In a new course, Special Effects for Studio and Stage, associate professional faculty member Ken Cole taught Department of Film, Television, and Theatre students how to brainstorm and design a wide range of practical illusions for use in creative productions. The group of about 10 students simulated explosions, used makeup to create realistic-looking wounds, built props out of scraps and spare parts, and conjured up a realistic rainstorm.
Eugene Staples has a vision: Entertainment can be more than a distraction—it can be an inspiration. It can teach kids how to be better people. It can make the world a better place. That sense of responsibility—the desire to make things that make an impact—was sparked at Notre Dame, and was recognized this spring by the Television Academy Foundation, which honored him with a Mister Rogers Memorial Scholarship.
Furiously strumming his jarana into the early morning hours of a stranger’s backyard birthday party in Austin, Texas, Alex Chavez was having fun with the hired musicians who had brought him along as an impromptu guest. He was also doing fieldwork. Chavez, who joined Notre Dame’s Department of Anthropology in 2014 as an assistant professor, studies “the aesthetic dimensions of contemporary lived politics”— sometimes referred to as cultural poetics. He focuses on the unfolding of this expressive grammar among Latino migrant communities in the United States.
Robert Sedlack, associate professor of visual communication design in Notre Dame’s Department of Art, Art History, and Design, has been named the winner of the 2015 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award. The Sheedy award presentation will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 6, in the McKenna Hall auditorium. It is open to all faculty and students.
Sarah Edmands Martin, a third-year graduate student in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, received the Walter Beardsley Award from the Snite Museum of Art for her thesis installation The Princess & The Beast. Charles Loving, director of the Snite Museum, presented the award during the opening reception for the 2015 Thesis Exhibition on April 10.
“I’m thrilled to be a part of this project and to be in Dublin. It’s an amazing opportunity,” said Katie Brennan, a sociology major in the College of Arts and Letters. During the summer of 2014, Brennan and three other University of Notre Dame undergraduates interned on the production of 1916: The Irish Rebellion, a three-part television documentary set to air on PBS, the BBC, and Irish broadcaster RTÉ in 2016.
The University of Notre Dame will play a major role in the international celebration of the centenary of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising, which was announced Tuesday, March 31 in Dublin by Taoiseach Enda Kenny. A documentary television series, 1916: The Irish Rebellion, produced by Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, will be broadcast worldwide during the centenary, which memorializes the events in Dublin on Easter Week a century ago, when an insurrection started a process that culminated in an independent Irish state and accelerated the disintegration of the British Empire.
In fall 2015, the College of Arts and Letters will launch a new Collaborative Innovation program that focuses on the principles of design thinking—a powerful approach for solving real-world problems. “A dynamic, iterative, and deeply human process, design thinking prepares students for the type of collaborative, cross-disciplinary work they will encounter after graduation, no matter what career paths they pursue,” said Richard Gray, chair of the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, which will be home to the new program.
Robert Sedlack, associate professor of visual communication design in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, is the recipient of the 2015 Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D., Faculty Community-Based Research Award, given annually by the Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns. The award honors a Notre Dame faculty member whose research has made a contribution in collaboration with local community organizations.
The University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) announces the 26th Annual Notre Dame Student Film Festival, in the Browning Cinema at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, January 29 through 31, 2015.
Three Notre Dame faculty members in the Department of Music teamed up with members of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra and two Chicago artists to film a dramatic performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, to be released in January.
A series of three documentary films, directed by award-winning film directors who are also University of Notre Dame alumni, will be released on the WatchND app and the UND.com website during the last three weeks of this year. The series, “First Time Fans,” presents the excitement and wonder of some very different people as they experience a Notre Dame football game for the first time.
Rome. Bangladesh. An abandoned island off the Irish coast. These are just a few of the locations where William Donaruma ’89 has traveled as a filmmaker and teaching professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT). “Nothing beats experience and pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone,” Donaruma said.
Among the most noticeable features of the Campus Crossroads Project’s design to enhance and harmonize the University of Notre Dame’s academic, athletic, and student life programs will be the South Building, a six-level structure connected to the south side of Notre Dame Stadium, on which work will begin in November 2015. The building will make possible the relocation of Department of Music from its present quarters in Crowley Hall, bringing it under the same roof as the Sacred Music at Notre Dame program.
On the second floor of West Lake Hall, a group of Notre Dame students is making big plans. They are focused on addressing the plight of those afflicted with HIV/AIDS in South Africa. They’re even planning a trip to Johannesburg next spring to offer hands-on assistance. But these are not biology or preprofessional studies majors. They are graphic design students exploring ways to use their talents to promote awareness and prevention of HIV/AIDS.
“Imagine a kind of live, national GRE exam where students audition in open competition against one another, evaluated by representatives from the best graduate theatre programs,” said Professor Jim Collins, chair of the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT). Notre Dame had record success in 2014 at the national auditions organized by the University/Resident Theatre organization (URTA), with six of the seven FTT students who auditioned receiving offers from graduate programs in attendance.
