Annamaria Bellezza is the recipient of the 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award, the most prestigious teaching award at the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a BAT
(Bachelor in the Art of Teaching) in French from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and pursued her graduate studies in Italian Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.
She is the co-author of the textbook Prego, An Invitation to Italian, 4th edition and the intermediate-to-advanced reader Il reale e il possibile. Her main field of research is critical performative pedagogy in language teaching and learning, applied linguistics and more broadly SLA. The themes and topics of her courses focus on the analysis and interpretation of power dynamics/power struggles/power and status games across gender, class, race in novels, plays, films, tv, and in our everyday exchanges.
For a glimpse into her work, see her latest article and book chapter:
⇒ Developing Performative Competence and Teacher Artistry: A Pedagogical Imperative in the Multicultural Classroom. L2 Journal, Volume 12, Issue 3 (November 2020)
⇒ Teaching the conflicts in American foreign language education.
Adler, Rutie, Annamaria Bellezza, Chika Shibahara, and Lihua Zhang. In: Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentering in Higher Education and Research. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bojsen, Heidi; Daryai-Hansen, Petra; Holmen, Anne&Karen Risager (Eds.). 2022
Annamaria brings her passion for the performing arts to the classroom, drawing on her training at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco and the Tisch School of Drama at New York University. She is the Organizer and Director of Words in Action, the multilingual student performance she created in 2012, which she directs every Spring on the UCB campus. This event brings together our diverse language community through theater, music, dance and poetry and is open to all UC students taking a language class (you can find information about the event on our Italian Studies website or on the Berkeley Language Center website, which also houses videos of all past performances). Annamaria has been the Academic Coordinator for the Berkeley Language Center for a number of years, making it a hub for language lecturers to discuss pedagogical issues, conduct research, acquire professional development and build communities.
She is also a freelance script consultant and translator, she has written her first screenplay, Egg chasers, currently being pitched to producers, and is working on a second script.
