectic fall semester to make and experience the arts and thus to Take Care of themselves, their friends and neighbors, our democracy, and our world. Challenging times make the arts even more important.”
Democracy through the arts at U-M
With students back on campus, the University of Michigan has ramped up its efforts to encourage them to vote in the 2024 presidential election.
From making a personal voting plan and getting registered to engaging conversations centered around democracy and caring for oneself during potentially stressful weeks surrounding the election, below are a handful of programs that address the broad spectrum of democratic participation.
Since 2018, the pair have been utilizing behavioral science insights and their own design strategies to build inviting spaces, experiences and materials that demystify the voting process, and increase student voting with the hope of creating lifelong voters. And it seems to be working.
At the last presidential election, aided by efforts of the CCVP and their UMICH Votes Coalition partners, nearly 90% of voting-eligible students registered to vote and 78% cast their ballot on election day.
Right now at the U-M Museum of Art, CCVP has activated the space with information about registration and how to learn about your ballot. The installation includes a giant U.S. map where students can put a pin in the location where they plan to vote, as well as digital resources to understand rules and deadlines for each state.
Working with Stamps student and illustrator Ria Ma (BFA ’25), CCVP designed a playful “Voter Style” personality quiz. From a Busy Bunny to a Party Puppy to a Hometown Hart, the quiz uses answers to lighthearted questions to generate a customized voter action plan with easy to follow steps.
A collection of Zines also available on-site, such as “Voting 101” and “I’m Registered, Now What?” offer key information in a conversational tone with illustrations by Victor Luis Garcia (BFA ’24).
The UMMA space will become an active satellite office of the Ann Arbor City Clerk, for registration and voting, beginning Sept. 24, and a secondary voting hub at the Duderstadt Center on North Campus will become operational starting Oct. 21.
Common Sense Diner
Hosted by UMMA’s Visiting Artist for Arts & Civic Engagement, Philippa Pham Hughes, individuals from both sides of the aisle are invited to break bread together and discuss “what it means to be an American right now.”
These free, intimate meals, taking place on Thursday evenings and Friday afternoons through Nov. 1, have no agenda of persuasion or pandering. The goal is simply to “ask questions and listen to each other.”
A meal will be served along with art and discussion prompts that allow participants to connect with fellow guests in surprising ways.
The Common Sense Diner is part of Hughes’ “Hey, We Need to Talk!” exhibit, open through Jan. 26, 2025, at UMMA, and is free and open to the public.
Take Care
The U-M Arts Initiative is taking a different approach to election season. Through “Take Care,” the initiative explores “how art can help communities to process the current moment: caring for oneself and others during challenging times, self and community-healing as a means of collective resilience, and how taking care and self-expression can help create a world we all want to live in.”
With a range of programming from workshops and discussions, performances and art making, and exhibits and exercise, finding ways to take care of yourself and others is the priority.
On Sept. 13, the initiative will gather the U-M community to share in music’s power to bring people together and cope through challenging times with its second annual Community Sing event at Ingalls Mall. The event is free and open to the public.
The monoracial fixation of America, despite its increasingly mixed-race identity
2020 U.S. Census showed 276% increase in individuals who identify as ‘two or more races’ since 2010
It’s been 57 years since the landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage in all 50 states. But recent news coverage of Kamala Harris seems to highlight an American fixation with being monoracial.
Harris is the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to be nominated for U.S. president.
“Trying to imply that (Harris) identifying with both sides of her family is somehow nefarious is nothing new for mixed-race people,” said Karen Downing, education librarian at the University of Michigan and scholar of critical mixed-race studies.
Her new U-M Library exhibition “Being Mixed Race in a Mono-racially Organized World” is open through December 2024.
“‘Monoracism’ can come from many directions and is an added layer to traditional racism,” said Downing, who identifies as mixed-race herself. “We move through the world being challenged a lot, and there is always pressure to choose one (identity) or the other.”
