Position overview
Position title: Assistant Teaching Professor of Sound and Media Art
Salary range: Commensurate with qualifications and experience; A reasonable estimate for the annual salary (academic year, nine-month basis) of this position is $89,400 to $116,500.
Percent time: Full-time (100%)
Anticipated start: July 1, 2027, with the academic year beginning in September 2027. Degree requirements must be met by June 30, 2027 for employment effective July 1, 2027.
Application Window
Open date: June 29, 2026
Next review date: Monday, Oct 12, 2026 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Apply by this date to ensure full consideration by the committee.
Final date: Wednesday, Jun 30, 2027 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled.
Position Description
The Music Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz invites applications for an appointment as Assistant Teaching Professor of Sound and Media Arts from artist-educators whose practice engages creative coding, sound, and media arts through ethical and critical approaches to technology, and who demonstrate a deep commitment to pedagogical excellence.
The successful candidate would join the faculty of the Music Department as an Assistant Teaching Professor, and would join the core faculty of UCSC’s Creative Technologies program, a multi-departmental, online undergraduate major whose faculty are dedicated to advanced, innovative web-based arts and design pedagogy, and a curriculum that cultivates imagination, justice, and empowered community in digital contexts.
The UCSC Music Department and the Creative Technologies program seek an Assistant Teaching Professor of Sound and Media Arts who will teach courses and mentor students in creative coding, sound studies, and media arts practice including sound art or electronic music. Additional teaching areas may include: generative and algorithmic approaches to design and media; physical computing; interactive, participatory, and/or performance-based digital media; music composition; ethical and critical approaches to emerging technologies in contemporary art; and other courses according to the selected candidate's areas of expertise.
The position is situated within a creative community whose practice is grounded in questions of justice, equity, and social engagement–and in which these are not peripheral concerns but central to how we make, teach, and think about art and technology.
The successful candidate must have practical proficiencies in one or more technologies from each of the following categories: digital audio workstations (e.g., Reaper, Logic, Live, ProTools), real-time multimedia production (e.g., Max/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data, SuperCollider, Orca), and creative coding environments (e.g., Processing, p5.js, openFrameworks). Note that the category examples are not exhaustive and may include other open-source and/or custom applications.
Along with the aforementioned software proficiencies, the successful candidate must have working expertise in one or more programming languages, with preference for those that have relevant application to creative coding, media arts, real-time performance, and sound design/music (e.g., JavaScript, Python, C#).
Areas of specialization may include, but are not limited to:
- Accessibility-focused and disability-justice-focused media practices, including universal and anti-ableist design
- Critical and historical approaches to sound and listening
- Spatial audio and immersive media
- Socially engaged and community-centered practice
- Ethical and critical approaches to machine learning and artificial intelligence
- Game art and interactive media platforms
The primary responsibilities for Teaching Professors are (1) teaching; (2) professional and/or scholarly achievement and activity, including creative activity, especially as such activities relate to instruction and pedagogy, with impact beyond one’s own classroom; and (3) University and public service. The ideal candidate will have significant experience teaching in online and remote-access environments, and facility with hybrid and web-based pedagogical tools.
We welcome applicants who define their creative work broadly and inclusively, across or transcending traditional disciplinary, genre, or media categories, and who have significant experience in modes of production that center collaborative approaches and/or challenge conventional notions of authorship and audience. We value candidates who bring an ethos that foregrounds approaches and methods over specific tools, and who demonstrate familiarity, adaptability, and critical perspectives, toward both proprietary software practices and FLOSS (Free/Libre Open-Source Software) practices–including personal and community-developed software.
We welcome and encourage national and international applicants working in any of a wide range of creative practices, including one or more of the general areas described above, but not limited to them.
The Music Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz is a community that attracts students who improvise, compose, experiment, and explore collaborative creative goals, all with a sense of freedom to cross traditional silos of genre and scholarship. The department is led by a multidisciplinary faculty of musicians, musicologists, technologists, anthropologists, and composers, including specialists in performance, African American and Global African musical traditions, experimental music, Hindustani musics, Central Asian musics, traditional and contemporary Korean musics, popular culture, Mexican folk music and Chicano music, aural diversity, Hip-Hop, and communal music practices. We offer undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees, including a scholarship-focused PhD and a composition-focused Doctorate of Musical Arts; we host, annually, the internationally recognized April in Santa Cruz Festival of Creative Music, and, periodically, the Pacific Rim Music Festival.
The UCSC Creative Technologies program—the first online major program in the University of California system— features a multi-departmental curriculum, teaching creative work and its contexts, across disciplines and departments, emphasizing digital environments as a nurturing nexus for justice, community, and imagination. Its faculty specialize in experimental media, critical games scholarship, digital design, collaborative practices, media history, and the study of voice, sound, and speech. This online program allows UCSC Arts students to transcend departments and genres, transcend the physical space of its campus, and bridge geographically and economically remote communities. The UCSC Music Department is joined by the Art Department and the Department of Performance, Play, and Design, as well as faculty from other Arts Division Programs, in supporting the Creative Technologies major.
UC Santa Cruz is a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI) with a high proportion of first-generation and low-income students. We welcome candidates who understand the historical barriers that exist in higher education and who can clearly articulate how their teaching, mentoring, creative/professional activity, and service contribute towards building a just scholarly community.
The Assistant Teaching Professor title confers the rights and responsibilities of membership in the UCSC and UC Academic Senates. Appointees to this title are eligible for promotion to Associate Teaching Professor, which is analogous to tenure. The Associate Teaching Professor and Teaching Professor titles confer the rights and responsibilities of membership in the UCSC and UC Academic Senates, and appointees to these titles have security of employment which is analogous to tenure.
Qualifications
Basic qualifications (required at the time the application is submitted)
The following basic qualifications must be demonstrated in the application in order for the applicant to be eligible for consideration for the position.
- M.A., M.M., M.F.A. or higher (or equivalent foreign degree) in sound studies; music composition, music theory/perception/cognition, or musicology, or a closely related field; media arts; media studies; computational approaches to media; or education with a specialization in one or more of the aforementioned areas. It is expected that the degree requirement will be fulfilled by June 30, 2027.
- A record of teaching at the college or university level.
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