Faculty Pursuits

ABOVE: Amanda Centeno in Behind the Attic Wall at Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theater, Written by Peggy Stafford, adapted from the novel by Sylvia Cassedy. Photo by Buck Lewis.

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Joel Neville Anderson, Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Film, received the Purchase College Student Engagement Award for 2022. His essay, Tracing Pre-Histories of Nuclear Disaster Between Japan and Unceded Territories of North America: On Takeuchi Kota’s Blind Bombing, Filmed by a Bat (2020), was published in the exhibition catalog for TAKEUCHI Kota: Tokyo Contemporary Art Award: 2021-2023, edited by Ryohei Koya. The exhibition was presented in 2023 by Tokyo Arts and Space at the Museum of Contemporary Art, operated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture. For the return of JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film, Anderson moderated the Q&A for the centerpiece presentation, Under the Turquoise Sky, with director Kentaro and actor Yuya Yagira on August 4, 2023. Anderson also provided introductions and led post-screening discussions in the Japan Foundation-supported Summer 2023 Japanese Film Series at KinoSaito, an arts center in Verplanck, NY, rooted in the creation and practice of abstract art committed to nurturing experimentation in every form and medium.

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Christian Bailey, Associate Professor of History, recently published German Jews in Love: A History. The book was featured on the Conversations in World History podcast and in an essay for the Jewish Book Council, “Love Stories from German Archives.” Events in conjunction were held at the CUNY Graduate Center and the UC San Diego Library.

Beanie Barnes, Visiting Professor of Film, was part of a legal team, courtesy of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) and Northwestern University’s Center for Wrongful Convictions. The team presented a petition to the State of Illinois’ Pardon and Parole Board seeking a posthumous pardon for Joe James, a young Black man convicted and hanged following an unjust trial in Springfield, IL, in 1908. The arrest of James led to a destructive anti-Black race riot that re-shaped the state of Illinois and which was omitted from state and national history books. In 2018, Barnes, a screenwriter with an MBA from Yale University, unearthed what happened to Jones and spent months writing, contextualizing, and building the current Wikipedia page on the events that led to the young man’s death. After her research, she built a case proving James’ unjust demise. She approached the CRRJ, which brought on Northwestern in 2021. Governor Pritzker will make his determination this fall. Barnes also was a keynote speaker at Yale University. She spoke at the School of Management as part of its Council on Anti-Racism and Equity’s Ogilvie Colloquium about breaking barriers, what it means to be a leader for business and society, and the dehumanizing history and nature of the word “productivity.”

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Darrah Carr, Assistant Professor and Interim Director of Dance, was comm- issioned by the Irish Arts Center to create a new work for the opening season of its new $60 million venue in Manhattan.Carr collaborated with choreographer Seán Curran and Irish musicians Dana Lyn and Kyle Sanna on Céilí. Their September 2022 run was sold out, and they toured to Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in July 2023.Céilí will enjoy a return engagement at the Irish Arts Center in December 2023. In October 2022, Carr presented her research at the Dance Studies Association conference in Vancouver and the National Dance Education Organization conference in Atlanta.​

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Alexandra Dos Santos, Adjunct Assistant Professor of College Writing and a Purchase alumna, will have her personal essay published in Lithub in early October. The essay, “Whatever Walked There, Walked Alone: How The Haunting of Hill House Helped Me Understand My Grief,” is a tribute to her mother, who passed away in 2022. In July 2023, Dos Santos’ short horror story about familial trauma, “The Living Room Monster,” was published in The Latino Book Review’s 2023 issue. This is Dos Santos’s first semester teaching at Purchase and she hopes for many more to come.

James Dunn, Lecturer of Acting and Lecturer of Theatre and Performance, recently premiered as an actor in his latest horror feature, The Harbinger, written and directed by Andy Mitton. He just closed the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Die Zauberflöte (“The Magic Flute”) by Simon McBurney, Artistic Director of Complicité. He is currently co-writing, co-producing, and acting in the first iteration of a new project on immigration and displacement, which had its first development period upstate at the North American Cultural Laboratory’s Deep Space Residency in the summer of 2023. Follow Jay’s work at JayDunn.co.

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Roni Gross, Lecturer of Graphic Design, is the recipient of the 2023 Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award. She will be working on a Letterpress printed edition entitled As Much as My Daughter, a new version of the Book of Ruth, which gives primacy to the voices of Ruth and Naomi.

Elizabeth Guffey, Professor of Art History, was honored with the Bard Graduate Center’s Iris Foundation Outstanding Mid-Career Scholar award on April 26, 2023.