The U-M exhibition dives into the lived experiences of this growing demographic by utilizing research, university collections and news stories, she said.
“If you think about the period from 1967 (Loving v. Virginia) forward, it’s taken about two generations of folks to feel comfortable enough to have relationships that are interracial, and for the taboo that used to be in place to, in many ways, be ameliorated by more people dating and partnering interracially,” Downing said.
Citing a Pew study from 2017 that found 1 in 6 newlyweds are married to someone of a different race or ethnicity, Downing wanted to provide future generations of mixed-race students with resources that reflect their lives.
“We know that our schools, our community organizations, our universities, are going to be seeing this wave of mixed-race people in the not-very-distant future. We are already seeing it, but the numbers are increasing year over year,” she said.
“Making our resources and collections more visible, forming faculty relationships on campus to elevate these materials in courses that are already being taught, allowing established scholarly work to contribute to collective knowledge—this is the path forward.”
Mixed at Michigan
In 2023, the university was revisiting its DEI strategy and the 2020 census data had been freshly released. Downing said the time seemed right to move forward with this work.
She and her team of graduate and undergraduate students from the Library Engagement Fellow program worked with the U-M student organization Mixed at Michigan to learn about what would help mixed-race students feel welcome and included on campus.
“What we heard from students was that they feel a silence on these issues,” Downing said. “They feel a sense of not being included; that their identity is not reflected in courses and co-curricular things. They don’t always feel there is a space for these kinds of conversations.”
After presenting the findings to U-M’s chief diversity officer, the heads of HR and various department chairs, Downing received funding to research and program the exhibition. “Being Mixed Race in a Mono-racially Organized World” is the largest presentation on the mixed-race experience that Downing has curated, and the first to occupy a physical space. Her previous two exhibitions were digital-only.
A deep dive of existing library collections turned out scholarly and popular resources, newsletters from mixed-race communities, parenting and children’s books on healthy identity development and more.
The team worked for months to represent the data via colorful U.S. and world maps, along with a detailed timeline of key dates in mixed-race history from the 1800s to the present. They also showcased quotes from existing interviews with public figures who identify as mixed-race, including Harris, Barack Obama, Lenny Kravitz, Shakira, Bruno Mars, Keegan Michael Key and others.
The researchers encourage U-M faculty to visit the exhibition with their students, and to incorporate the materials into their syllabi.
“Ultimately I’d love it if we could get to a point where the way that people identify is what we accept,” Downing said. “We shouldn’t be putting identity onto people; we shouldn’t be making assumptions about people. And I know that we are a long way from that at this point, but people like Kamala Harris are really opening a lot of people’s eyes to the fact that there is nothing wrong with—and, in fact, there are many wonderful things about—having multiple cultural traditions to draw from.”
U-M alum handpicked by Scarlett Johansson for role in the film ‘Fly Me to the Moon’
For University of Michigan alum Anna Garcia, her starpower is fueled by improv. That, and her natural humor and endearing theatricality: “My biggest note I’ve gotten over the years is, ‘Can you do less?'” she joked.
As a performer with the Midnight Book Club improv troupe at U-M to improvising with L.A.’s sketch comedy group Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB), Garcia learned to listen and react, two of the most critical skills required of an actor. And after honing those talents in commercials and small parts in TV series, Garcia rode her rising star to the silver screen this summer in Columbia Pictures’ “Fly Me to the Moon.”
The movie, set in 1969, marks the actress’ major motion picture debut. She plays Ruby Martin, the plucky right hand to Scarlett Johansson’s Kelly Jones, a marketing executive hired to promote NASA and the Apollo 11 moon landing. The film opened in theaters nationwide July 12 and also features Channing Tatum, Woody Harrelson and Ray Romano. Greg Berlanti directed.
“In the moment, when I was finding out (I got the part), I almost threw up,” Garcia said. “I, like, swerved off the road, nearly crashed my car, and was just sobbing over the phone with my agent and manager. Then I FaceTimed every single person in my life to tell them about it.”
