MISSION AND MINISTRY | José Garcia Moreno has been appointed director of the Academy of Catholic Thought and Imagination (ACTI) by John T. Sebastian, vice president for Mission and Ministry. Garcia Moreno, a professor of animation in the LMU School of Film and Television, had been leading ACTI in an interim capacity and will now serve as director through August 2021.
Founded in 2014, the Academy for Catholic Thought and Imagination serves as a hub for scholarship, research, and creative outreach and engagement with LMU’s mission and the Catholic intellectual tradition. In his four years as ACTI’s inaugural director, Professor Brian Treanor of the Philosophy Department established ACTI as central to LMU’s academic identity. As interim director, Garcia Moreno built on the foundations laid by Treanor by developing innovative programs that explored the breadth of the Catholic imagination, culminating in a collaborative art installation with renowned Mexican artist Betsabeé Romero and SFTV colleague David Garden. This project, titled “Caravan,” was exhibited at the Laband Art Gallery on LMU’s Westchester campus in early 2020 and featured Romero’s adaptations of traditional crafts alongside experimental animation to interrogate and reflect on the realities of migration.
“Caravan” reflects Garcia Moreno’s vision for ACTI as a venue for promoting critical thought around liminal qualities of boundaries and frontiers. Looking to the future, he plans to reschedule events from the spring that had to be postponed because of the outbreak of COVID-19, including presentations of their research by ACTI’s 2019-20 Faculty Fellows, Christopher Kaczor, professor of Philosophy, and Leon Wiebers, associate professor of theatre arts. Garcia Moreno is also eager to stretch ACTI in new directions: For Garcia Moreno, “the future is interdisciplinary.”
“As a community, we are asked to embrace and promote a new surge of creativity in the sciences and the arts, so that this surge may extend into all areas of human activity,” he said. “Not only are the sciences and the arts sacramental but also, they share a common creative process. Everything is in a constant process of evolution and change. The developments that are made in one area may sometimes have serious consequences for the foundations of theories and concepts in other areas. Each problem produces an energy that seeks to be solved with a new idea. But, rather than looking for something truly fundamental, we often attempt to modify a problem without disturbing the underlying infrastructure. ACTI looks to promote unforeseen collaborations and unexpected ideas in new common grounds, like in a vibrant academy of the core. Such is our challenge in times of major distress but also of great opportunity.”
Sebastian said he welcomes the opportunity to support this vision and to continue working with Garcia Moreno. “No sooner had we begun to imagine together ACTI’s future as a vital center within Mission and Ministry than the pandemic brought everything to a screeching halt,” Sebastian said. “José had some truly innovative projects in the works for the spring semester, and we want to make sure that the LMU community still has a chance to experience his own prodigious creativity once the university physically reopens. ACTI has a critical role to play in illuminating the intellectual dimension of the university’s Catholic identity, and José brings an important voice to conversations about how scholarship and creative activity across as well as between disciplines shape how we think about LMU’s mission.”
Garcia Moreno earned a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, an M.A. from the School of Film at the Charles University in Prague, and an M.F.A. from UCLA. His animated work has been featured and celebrated in film festivals around the world, earning prizes at La Habana, Toronto, San Francisco, Mexico, Montreal, and Japan. Garcia Moreno is also a Fulbright scholar and a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant/CONACULTA. In 2018, he received an Animation Meritorious Award from the Kennedy Center Theater Festival. An LMU faculty member since 2003, and former chair of the Animation Department, Garcia Moreno is known for his commitment to teaching and for his mentorship of students and faculty.
