ASK HIM TO REFLECT on the moment and Andy Jurgensen ’04 describes it as “an out-of-body experience.” Who wouldn’t? Not many people hear their name at the end of this sentence: “And the Oscar goes to …”

But Jurgensen has. The UC Santa Barbara film and media studies grad earned the entertainment industry’s most coveted statuette as winner of the 2026 Academy Award for Best Film Editing for Best Picture winner, “One Battle After Another.”

“First just hearing my name called, then all the cameras turning to me and following me up on stage — it was surreal,” he says. “But it was exhilarating.”

It was only his second film as lead editor, but Jurgensen had been building toward it for years, honing his skills in assistant roles and refining an editorial sensibility shaped first more by theory than by technique. Multiple collaborations with director Paul Thomas Anderson — “One Battle” was their fourth film together — helped to sharpen his sense of rhythm and narrative structure. The foundation for it all, Jurgensen says, came courtesy of UCSB, where the primary focus isn’t on how to frame a shot but how to think about one.

That distinction sits at the heart of the university’s Department of Film and Media Studies, which has quietly produced an outsized number of industry success stories. In an ever-shifting media landscape that stretches far beyond Hollywood soundstages into a diffuse network of streaming platforms, global audiences and emerging technologies, the department stays true to its guiding premise: that intellectual agility matters as much as technical fluency. Film and media students get training in both at UCSB, where they’re taught to ask and articulate why a story works, or not, before they learn how to shape it into a show. When they do finally step foot onto a set or into a writers’ room, they come packing a unique and valuable toolkit.

“Our students are incredibly successful because of how much we really hammer the history and the theoretical and critical foundations of film and media education into what they’re doing,” says department chair Jennifer Holt, who specializes in media and policy and digital media infrastructure. “It really shows in the films and productions they ultimately make.” 

Holt is helping to steer the department into one of the industry’s most unsettled frontiers: artificial intelligence. Her new course on AI and media industries — part of a larger initiative on the same topic — examines how AI is reshaping everything from screenwriting to visual effects, pushing students to grapple with what such technology can do and why it matters. 

“We’re not here to tell students what to think,” she says. “We’re here to teach them how to think and give them tools to understand what these things mean and how it impacts their process. It’s genuine media literacy that we feel is super important for them to have.” 

That emphasis on critical thinking, alumni say, is precisely what gives them an edge in the industry. 

In her first industry job, at a talent agency, Kirsten “Cookie” Pierre ’16 was often tasked with writing “coverage” — quick script analyses to save agents time. It was like riding a bike.

“Everything came back to what we did in school. At UCSB, we were constantly reading, watching, breaking things down,” Pierre says. “You’re trained to distill something into a clear argument, a thesis.”

The skills serve her well still today as a writer on HBO’s hit medical drama “The Pitt,” working alongside fellow alum Elyssa Gershman ’16. They knew of each other on campus but bonded later, after moving to Los Angeles and ending up in the same improv class — taught, fittingly, by another UCSB graduate. It was Gershman who later recommended Pierre for the show. Their path to the writers’ room was anything but linear, a reality both say UCSB prepared them to navigate.

“UCSB isn’t necessarily seen as an ‘industry school,’” Pierre says. “But that’s actually our strength. We were taught to analyze things differently. You come in with a perspective that stands out.”

Gershman was a double major in communications and film and media studies, but Hollywood always had her heart. The critical studies coursework and the hands-on production classes solidified her ambition to be a screenwriter, and the people she met proved just as formative.

“UCSB is the best decision I ever made,” Gershman says. “My best friends — Cookie being No. 1 — are all from UCSB. All the people I lived with when I moved to L.A. were from UCSB. My first job was working for another alum. It becomes such a tight-knit community, and you grow with those people.”

That growth extends into the industry, where alumni seem to surface everywhere. “There are UCSB alumni all over the industry, from the creative side to the production side, the development side, marketing, and distribution,” says Ross Melnick, a professor who started his professional journey in Hollywood, too, working in representation, publicity and distribution. “The industry and the jobs available for it are changing so fast and our students are meeting that challenge every day.”

Melnick sees that breadth as a direct result of the curriculum. While many students arrive dreaming of directing or writing, their exposure to the industry’s wider ecosystem often expands their ambitions. “We’re teaching the history of the art form, but also the history of the industry and the infrastructure behind it,” he says. “That combination makes for better storytellers, but also more adaptable professionals.”

That learning extends beyond the classroom at the Carsey-Wolf Center, where Melnick is currently Interim Dick Wolf Endowed Director. The interdisciplinary hub, named for founding benefactors Marcy Carsey and Dick Wolf — industry legends in their own right — hosts screenings, panels and industry conversations. Backed by a dedicated board of prominent alumni and supporters, including Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning screenwriter and director Scott Frank ’82, the center creates opportunities for students to engage directly with the people shaping the field.