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Keavy Handley-Byrne, Adjunct Lecturer in Foundations, Art+Design, brings together found images of women with their eyes closed—accidental photographs tossed aside before there was a delete button—in their photo book, Paper Lighthouse. “But accident always plays a role in photography,” writes Margaret Sartor in her included essay. “It is precisely in the unpredictable and unintentional details of a photograph that the magic of the medium flourishes.” Paper Lighthouse departs on a wayfinding journey towards Handley-Byrne’s grandmother through the interior world behind these women’s eyes—a world, as Sartor writes, “as large and unfathomable as the Milky Way.”

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David H. Jameson, Lecturer of Computer Science, continues to tour with multiple bands and just released a major new update of his product, Gig Performer, aimed directly towards live performing musicians. gigperformer.com

Liam Joynt, Lecturer and Co-Chair of Acting, is the author of a chapter in the March 2023 First-Edition Routledge publication Vocal Traditions: Training in the Performing Arts. He is a master teacher, co-creator of the Teacher Certification Program, and contributor to the Miller Voice Method, which is highlighted in the book. ​Vocal Traditions: Training in the Performing Arts explores the 18 most influential voice training techniques and methodologies of the past 100 years. This extensive international collection highlights historically important voice teachers, contemporary leaders in the field, and rising schools of thought. Edited by Rockford Sansom, copyright 2023, published March 21, 2023 by Routledge.

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Elise Lemire, Professor of Literature, was one of three finalists for the New England Society Book Award in historical nonfiction for her 2021 book Battle Green, Vietnam: The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Lemire published “The Violence of the Vietnam War in the Memorialized American Landscape” in The Public History Landscape of Violence and Public Memory, edited by Martin Blatt (Routledge, chapter 13, June 2023). Her op-ed ”What Russian Soldiers and Vietnam Veterans Share” was published by History News Network on November 6, 2022. Lemire also published a review of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America, by Brigitte Fielder, in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 39.2 (2022): 139-141.

Cynthia Lin, Associate Professor of Painting, was featured in the group show Satellite and Sediment, which included a catalog and artist’s talk, at the Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts at Union College in Schenectady, NY, January 3-March 10, 2023. She also contributed an image to Luis Camnitzer: Monuments to Unknown Heroes, on view at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, April 28-September 24, 2023.

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Jeanine Meyer, Professor Emerita of Mathematics/Computer Science, recently had two books updated: Programming 101: Learn to Code with the Processing Language Using a Visual Approach, second edition, in 2022; and The Essential Guide to HTML5, Using Games to Learn HTML5, third edition, in 2023 (Apress). Meyers also gave a series of origami workshops at the New Castle Senior Center in Chappaqua, NY in February and March 2023. This followed a series offered on Zoom in 2022. She will give a short set of origami sessions using Zoom as a continuing education course for Riderwood, a senior living facility in Maryland, in January 2024.

Phil Moffa ’02, MM ’10, Lecturer of Music, released Second Foundation on Love Injection Records in May. The EP features remixes of his works by four former students: Zianni Orange ’23, Alexander Dell ’21, Adrian Mojica ’15, and Evan Shornstein ’15. This summer, Moffa performed at the Glastonbury Festival in the U.K. and Kappa Futur Festival in Turin, Italy with Lost Souls of Saturn, his collaborative multimedia project with Seth Troxler. This fall, Moffa will perform with retired professor Joel Thome (Composition) on November 11 at FiveMyles Gallery in Brooklyn; the premiere coincides with the release of their album Event Horizon.

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Djordje Nesic, Lecturer in Opera, conducted the opera Svadba by the Serbian-Canadian composer Ana Sokolović in April 2023 at the Manhattan School of Music (MSM). In May, he coached and performed the world premiere reading of the opera She Who Dared by Jasmine Barnes (music) and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton (libretto) at MSM, organized by the American Lyric Theater. In June and July, he taught, coached, and performed at the Opera Saratoga summer festival for his ninth season, working on Donizetti’s Don Pasquale.

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Lenka Pichlíková-Burke, Theatre and Performance, has contracted with Routledge, the British publisher of professional and academic books, to publish a two-volume work on the pedagogy of Michael Chekhov. Chekhov was a Russian actor, theatre director, and teacher who brought a revised version of Stanislavsky’s acting method to England and America. Chekhov’s psycho-physical acting technique has inspired three generations of actors on stage and in films. Excerpts from Pichlíková’s dissertation on the same subject are currently in the press in a Czech translation. Pichlíková also took 10 students from the Theatre and Performance, Conservatory BFA Acting, Playwriting and Screenwriting, Journalism, English and Global Literatures, Communication, and History programs to Prague for three weeks in July as part of a six-credit study abroad course entitled Political Theatre in Prague. The course focused on East Central European countries in the Communist bloc from the 1940s to 1989, especially the political writings and plays of Václav Havel. The group performed two one-act plays and one act of a full-length play by Havel, in part using techniques they learned from Pichlíková in the Michael Chekhov method. The students were Nolan Cleary, Fernando Coronado, Milly Garcia Arias, Alexa Gialleonardo, Arthur Goady, Roxanne Guyton-Von Eck, Benjamin Lind, Em Stern, Katarina Tobits, and Wren Woodward-Aviles.

