Crown College Core Course Faculty
Lisa Berkley
lberkley@ucsc.edu
With more than 30 years teaching, meditation, well-being, and holistic healthcare, and working in human rights, equity and social justice, Dr. Lisa Berkley’s life’s work is dedicated to how we thrive, as individuals and society. She is the Founder and President of the Institute for Inner Economy, a non-partisan think tank dedicated to operationalizing positive peace and establishing healthy governance at the local, national, and international level. At UCSC, in addition to teaching Core, Lisa Berkley has developed a resilience program and co-founded the Center for Applied Ethics in Advancing Technologies (CAVEAT)
Dr. Berkley holds a B.A. in Environmental Science and Economics, an M.A. in International Policy, focusing on Counterterrorism and Transitional Justice, and both an M.A. and PhD in Leadership and Change. She is the co-author of the book chapter “Female Leadership for Peace and Human Security: A Case Study of Israel/Palestine,” which can be found in Women and Leadership Around the World, Vol. III (Information Age Publishing, 2015). She is currently co-editing the forthcoming book: Leadership at the Spiritual Edge: Emerging and Non-Western Concepts of Leadership and Spirituality (Routledge, 2024).
Lisa resides in Marina, California where she is a former elected official.
Dion Farquhar
Dion has a distinguished teaching record across UCSC including Crown, Porter, and Cowell Colleges and the Politics, Feminist Studies, and Literature Departments. Rooted in the tradition of Marxist and Feminist Theory, she has extensive knowledge of science fiction and of the literature on emerging technologies as well as being an accomplished poet. She has a strong, leading role in the innovation and development of Crown’s College 1 course.
Tim Fitzmaurice
Tim has been a lecturer in Writing at UCSC since 1983. He is a fellow of Crown College. He is a poet and dramatic writer as well as an essayist. From 1998 to 2006 he served on the Santa Cruz City Council, and as Mayor of Santa Cruz in 2000-2001. He currently teaches Ethics and Technology in the Crown College Core Course, and political/social justice issues, related to mass incarceration, in other core courses. For three years, he has taught Creative Writing at Salinas Valley State Prison, near Soledad, CA. Tim holds a B.A. in English from San Jose State University and his M.A. in Comparative Literature from UCSC.
Linda Glenn
JD, LLM, Linda is an ethicist, futurist, educator and attorney-at-law with over 30 years of experience in private and public sectors across multiple industries including exponential technology, healthcare, government, education, business ethics and futures forecasting. She is an keynote speaker, writer, seminar developer/presenter, with a large body of published work in peer-reviewed journals. She is currently serving as a lecturer and the Founding Director of the Institute for Applied Ethics and Emerging Technologies at Crown College, University of California Santa Cruz. She also holds faculty appointments at California State University Monterey Bay, and the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical Center; she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and their rescue dogs.
Carolina Gonzalez Riano
Carolina is a performer, theater director, producer, and educator. Her research of interest includes the relationship between theater and armed conflicts, politics, women in playwright, and social justice. She is a co-founder of RET – Red de escuelas de teatro in Colombia, an active member of ITI – UNESCO.
She has performed and directed with various companies, including notable plays by Aesquilous, Moliere, Bertolt Brecht, and Carlo Goldoni. Being a part of the company Teatro Libre, toured as part of various festivals: Festival Cervantino de Guanajuato, Mexico; Festivals de Teatro Clásico de Chinchilla; Festival de Teatro Clásico de Almagro, Spain; Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá. Carolina is a lecturer at Crown College, teaching the Crown’s College 1 course since 2020. Currently, she is working in partnership with Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas in Bogotá, Colombia, teaching a version of the Global Classroom of Crown 1 course. Carolina holds a B.A. in Performing Arts from Universidad Central and a M.A. in Theater Arts from UCSC.
Kati Greaney
kgreaney@ucsc.edu
Kati Greaney came to UC Santa Cruz from St. Louis, MO as an undergraduate in the Community Studies department and then returned as a graduate student in the Social Documentation program. Her interest and passion for humanity and storytelling led her to work as a photographer and documentary filmmaker
on projects across the US, throughout Southern India, Cuba and Brazil. She is currently teaching the college one course at Crown College and John R Lewis College, in addition to courses in Digital
Storytelling and Entrepreneurship.