New York, New York, 7/8/24 – Anna Garcia attends the World Premiere of “FLY ME To The Moon”
-PICTURED: Anna Garcia
-PHOTO Marion Curtis / Starpix for Sony Pictures
-Location: AMC Lincoln Square
The road to the moon
As a U-M student, Garcia majored in screen arts & cultures as well as performing arts management. After joining the improv troupe her freshman year, she was inspired by more senior members to study film, which she did, in addition to writing and directing. Acting in friends’ pilots and short films throughout college, she realized how much she loved being on camera. The on-set exposure opened her to new styles of acting and performance, expanding her professional options when she graduated in 2017.
“In the film and theater world, people kind of split between New York and L.A.,” she said. “I had been dead-set on New York my whole life, but senior year of college one of my best friends had decided she was moving to L.A. and invited me to live with her, and I was like, ‘Oh! OK!’ It was a total last-minute decision.”
But she was ready.
“I did commercials in Michigan every now and then when I was a kid,” said Garcia. And as a 2013 graduate of Groves High School in Beverly Hills, Mich., she already was eligible for membership in the Screen Actors Guild.
“It was a huge leg up in the industry because I could sign with a commercial agent right away.”
Commercials provided a steady stream of income as the artist auditioned and built relationships in Hollywood. Within just a few months, she booked a national Duracell commercial.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, acting is actually easy! I can just book everything I audition for. I know exactly what I’m doing!’ Huge false impression,” she admitted. “I booked that commercial and then it was over two years of nothing.”
Garcia was at an aggravating standstill, not knowing how to access performance opportunities beyond commercials.
“Here’s the thing. Nepo babies are so cool, but I am the exact opposite of that,” she said. “My dad worked in automotive, my mom worked in education, so I really moved to L.A. like, ‘Hello? Help? Anyone?'”
Nepo alumni
The roadblocks began to fall away once Garcia leaned on a good friend who’d studied at the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and had found success in writing and acting. Garcia’s Michigan friend also worked as a tour guide at Universal Studios and introduced her to a showcase opportunity the studio held for new talent.
“The Michigan Mafia is large! There are so many U-M people who work in the industry,” Garcia said. “So if you’re not a nepo baby, maybe go to Michigan and you’ll have some connections that way.”
She participated in the Universal showcase, signed with a small-time agent, and by 2019, was auditioning for film and TV parts. Thanks to small roles on shows like “Hacks,” “Superstore” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” she began learning the business of the on-screen performance world.
Committed to her roots in improv, Garcia also completed classes at UCB, following in the footsteps of such comedians as Aziz Ansari, Ed Helms, Aubrey Plaza and Kate McKinnon. She’d caught some momentum and was performing with a team regularly in 2019.
Then the pandemic hit.
Time for a rewrite
As the nation locked down, Garcia turned to producing TikTok videos out of “pure boredom and necessity.” She developed a large enough audience (currently some 221.3K followers) to attract the attention of Sam Reich, the CEO of Dropout, formerly CollegeHumor. The comedic streaming platform featured many improv-based shows, allowing Garcia to flex her creativity and display her talent.
In 2022, she secured a coveted spot in the prestigious CBS Showcase. Recognized by many as the industry leader in actor showcases designed to spotlight up-and-coming talent, Garia was one of 12 actors selected from a nationwide search.
Those selected are given the opportunity to develop characters unique to their comedic voice. They gain on-set experience and attend workshops, write and create new work, and receive mentorship to advance their careers.
“A lot of things happened at once from there. I got a new manager because I had some credibility now with the TikTok videos, and a few TV roles under my belt, and then the showcase happened in 2022, and since then it has really been full steam ahead,” she said. “About nine months later, I got the audition for this movie—it was called ‘Project Artemis’ at the time.”
Ms. Johansson on the line
Garcia recalls the arduous audition process lasting months. She engaged in several readings, call backs and director sessions. It finally paid off when she secured the role as the ever-present assistant to Johannson’s character.
