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Mason Gross School faculty: Share your latest news by filling out the news submission form.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

  • Christopher Cartmill is a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome in March and April 2024. He will be working there and in Italy on his translation of Carlo Gozzi’s play The Little Green Birdie, which was first performed at Mason Gross in 2022, to prepare the work for publication. On February 9, 2024, The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research along with company member George Olesky presented The Nebraska Dispatches, based on Cartmill’s journals that detail his return to his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, to write a play about Chief Standing Bear and the complicated personal adventure that ensues. THEATER
  • Evelyn Wang has been awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in the amount of $16,500. The competitive awards for New Jersey artists are granted by an independent peer panel assessment of work samples, and awards may be used to help artists produce new work and advance their careers. DANCE
  • Shelley Zhang and Melissa Dunphy collaborated on a new composition, “The Price of Ambition,” with music by Dunphy and poetry by Zhang. The piece was commissioned for Every BODY/The Body Image Consortium, which is made up of LGBTQ+ identifying choirs including the Atlanta Women’s Chorus, Appalachian Equality Chorus, Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., One Voice Chorus, Turtle Creek Chorale, and Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus. It is published under Mormolyke Press and will premiere July 21 and 22 at the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus concerts. MUSIC
  • David P. Gordon designed the scenery for “Groucho, A Life in Revue” at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre, directed by Frank Ferrante. The production marks the 100th anniversary of the Marx Brothers record-breaking run on the very same stage. The show runs from February 13th to March 10th. THEATER
  • A number of faculty and alumni were part of ensembles that took home Grammy Awards at the February 4 ceremony: Mark Dover, faculty, and Ilmar Gavilán, alumnus: Best Classical Compendium for Passion For Bach and Coltrane; Javier Diaz and The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra: Best Opera Recording for Terence Blanchard’s Champion; Isrea Butler and Shawn Edmonds, alumni, with The Count Basie Orchestra: Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album for Basie Swings The Blues. MUSIC
  • Didier William is one of 49 artists featured in the exhibition Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home in New Orleans, opening November 2, 2024. Prospect 6 is the longest-running, citywide contemporary art triennial and is curated by Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson. Work by William, along with Paul Gardère, is also featured in the Zimmerli Art Museum’s exhibit Repossession, which William organized and which runs through July 31. ART & DESIGN
  • Alessandra Williams spoke about pedagogy, networking, and economic stability for BIPOC students in dance higher education as a co-panelist with Ananya Chatterjea and Gaynell Sherrod for the plenary address “With Love, You Can Reach for Whatever You Want!” at the International Association of Blacks in Dance conference in Memphis on January 26. DANCE
  • Anne McPherson is the production stage manager at The Play That Goes Wrong, playing off-Broadway at New World Stages. THEATER
  • On February 21, 2024, students from New Brunswick Public Schools will participate in an All-City Music Festival; the band will be conducted by Todd Nichols and Julia Baumanis, and the orchestra will be conducted by Tomás García Dueñas and Nathan Sawyer, both graduate students of Ching-Chun Lai. MUSIC
  • In this video, Scott Ordway discusses his song cycle “Expanse of My Soul,” a collaboration with Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, in advance of its February 4 world premiere at Stanford Live. MUSIC
  • The Mingus Big Band, featuring jazz studies faculty Conrad Herwig, Alex Norris, and Abraham Burton and distinguished alumni Johnathan Blake, Theo Hill, and Anthony Fazio, has been nominated for a 2024 Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album for The Charles Mingus Centennial Sessions. The awards will be announced February 4. MUSIC
  • Steffani Jemison is the recipient of a 2023 Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) grant of $25,000, awarded to woman-identifying artists over the age of 40 and at a critical junction in their career. The award is given in “recognition of an artist’s accomplishments, artistic growth, originality, and potential” according the AWAW website and is by nomination only. ART & DESIGN
  • On November 15, the university’s Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes (CACP) honored Julia Baumanis with the Torchbearer Award. According to CACP, the Torchbearer Award recognizes those who work to further “diversity, inclusion, equity, and access…through their academic research, teaching, community engagement, and/or workplace engagement, program development, and leadership.” One of Baumanis’s students, Zoë D’Amico, nominated her for the award. “She works tirelessly to provide the best environment for her students, teach future educators how to be inclusive and incorporate diversity in their own teaching, and use her own platform to empower her own students, community, and women in her field,” D’Amico said in her speech at the ceremony. Baumanis was one of just seven Rutgers employees selected for the award this year. MUSIC
  • Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy: New Perspectives, edited by Lynette Bowring, Rebecca Cypess, and Liza Malamut (Indiana University Press, 2022), was awarded the Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society and the book award from the Jewish Studies and Music Study Group. MUSIC
  • Collective Wisdom, the new album by Louis Levitt‘s indie-classical quintet, Sybarite 5, debuted at No. 1 in October on Billboard’s Traditional Classical charts. MUSIC
  • Debra Cartwright (also an MFA’23 alum) has received an Honorable Mention in the AXA Art Prize US awards. ART & DESIGN
  • Pam Tanowitz‘s eponymous company presented the New York City premiere of her work Song of Songs November 9–11 at City Center. Tanowitz is the third featured artist in City Center’s Artists at the Center series. DANCE
  • Gerald Casel has been awarded an Isadora Duncan Dance Award, aka “Izzie,” for Outstanding Achievement in Direction/Choreography for Not About Race DanceDANCE
  • The Coldest Case, an Audible Original scripted audio drama co-written by Ryan Silbert, will be released this year. Aaron Paul and Krysten Ritter lend their voices to the second season, a collaboration with James Patterson Entertainment. FILM
  • Park McArthur, the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts, is the recipient of a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. The annual prize is given to risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater, and the visual arts. ART & DESIGN
  • Jeanine Oleson is the recipient of a 2023–24 Rome Prize in visual arts from the American Academy in Rome. The annual prize is awarded to American artists and scholars for research and work in the arts and humanities. ART & DESIGN
  • Mark Armijo McKnight has been named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. He’s one of 171 fellows in 48 fields, and only one of two fellows from Rutgers. ART & DESIGN