Jason Pine, Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology, had his research and plans to build an ecological-focused, multidisciplinary residency in Vaðlaheiði, in northern Iceland, profiled in the Sunday edition of Iceland’s most popular daily newspaper, Morgunblaðið.

Nicolette Polek, Lecturer of Creative Writing, published a poem in The Atlantic titled “Outdoor Day” and a short essay in The Paris Review. She also completed an MA in religion and literature at Yale Divinity School.

Edward Pomerantz, Associate Professor of Screenwriting, was winner of Best Feature Script or Screenplay (main category) for The Girl With The Blue Guitar at the Beyond the Curve International Film Festival in Paris in June 2023.

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Susan Shopmaker, Lecturer of Acting, is a casting director in New York City and teaches 4th year The Business of Acting. Recent work includes casting Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, with Paul Giamatti and newcomer Dominic Sessa, opening November 2023; Michel Franco’s Memory, with Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, premiering at the Venice Film Festival in 2023; and Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, with Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, and Harris Dickinson, opening December 2023. She cast John Slattery’s film Maggie Moore(s), starring Purchase grads Micah Stockand Oona Roche, which was released in summer of 2023. Television work includes the Amazon series Dead Ringerswith Rachel Weisz, Britne Oldford, Poppy Liu, and Purchase alumni Cici Koueth, Diata Coleman, and MacKenzie Greer; and Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness for HBO, starring Purchase graduates Alicia Pilgrim, Ta’Neesha Murphy, Jason Ralph, Claudia Logan, and Aja Dier. Shopmaker was recently invited to be a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.

Paul Siegel, Professor of Psychology, was awarded a SUNY Research Seed Grant to develop a potential new intervention for U.S. combat veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder. The intervention involves repeated subliminal exposure to trauma-related imagery, based on the paradigm that Paul has developed in his lab with senior psychology majors and recent graduates since 2007. SUNY Research Seed Grants provide funding to support SUNY faculty pursuing extramural grants that are a strategic priority. Awards are made annually through a competitive request for proposals process. Seigel also recently published a commentary article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, one of the most high-impact journals across the sciences. The article is about the maladaptive scripts that people unconsciously live by.

Bettijane Sills, Professor, Conservatory of Dance, had two performances of her ballet Masquerade, originally choreographed in 2009 and staged for the Purchase Dance Company in 2011, performed by the New Jersey Ballet. The first was presented on May 15, 2022, at the Mitchell and Ann Sieminski Theater in Basking Ridge, NJ, followed by a performance at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown on May 22, 2022. In this graceful neoclassical ballet danced to Khachaturian’s Masquerade, dancers glide across the stage where masks inject a hint of mystery.

Peggy Stafford, Assistant Professor of Playwriting, wrote Behind the Attic Wall, adapted from the novel by Sylvia Cassedy and performed at the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College on July 28–30, 2023. Play description: When orphaned 12-year-old Maggie Turner is sent to live with her two great-aunts in an old, empty boarding school, she is bereft and alone. Soon she is called to the attic by two china dolls, building a world that is at once intricate and theatrical—a place where she finds friendship and a sense of home.

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Gregory Wharmby MA/MFA ’20, Lecturer of Visual Arts, has work included in the 2023 SPRING/BREAK Art Show in curator Bryan Ellingson’s Doomsday Clock in a Box. The work, a selection from his “Former Smoker” series, will be shown along with work by Bryan Ellingson, Milly Skellington, Agony Starlight, and Jennifer Blaine. SPRING/BREAK Art Show is an internationally recognized exhibition platform using underused, atypical, and historic New York City exhibition spaces to activate and challenge the traditional cultural landscape of the art market, typically but not exclusively during Armory Arts Week. Wharmby is primary instructor of AOA 1000 Discovering the Arts and Curatorial Manager for the School of Art+Design at Purchase College.

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J.D. Zeik ’82, Assistant Professor of Screenwriting and Film, did the production draft for Shadow Land, a film that shot in May of this year, produced by SP Media, and filmed at Nu Boyana Studios in Bulgaria. It stars Academy Award winner Jon Voight, Martin Csokas (The Equalizer, The Lord of the Rings), and Rhona Mitra (The Last Ship).

TOP: Amanda Centeno in Behind the Attic Wall at Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theater, Written by Peggy Stafford, adapted from the novel by Sylvia Cassedy. Photo by Buck Lewis.