“It wasn’t until I was on set with Scarlett the second-to-last day of shooting that she was like, ‘Do you know how you booked this?'”
Johannson told Garcia that Ruby was the last role to cast, but the team was at a loss having exhausted every option. They decided to revisit the tapes sent by the casting office, hoping to discover an overlooked gem. That’s when Johansson, one of the film’s producers, found Garcia’s tape and became the actress’ most ardent advocate.
“Scarlett later told me that she wanted to call me and tell me personally that I got the part, but the studio said it was customary for the representation to do it. I was like, ‘I actually would have crashed my car if that happened.'”
Garcia describes Johannson as “just so talented and so cool,” a fact that was apparent in their first chemistry read together.
“Her talent was just undeniable. Within two minutes I felt I had already learned more about acting than any other experience in my life.”
Being at the table reading as a “full player” in the setting was one of many “pinch me” moments for Garcia.
“Oh, I’ve loved Ray Romano forever, and now he’s two feet away from me and we are making each other laugh,” she said.
“Everything really came together to create a totally fulfilling life as a performer.”
Yes, and …
Garcia credits her U-M improv experience as the foundation of her acting career. The connections she made at Michigan taught her to stay present and listen.
“It is so cliché to say it, but acting is reacting, and improv is all reacting, so it was my fundamental training,” she noted. “Getting to be on that improv team with my best friends and just play together for four years straight felt like the best training possible because you get to have fun in performing. You learn to listen and care what people are saying, which is also fundamental to acting.”
She discovered along the way that commercial directors enjoy casting improvisers. She often found herself riffing through an entire commercial, or parts of it, as a jumping-off point on set.
Even in her chemistry read for “Fly Me to the Moon,” Garcia sensed the importance of improvising and showing the casting team what she was capable of. Director Berlanti welcomed the cast’s input, she said.
“He respects the performer so much, and knows our capabilities and talents, and encouraged us to improvise where possible,” she said. “A lot of the stuff we added made it into the movie.”
As for what comes next? Garcia has a show coming out next year (which is not yet announced), and she continues to audition and contribute to Dropout.
Book Arts: A highlight at Ann Arbor Art Fair
The University of Michigan Libraries, in collaboration with the U-M Arts Initiative, are bringing book arts into focus at this year’s Ann Arbor Art Fair with Art + Science.
Visitors to the fair will have the opportunity to create their own local flora-inspired prints using two historically important book art methods: cyanotype and woodblock printing.
“We have a large collection of wooden and metal blocks with pictorial illustrations that would have been used alongside text in letterpress printing. Everything from a sort of vintage version of clip art for newspapers or newsletters to diagrams of teeth used by dentist’s offices,” said senior associate librarian Jamie Lausch Vander Broek.
“In addition to this more mass produced material, we have some original, hand-carved wood engravings that were used to create cards, fine press books and beautiful endpapers; many of these are by an artist named John DePol.”
The Ann Arbor Art Fair is an annual three-day juried art fair in downtown Ann Arbor spanning 30 city blocks, including parts of the U-M campus. Each year, nearly a half million visitors shop the creations of roughly 1,000 artists, with special events like Art + Science, and community participation throughout.
For this Art Fair collaboration, Vander Broek and the Arts Initiative worked alongside Josey Hanish, a Ph.D. candidate in engineering and U-M Library Book Arts Studio student assistant, to create facsimiles of two of DePol’s botanical illustrations.
In an effort to reduce wear and tear on the original woodblock pieces, they followed a process very similar to the historical one using magnesium letterpress printing plates mounted on wood for a more durable woodblock press of two prints from “California flora,” a book in the library’s collection which features DePol’s artwork.
“Creating multiples of not only the printed work, but also the printing objects themselves is a big part of the history of printing and book production,” Vander Broek said. “People think Gutenberg invented the printing press, but he actually invented a casting system for making multiples of the tiny pieces of metal type. Being able to quickly make many copies of the letterforms greatly increased the efficiency of the process.”
