Students and Alumni
Ryan Conarro (MFAIA ’15) is performing in Perseverance Theatre’s production of The Blue Bear in Juneau, Alaska, at Perseverance’s SummerFest. The Blue Bear is a two-person place-based piece adapted from a memoir by southeast Alaska wilderness guide Lynn Schooler. Conarro was part of the original team of collaborators who created the play in 2010. This is Perseverance’s third run of the piece.
Margaret DeLima (MFAIA ’07) is currently in residency at the Blueberry View Artist’s Retreat in Benton, Michigan. An artist’s reception was held in her honor on August 28.
Mary Edwards (MFAIA’ 07) will perform a concert, including songs from her new album,Everyday Until Tomorrow on Sept. 14, at the Rockwood Music Hall in New York City.
Christie Negri (MFAIA ’15) won an honorable mention in the Focus Point Shape International Online Art Gallery competition for this portrait that she took of fellow student Ananda Bena-Weber posing as Charlie Chaplin.
Jim Raposa (MFAIA ’14) will be appearing as Zach in the Weston Playhouse production of A Chorus Line July 31-August 23, 2014. He first performed on the line as Mike (I Can Do That) over fifteen years ago in California, and then directed and choreographed it at Burr and Burton Academy, where he is on staff as the Director of Drama, Dance and Tech Theater.
Riva Weinstein (MFAIA ’14) presented a a series of (somewhat) spontaneous site specific outdoor installations at the Hudson Highlands Nature Museum in Cornwall, N.Y. She writes, “I’ll be walking with natural materials collected here and there (as well as with art created by my conceptual collaborator Linda Byrne who will be here in spirit though not in body).”
FACULTY
Petra Kuppers has had a very busy summer. Her installation of Salamander, a community performance project created by The Olimpias artist collective, a group of disability culture activists and their allies, will be on display until December in the Women’s Studies Department at Lane Hall, University of Michigan. In August, Petra will mount a Salamander performance event on the Swedish coast, near Gothenburg, with one of Sweden’s foremost integrated dance companies. In June, Petra performed as part of the Milkbar’s Live Art sharing, showing The Chair in an abandoned warehouse space in East Oakland. Finally, she was a featured speaker at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Pre-Conference: Creating and Sustaining Interactive and Socially Engaged Theatre, and spoke at the International Association for Theatre Research on Land-Based Performance Pedagogies.
For the 2014 Vancouver Queer Arts Festival Laiwan curated “Queering the International”, a visual arts exhibition featuring artists from a range of nations covering a breadth of viewpoints and perspectives from queers near and far. Recent homophobic events in Russia, India, Uganda, and elsewhere have made it timely to highlight artists who address queer identity on an international scale, and whose work celebrates the complex human condition we find ourselves in as queers. Queering the International engages themes that are at once broad and challenging, asking artists What is Queer, What is International, What is your Diaspora, and What is Identity?
Andrea Parkins was on the scientific committee that selected papers and audio works for presentation at the Invisible Places Sounding Cities: Sound, Urbanism and Sense of Place symposium, which took place in Viseu, Portugal from July 18-20. Sound artist/theorist Brandon LaBelle was keynote speaker, and Parkins’ 7-channel audio work, oneroomafteranother, was presented in the symposium’s Listening Room. In August, she performed “Three Rooms in the Memory Palace Part 1 at Harvestworks in New York.
