STUDENTS & ALUMNI

Coming soon to a bedroom near you…NOBODY’S HOME: a multi-sensory meditation-comedy on the nature of nothing, performed for extraordinary audiences in ordinary bedrooms.  An original play by Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews (IBA ’09, MFAIA ’16) and Mason Rosenthal of the Medium Theatre Company is now touring New York and will be coming to New England in October.
In September Ananda Bena-Weber (MFAIA ’16) performed her solo work, Scholars, at Clark University.  She also will be starring in a piece called Duke’s Place with the Sierra Nevada Ballet and the Reno Jazz orchestra as part of the Nevada state sesquicentennial anniversary.
Susan Buroker’s  (MFAIA ’16) sculpture “Altered Earth, Synthetic nitrogen farming; the consequential machine,” inspired by the consequences of using nitrogen fertilizer in farming, is on exhibition at this year’sCollaborative Concepts Farm Project in Garrison, New York.
Kate Hollett’s (MFAIA ’13) project, “Emotional Extremism, ‘Smile’ Depression, and Moving Past the Mirror Stage” was hosted by Social Media Week Berlin. “An artistic take on the sociopsychological framework in social media,” this project “examines the role of the self, ego gratification and emotional expression in social media.”
C. Robin Marcotte (MFAIA ’12) performed in the Tributary Dance  premiere of a work-in-progress inspired by Neil Bousfield’s wordless novel Walking Shadows: A Novel Without Words at the Silver Center for the Arts at Plymouth State University.
Jessica Plumb’s (MFAIA ’10) Return of the River is an uplifting documentary about environmental and cultural restoration. The film explores how change happens, showing how an idea to bring two dams down moved from “crazy” to  reality. Four years in the making, the film won an audience award and a jury award in its premiere weekend at the Port Townsend Film Festival.  It has been nominated as one of three finalists for “best international documentary” by the Kuala Lumpur Eco Film Festival.
Donia Salem (MFAIA ’15) will again be Co-Directing this year’sOutlet Dance Project’s Day of Dance and Film Festival at the Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey.  Ananda Bena-Weber (MFAIA’ 15) will be a featured choreographer and Hattie Mae Williams (MFAIA ’17) will be showing a film.
Terre Unité Vandale (Parker) (MFAIA ’12) and her Movement Arts Ensemble culminate Laurel Park Art’s (Northhampton, MA) first annual artist residency with a performance ofStone Songs, a dance experiment in listening to the landscape, asking “What messages are humming inside the stones’ still presence?”
Kriota Willberg (MFAIA ’11) has a number of projects this fall. Her work will appear in the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Md., at the New York Academy of Medicine Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health’s  Second Annual Festival of Medical History and the Arts, “Art, Anatomy, and the Body: VESALIUS 500,” and in the Subculture Anthologypulbished by Ninth Art Press. Her work is also currently on view in Carousel Comic Art at Dixon Place Gallery in New York.
 

FACULTY

Pam Hall has been named as inaugural Public Engagement Post-doctoral Fellow at Memorial University in partnership with the Shorefast Foundation ”to build public engagement capacity and contribute to research and learning on a topic of mutual interest to the people of Fogo Island and Change Islands, the Shorefast Foundation and the university.”  The research on this project will comprise the second chapter of herEncyclopedia of Local Knowledge.  She begins her research this month on Fogo Island and Change Island in NE Canada. She is quoted:  “For me this project is about rethinking how we see knowledge as something produced only by scholars in universities. We need to challenge that belief and recognize that there are many kinds of knowledge and many diverse knowers in every community, especially those in rural and coastal settings where people work closely in, and with, their local environments. We need more than a single kind of knowledge to build a sustainable future together….”
Seitu Jones has been working on a year-long project of urban food sustainability and justice, which culminated on September 12 with a meal for 2,000 at a half-mile long table in Frogtown, St. Paul, Minnesota.  “Called ‘CREATE: The Community Meal,’this project exemplifies art and artists’ essential role in our lives by creating a platform to learn from and exchanging diverse points of view. Like sharing a meal, art can remove barriers and create a community where, perhaps, none existed before.”
Petra Kupper’s recent publications include “Outsider Histories, Insider Artists, Cross-cultural Ensembles: Visiting with Disability Presences in Contemporary Art Environments.” in TDR: The Drama Review. and “Lit Skin: Collaboration in Water, Land, Body Poetics” in Acts + Encounters edited by Juliana Leslie and Andrea Quaid.  Her short story “The Nursing Home”appeared in the online journal Wordgathering.
Lan Thao Lam has work in two group exhibitions this month:  A Gift to Birobidzhan, organized by Yevgeniy Fiks at 21ST. PROJECTS in New York and Fifty Signs of Freedom, an exhibition of fifty responses to the question, “What does FREEDOM look like to YOU?”)organized by Pamela Callender (MFAIA ’11) at the Fogartyville Community Media and Arts Center.