“I think it’s extraordinary,” says Rick Rosen ’75, a veteran talent agent who cofounded Endeavor, now WME Agency. He is a key player in the new AI and Media Industries Initiative housed within the center, where he serves on the executive board. “The faculty is extremely impressive and high-level. And the quality of the students in the film and media studies program is first-rate and incredibly impressive.

“Dick and Marcy and I and everybody on the board are very committed to maintaining that standard of excellence and continuing to evolve to the ever-changing media landscape,” Rosen continues. “The most important thing that someone who wants to get into film and television or media needs to be able to do is to think critically — to read critically, to analyze what you’ve read — and UCSB does a great job of training these students to be critical thinkers.”

It helps that a lot of that training is being done by faculty who are successful practitioners themselves. Auburn Films executive Wendy Eley Jackson, a prolific producer of both documentaries and features, teaches screenwriting. So does multihyphenate Cheri Steinkellner, the Emmy-winning, comedy-writing legend behind “Cheers” and other hits, who has a new musical bound for Broadway. Teaching professor James McNamara, a historian of literature and film, is also the creator, writer and showrunner of current Disney+ hit “The Artful Dodger.”

The department has a knack for attracting faculty members who are modeling exactly what many of its students hope to be doing one day: absolutely crushing it in Hollywood.

“This warmly collegial and intellectually brilliant environment is hugely generative for my work as a scholar of film narrative and as a creative practitioner in television, and I am deeply grateful to be a part of it,” says McNamara. “Alongside theoretical, historical and analytic training, [the department’s] creative production classes are taught by professors with world-class creative practices who have variously created, written, directed, showrun and produced critically acclaimed global streaming television series, iconic network television series, feature films, documentaries and Broadway plays, and have been nominated for or won Emmy, BAFTA and Australian Academy awards for their work.”

UCSB graduates, too, span the full spectrum of the industry. See, among others: indie film icon Gregg Araki ’82, whose latest film stars Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman and Charli XCX; Geoff Burdick ’90, senior vice president at James Cameron’s Lightstorm, which won the 2026 Best Visual Effects Oscar for “Avatar: Fire and Ash”; Brad Silberling ’84, a director, producer and writer of TV and features, from “Jane the Virgin” to “City of Angels”; Justin Tipping ’07, director of breakout horror hit “HIM”; Shavonne Wieder ’03, vice president of global brand marketing at Universal Pictures; Cameron Alexander ’10, whose first feature, “The Heart of the Beast,” opens in September 2026, starring Brad Pitt; and producer Yvett Merino ’94, who won the 2022 Best Animated Feature Academy Award for Disney’s “Encanto” and was nominated this year for “Zootopia 2.”

Writers, directors, editors, actors, executives — the list is long, and continues to grow. As the department’s head of production, Chris Jenkins has worked with many of them by way of his hands-on courses. That includes the much-beloved Film 106, where students pitch and, if selected, hire a student crew and produce their own original short film from scratch, as well as GreenScreen and the Coastal Media Project, which are centered primarily on environmental filmmaking and have resulted in films being showcased in festivals from Santa Barbara to Florence, Italy.

“We have opportunities here to do some very unique stuff — environmentally, for instance, and these programs are knocking it out of the park every year,” says Jenkins, who has also overseen the expansion of courses in sound production and helped to secure major corporate sponsorships for cameras and other equipment. “We’re nimble. We can do things that other schools can’t do, and I’ve tried to focus on those things.”

That’s the sentiment across the department, which integrates production into a broader intellectual framework. Students don’t just learn how to make films; they learn how to situate them — historically, culturally, politically. In an era when technology can automate almost everything, that humanities-centric grounding is priceless.

Gershman and Pierre still lean on it every day in the writers’ room, where narrative urgency traces directly back to their education at UCSB. “Why today?” asks Pierre, nominated for a 2026 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for an episode of “The Pitt” that she co-wrote. “Yes, why today, and why now?” adds Gershman, who recently won two Writers Guild of America awards for her work on the show. “The network asks us these questions all the time. And these are all things we learned at UCSB.”

If the answers sometimes lead to awards, so much the better. But for many alumni, the deeper reward lies in something less visible: the ability to navigate an industry in flux with curiosity, resilience and a clear sense of purpose. Gershman, frames it in personal terms. “Television made me feel seen and less alone growing up,” she says. “That’s why I wanted to do this work. I think that art can be so powerful and special, especially now, and I like feeling like I am fostering connection and community, and maybe helping other people the way it helped me.”