The Center for Documentary Arts and Research (CDAR) at UC Santa Cruz supports interdisciplinary explorations of the documentary and non-fiction arts, broadly conceived: it serves as a locus for experimentation and investigation of the social, aesthetic, historical, political and pedagogical capacities of documentary and nonfiction film and media forms and practices.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, is home to an extraordinary group of researchers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences – artists and filmmakers; historians, theorists, and critics – whose work is vital to the practice and analysis of documentary media in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to staging screenings, talks, and symposia on new and historical work in documentary media for publics from the UCSC campus, CDAR fosters exhibition, discussion, investigation and collaboration in areas of documentary and non-fiction media history, theory, and practice that bridge departmentally- or divisionally-discrete teaching and research, within and between university campuses, and between academic settings of documentary research and the broader public sphere.