In addition to woodblock printing, visitors can also create cyanotypes of Michigan plants using illustrations by Mary Vaux Walcott from the library’s collection.
Cyanotype is a technique which involves layering objects on paper pre-coated with a solution of iron salts and using sunlight to develop the one-of-a-kind image. The final product is a blue and white print of the objects pressed to the page.
“One of the areas of special focus for the Arts Initiative has been science and art; many STEM-field students have identities beyond what they study toward their major requirements and are very creative with strong arts backgrounds,” said Alison Rivett, associate director of the Arts Initiative. “Creative expression is a vital part of being human and we want to help accommodate everyone who has the desire to tap their creative side.”
Highlighting a medium based on a scientific process, like cyanotypes, delivers on the Initiative’s mission of infusing the arts interdisciplinarily.
These forms of artistry, and others, are in practice every day at the U-M Library’s Book Arts Studio where students, faculty, staff and the community can interact with library collections and materials to make new works of art.
“Now that we’re at a point of not even needing to print something out to read it, or to quickly digitally produce printed books on demand, there’s a resurgence in interest in the slower historical processes that led to the current moment,” Vander Broek said. “Understanding how these things work by using our hands is what we do at the Book Arts Studio every day.”
Art + Science is free and open to the public during the Ann Arbor Art Fair, July 18-20, located off Liberty Street between Fifth Avenue and Division Street.
UMich Prison Creative Arts Project presents final performance of “With Love, From Inside”
More than 30 people gathered inside the Matrix Theatre in Detroit to watch the Dropped Keys Theatre Company perform an original play titled “With Love, From Inside” Friday evening. The performance was the closing night of the company’s 10-show tour, which performed at venues across Southeast and Central Michigan.
Founded by University of Michigan students from the U-M Prison Creative Arts Project, the Dropped Keys Theatre Company aimed to tell the stories of incarcerated people through theater. Over the past nine months, students visited and worked with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated creative artists from Southeast Michigan to find ways to bring their stories to life through performance.
In a post-show conversation with the audience, Ashley Lucas, professor of theatre and drama, whose students put on the show, said the play came from the desire to provide an outlet for incarcerated people to share their stories beyond prison walls.
“We have great ways at PCAP to bring out the writing and the visual art but we’ve not had a good way to bring performance (to an audience), but the folks inside (prison) are performing as part of the workshops that we do every semester,” Lucas said. “(Incarcerated people) do incredible things that we can’t show to anybody because we can’t film them and we can’t bring you in and we can’t bring them out … This play is our attempt to make them present out here in the world that they cannot enter right now.”
The show focused on a fictional character created by Cozine Welch, a prison reform activist and poet who was formerly incarcerated. Played by U-M alum Sarah Oguntomilade, the character communicated through letters with her incarcerated mother of 35 years. Each letter contained a maxim which was acted out by the ensemble of students and alumni. Each story was reflective of those the students had been told by incarcerated people they visited.
Recent U-M alum Nathan Goldberg said the process of developing the script involved collaboration with people incarcerated at Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson, MI, who provided pieces of advice about life they wanted to share.
“(One inmate) brought out a bunch of these maxims, which became the letters throughout the show and the central mechanism of the show,” Goldberg said. “She went to a bunch of people around Cotton and (asked), is there any advice or anything that you would like to bring out into the world?”
In addition to incarcerated people’s letters and stories, Mary Heinen McPherson, the co-founder of PCAP and a formerly incarcerated person, recounted her lived experiences with the prison system, including poor health care, toxic living conditions and the lack of reentry resources upon her release. During the post-show talk, McPherson told the audience she founded PCAP and worked on the production because she felt the arts were a significant form of expression and resistance.
“When I first started this work 34 years ago, (the public) thought that art in prison is things like drawing little butterflies on envelopes or taking popsicle sticks and making little houses,” McPherson said. “It wasn’t understood that art is a vehicle for change … Art is revolutionary.”