Three faculty members from Notre Dame’s Department of Music embarked today, October 7, on a 12-day tour to Asia, building scholarly and cultural connections with universities in China and South Korea. Professor Peter Smith, chair of the department, Professor John Blacklow, an award-winning pianist, and Assistant Professional Specialist Tricia Park, a critically acclaimed violinist, will travel to Shanghai, Beijing, and Seoul. The trio will present lectures and performances, including one at Beijing’s Capital Library, in conjunction with the U.S. Embassy.
Chris Dekker, an organist in Sacred Music at Notre Dame’s Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) program, has been awarded a scholarship from the Fellowship of United Methodists in Music and Worship Arts. The scholarship recognizes an undergraduate or graduate music student who intends to pursue a career in sacred music and who demonstrates “evidence of exceptional musical or artistic talent, effective leadership ability, and outstanding promise of future usefulness to the Church.”
Two senior film, television, and theatre (FTT) majors in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters will see their original plays come to life October 2–12 in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. ND Theatre NOW is the only entirely student-driven production in this year’s FTT theatre season, with student writers, directors, and performers. It features two one-act plays: Beneath My Skin, by Zachary Wendeln, and Out of Orbit, by Lucas Garcia.
A heart-wrenching film from three 2014 University of Notre Dame graduates took top honors in the short documentary category at this year’s Sunset Film Festival in Los Angeles. In The Suicide Disease, Katie Mattie, Vincent Moore, and William Neal tell the story of Frances Shavers, who worked at Notre Dame as chief-of-staff and special assistant to University President Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., before she was diagnosed with Trigeminal Neuralgia.
Jeff Spoonhower ’99 has been appointed assistant professor of film and digital media production in Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television and Theatre (FTT). A 12-year veteran of the video game and animation industries, Spoonhower shares with students the very same production techniques and tools he uses in his award-winning professional work.
Internationally acclaimed, Grammy Award-winning baritone Nathan Gunn will return to his hometown in September to inaugurate his artist-in-residence series with the Department of Music at the University of Notre Dame. Gunn, a South Bend native, will spend one week each semester for the next four years teaching Notre Dame vocal students, visiting classes, coaching students as they prepare for OperaND’s annual performances, and participating in public colloquia with faculty.
Joan of Arc, leader of armies, adviser to King Charles VII, and patron saint of France, has been a role model to those who suffer for their convictions for more than 600 years. In the first of a series of sacred music dramas produced at the University of Notre Dame, Joan of Arc also served as inspiration for an interdisciplinary project featuring elements of film, music, and a multi-media art installation, said Sacred Music at Notre Dame Professor Carmen-Helena Téllez.
The healing power of music, the joyful celebration of faith—Teach Bhríde (the House of Brigid) seeks to enrich these elements of the Notre Dame spirit in a people who helped form this institution’s mission and heart: the Irish themselves. The House of Brigid began in 2009, when recent graduates of Notre Dame, aided by generous donors from the Notre Dame community and the Notre Dame Folk Choir, started a yearlong service program to assist in spiritual ministry and liturgical music in the Catholic Church in Ireland.
“My long-term goal has been to go to med school, but I’ve also found a passion for music and piano performance here at Notre Dame, and the College of Arts and Letters pre-health supplementary major has really allowed me to explore both of those things,” says senior Will Sievern from Evansville, Indiana. Sievern is pursuing a major in piano performance while also majoring in Arts and Letters Pre-Health.
Brock Switzer ’13, a film, television, and theatre (FTT) major in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, began taking dance classes at neighboring Saint Mary’s College during his sophomore year. It was there that he learned of the influence of dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. Using Graham’s techniques, Switzer planned to choreograph a dance for his senior thesis project. With the help of an American Dream grant from Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, he attended the Summer Intensive program at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in 2013.
The University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) announces the 25th Annual Notre Dame Student Film Festival, in the Browning Cinema, January 23 through 25, 2014. As in 2013, audience members will be invited to vote for their favorite film via text message. The Audience Choice Award will be presented to the student director(s) of the winning film before the final screening.
Fourteen Notre Dame students, along with two of their professors from the College of Arts and Letters, traveled to northern Spain over fall break to experience the Camino de Santiago—one of the most important Christian pilgrimages during medieval times. History Professor Olivia Remie Constable, the director of the University’s Medieval Institute, and Danielle Joyner, an assistant professor of medieval art history, say it was an academic adventure they won’t soon forget. And their students agree.
Christopher Chowrimootoo, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies, has been awarded the 2013 Kurt Weill Prize for outstanding article for his “Bourgeois Opera: Death in Venice and the Aesthetics of Sublimation.” The prize, which recognizes distinguished scholarship in music theatre, is awarded biennially by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music.
Joyelle McSweeney, associate professor in Notre Dame’s Department of English recently won the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights for her new play, Dead Youth, or, the Leaks.