It will be a weekend of stellar athletic competition this weekend in Montecito as Westmont hosts the Golden State Athletic Conference Track and Field Championship and the opening round of the NAIA Men’s Soccer National Championships. No. 15 Westmont men’s soccer, fresh off a GSAC Tournament Championship in Arizona, will play No. 18 Corban (Ore.) […]

Veteran journalist and author Robert Whiting is one of only a few Western writers to have written a regular newspaper column in the Japanese language. The author of several highly successful books on Japan and the city where he has lived on and off for more than half a century include the best-selling You Gotta […]

The list of endeavors Montecito filmmaker Niki Byrne took on before she was out of her mid-20s would put most of us older adults to shame with the breadth and variety of her adventures: soccer player, race car driver, advertising copywriter, helicopter pilot, vegetable chopper for a Top Chef winner, photographer, painter (her portrait of […]

Despite the pandemic, the film festival is continuing its recent tradition of giving over the prestigious closing night slot to selected short documentaries shot by Santa Barbara filmmakers. We caught up with two of the locals who have contributed frequently to the fest’s film lineup. First up is Casey McGarry, who tackled roller skating old […]

Since its founding in 1948, the Santa Barbara Choral Society has never missed a performance. Despite wildfires and mudslides, the show always goes on. And even during the worldwide pandemic, veteran director JoAnne Wasserman, who has conducted the talented singers for 28 years, was determined to carry on the tradition with a virtual concert at […]

Prolific Santa Barbara-based children’s book author/illustrator Bruce Hale, whose 60-plus books include the Clark the Shark and the award-winning Chet Gecko mysteries series, kicks off four straight afternoons of conversations with writers about their new books hosted by Chaucer’s. The Edgar-nominated Hale, whose books also include Snoring Beauty, one of Oprah’s Recommended Reads for Kids, […]

Perhaps ironically, it’s SBCC – which has been largely shut down during the pandemic, thus allowing SBIFF to create its makeshift drive-ins down by the beach in the college’s parking lots – whose Theatre Arts Department has compiled stories written by the SBCC community, including students, staff and faculty, to create three separate performances of […]

Westmont Music kicked off its spring student showcase series with a pandemic-proof performance of Gabriel Fauré’s sublime “Requiem” in its annual Masterworks Concert. Westmont found a new space for its spring reading of the piece, with the widely spaced singers vocalizing from the bleachers high above the orchestra located on the track at the college’s […]

UCSB Art & Lectures announced its new season of virtual events for the spring quarter – perhaps the last one necessitating such exclusively online programming before the pandemic releases its grip. The slate gets underway on April 10 with an old friend of A&L in Jane Goodall, the British primatologist, anthropologist, ethologist, and UN Messenger […]

In a COVID coincidence, the second weekend of the school’s zany take on Greek myth cozies up to a more serious – and perhaps even more ambitious – approach to some of the same material in the Ensemble Theatre Company’s live stream of the one-man show, An Iliad. The work is crafted around the stories […]