Fall highlights
From the Department of Art
Richard Bay, professor of art education, and his 212 Art Education class found pizzas inspiring. Using found material and four Benny Nicola’s pizza boxes, the students created realistic looking pizza art. The restaurant exhibited these on their wall in Radford.
Z.L. Feng, professor of art had his work exhibited in an international watercolor elite exhibition at Mitsukoshi Xinyi Place in Taipei. This show that brings 100 watercolor artists together from all over the world then moved to Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Once again one of Feng’s watercolor students made it into the annals of Watercolor Artist magazine’s “Ones to Watch” annual feature. The list of 10 talented artists includes MFA studio art alumna Bonnie Catron ’15. Nominated by Feng, he describes her work as “Inspired by the contrasting shapes and rustic aspects of tools, Bonnie is able to achieve her signature texture by emphasizing the shadows of overlapped objects and by using wet-into-wet, drybrush stippling and salt techniques.”
From the Department of Music
Six music education students attended the 5th International Conference on Music Learning Theory (MLT) in Chicago, Illinois, hosted by the Gordon Institute for Music Learning (GIML), a music education network focused on music learning and instruction. This once-in-a-lifetime event changed the trajectory of these students’ development as music educators as they engaged with leaders in the community of music education research and practice, connecting their academic knowledge from Radford University with their future civic engagement as music educators and advocators of the benefits of music education for all. Along with faculty mentor Jennifer McDonel, assistant professor of music education, they did a presentation about this experience at the Scholar Citizen Initiative Symposium this month. The students were Rachel Colby, Kareem Elrefai, Jasmine McCormick, Lauren Milburn, James Nugent and Zach Wood.
Ashley Walker and Sara Breyfogle were selected through a peer review process to present at the Passages 2015 Conference at Shenandoah University in Wincester, Virginia. Passages is a music therapy conference for students and new professionals in the Mid-Atlantic Music Therapy Region of the American Music Therapy Association. Walker presented “Expanding Your Guitar Technique.” She is a student in the BM program with a concentration in music therapy. Her applied instrument is guitar. Breyfogle two sessions were “Music Therapy for Bereavement 101” and “Hatha Yoga for Self Care.” She is a board-certified music therapist who is in the MS music program with a concentration in music therapy.
From the School of Dance and Theatre
Inessa Plekhanova, associate professor of dance, was an invited guest teacher at the Japan Grand Prix International Competition where she taught master classes in the Vaganova technique. She also conducted a Vaganova Seminar at Studio Five in Yokohama, Japan.
Amy VanKirk, assistant professor of dance, was part of a panel presentation “Investigating American Contemporary Dance – Pedagogy, Practice and History,” which took place at the National Dance Education Organization Conference in Phoenix, Arizona.
Jimmy Ray Ward, assistant professor of theatre, recently designed the scenery for Mill Mountain Theatre's production of “On Golden Pond.? Professor Ward also designed the scenery for the Roanoke Children's Theatre's production of “James and The Giant Peach.”
Senior theatre major Ian Gammarino, at the end of August, attended United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT-SE) Master Classes in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The two classes he attended were part of a welding intensive that included using metal inert gas (MIG) and tungsten inert gas (TIG) techniques. He enjoyed the MIG part, though the TIG was a different beast all together. He compared it to learning to drive a manual car, which is very different than an automatic version.
The College of Visual & Performing Arts at Radford University