Amrit Kaur
In addition to her work as social documentarist, Amrit has served as a project coordinator, community educator, and program manager for multiple creative, social impact-oriented organizations. This includes her work as outreach and communications chair for Satrang SoCal, the only volunteer-led South Asian LGBTQ+ non-profit in SoCal, and her involvement with the Transveer Film Fund, an organization that hosts an annual film festival and offers funding opportunities for South Asian Artists.
At Satrang, Amrit initially took charge of social media email list services. She them rose to the position of board member and established collaborations with her Gurdwara (Sikh Temple) in the San Fernando Valley and with Sikhs of LA (a nonprofit in Los Angeles). These actions resulted in an exponential growth of Satrang’s member base and in the publication by Sikhs of LA of online resources for immigrant South Asians.
Amrit completed her BA is psychology, with a minor in queer studies at Cal State University Northridge and she has just completed her MFA in social documentation with a designated emphasis in critical race theory and feminist studies at UCSC.
Nada Miljkovic
Nada, an artist educator, excels in digital media creation while imparting critical thinking, leadership, and entrepreneurship skills. Serving as a lecturer at Crown College since 2015, she’s crafted and delivered courses like Business Assistance, Eco-Entrepreneurship, Social & Creative Entrepreneurship, Startup Entrepreneurship Academy, and Podcasting and Digital Storytelling. Her commitment extends to teaching Ethics and Technology in the Crown
College Core Course and managing the Center for Innovation in Entrepreneurial Development, where she fosters innovation and entrepreneurial growth.
Additionally, Nada wears multiple hats as the CEO and co-founder of GetVirtual, which offers students practical experience in digitizing businesses. She presides over the boards of United Services Agency and E.A.R.T.H Lab SF, organizes TEDxSantaCruz events, and hosts a community radio show. Nada’s scholarly pursuits involve pursuing a Ph.D. in Digital Arts at the University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. She boasts a diverse academic background, holding a BS in Construction Management, a BA in Philosophy from Purdue University, and a Masters in Fine Arts in Digital Arts and New Media from the UCSC. A Santa Cruz resident, Nada resides with her family.
Marilyn Patton
Marilyn loves teaching at Crown College because of the supportive Provost and staff and the wonderful students!! Her doctoral work was on cannibalism in literature, focusing mostly on the writings of Melville and Atwood. Her published articles include work on Moby-Dick, and two pieces on Atwood’s novels. Her most recent publication is a chapter in a book on Latinx Literature, on teaching the plays of El Teatro Campesino. Her reading interests include Asian and Asian-American writing, science fiction, the origins of the universe, mythology and folklore, and theater. She earned her B.A. in English at Stanford University and her Ph.D. at UC Santa Cruz. She taught Literature and the Arts at Stanford, American Studies at UCSC, and both writing and literature in Silicon Valley. In this disenchanted world, where do we look for magic?
Livia Perez
Dr. Livia Perez (she/her/ela) is a Brazilian educator, media scholar and filmmaker. Her moving-image practice and research span non-fiction media, Latinx, feminist and queer media history, visual memory, diasporic media history, transnational film, an multimedia. The films she directed and produced have been screened at Sundance, Locarno, Havana, IDFA, Frameline, Havana, It’s All True and Hot Docs. She is member of the Red de investigación del Audiovisual hecho por Mujeres en América Latina, or RAMA, the research network on audiovisual creation by women in Latin America and member of the Brazilian Filmmakers Collective (BRFC). She received an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. from the University of Sao Paulo.
Jeanne Proust
Jeanne Proust has studied Humanities, Philosophy and Visual Arts in Bordeaux, Berlin, and Paris. She has been teaching Philosophy for the last 13 years in the US. Her PhD dissertation (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) focused on the pathologies of the willpower, both in philosophical and psychological perspectives, but her interests are wide: among many fields, she does research in Ethics, Philosophy of Technologies, Bioethics, Feminist theory, and Aesthetics. While teaching at different universities in New York, Jeanne is advocating for a widening of philosophical education beyond the Academia frontiers by participating in different events open to the general public. She taught at Rikers Island as a volunteer, and regularly gives public talks in philosophy, leading her to recently produce her own podcast, “Can You Phil It?”. She also collaborates with artists on her photography, drawing and painting works. Jeanne holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Humboldt Universität. She also has a B.A. Fine Arts, Art History and M.A. in Philosophy from Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III. She attained her Ph.D in Philosophy from Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris I.
Jeanne moved to Santa Cruz a year ago, to teach as a philosophy lecturer for UCSC and get involved with the Center for Public Philosophy (UC Santa Cruz). She is now the interim Acting Director of the Center.
