When Jeremy Geffen joined Cal Performances as executive and artistic director in April 2019, he had an idea about what his first season with UC Berkeley’s performing arts presenter — the largest in Northern California — would be like.

“It’s Never Too Late” is a new series that tells the stories of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.

One day a couple years back, the woman who has long cleaned Russ Ellis’s house in Berkeley, Calif., showed up with a new helper. Mr. Ellis did not think to ask her name.

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For 50 years, the Pacific Film Archive has screened everything from French New Wave favorites to activist documentaries.

When Yuriria Avila, who graduated from Berkeley Journalism in May 2021, saw Carmen Monoxide perform last year in Love for the Arts, a competition created by one of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars winners, Avila couldn’t believe she hadn’t heard of the drag performer until then.

Growing up in Norfolk, Nebraska, there weren’t a lot of people of color. Often the main interactions people had with communities of color were through stereotypes they saw in media and entertainment.

Kim Nalley graduated in May 2021 with a Ph.D. in history. In her dissertation, “G.I. Jazz,” she looks at African Americans as jazz artists, as well as occupiers, in post-World War II Germany.

In the second part of a three-part series, playwright and UC Berkeley professor Philip Kan Gotanda discusses how he began to write music during the emerging Asian American movement, which began at Berkeley in the late 1960s.

San Francisco performing arts theater The Marsh is debuting a new streaming performance series titled The Art Songs of Black Composers.  

Anna Sharpe has never done something because it was easy. Quite the opposite. If it’s hard — if it’ll take all she’s got, if it’ll leave her in pieces, she’s interested. Because it shows that it means something. That it matters.