FACULTY VOICES IN THE MEDIA

  • Christopher Cartmill is quoted in this Los Angeles Times article about the meaning of banter and its place in dating and on dating apps. THEATER
  • Min Kwon was interviewed by former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley for his Sirius XM radio show, American Voices, about her “America/Beautiful” project, which includes 70 composers and their take on “America the Beautiful.” Kwon has begun recording all 70-plus new works written for the project, which received media coverage from The Financial Times, NBC Nightly News, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and International Piano, among many others. She is collaborating with the multi-Grammy winning producer Adam Abeshouse for this recording (five volumes), which will be released later this year. MUSIC
  • Rebecca Cypess, associate dean for academic affairs, wrote an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed titled “The Abuse of Scholar Activism,” in which she outlines how ideologically driven scholar activism contributes to campus antisemitism. MUSIC
  • Jeff Friedman spoke with NorthJersey.com about the Disability Studies minor, a collaboration between MGSA, SMLR, Bloustein, and SAS, as part of the website’s feature “Rutgers launches disability studies minor to explore world of oft-ignored community.” DANCE
  • Rebecca Cypess, associate dean for academic affairs, penned an Op-Ed at NJ.com titled “Rutgers gets creative about climate change and creates a new minor.” MUSIC
  • Composer and multimedia artist Scott Ordway speaks about the relationship between art, landscape, and emotion on the Climate Change and Happiness podcast (Helsinki, Finland). MUSIC
  • Patrick Stettner weighed in about the benefits and limitations of using a smartphone to shoot a movie in a WIRED article, “You Can Shoot a Movie on a Phone. Just Don’t Expect It to Be Easy.” FILM

RECENT NEWS

Haiti-born Didier William’s dazzling, gazing paintings are literally an eyeful (Los Angeles Times) ART & DESIGN

Review: Pam Tanowitz’s Witty Dance Secrets in London (The New York Times) DANCE

Oakland Museum of California Opens an Exhibit Highlighting the Life and Career of Angela Davis (Gerry Beegan in Ebony magazine) ART & DESIGN

How to Decolonize a Museum? Try an Ax. (Raphael Montañez Ortiz in The New York Times) ART & DESIGN

Road Trip to Escape, USA (Julie Langsam in Dense Magazine) ART & DESIGN