In spring 2022, five seniors majoring in digital media studies were engrossed in their capstone project, assisting the efforts of the University’s (MAG) to make greater use of digital technologies in its exhibits and educational programming. One year later, not only is their capstone long complete, but a partnership between the Memorial Art Gallery and the digital media studies team has resulted in new educational materials available to a national audience of educators and students through a portal created by Verizon to help promote digital equity among the nation’s schoolchildren.

By visiting , educators, who are provided an access code, can find that draw on works in the Memorial Art Gallery collections to teach a social studies unit targeted to second graders. The lessons are a prime example of arts integration in the classroom, an approach to teaching that conveys subject matter in other areas of study through close examination of art and participation in art-making. The lessons expose schoolchildren (and their teachers) to advanced technologies—in this case, AR, or augmented reality—that many students may not otherwise encounter in their formative years.

From capstone students to grant winners

“We excel at collaborating and finding solutions to real world problems in our community,” says , an assistant professor of studio arts, describing the , which she directs. “This project is quintessentially Digital Media Studies at the URochester.”

Early in the spring 2022 semester, five seniors in Ashenfelder’s capstone course—Gina Romanazzi, Gevher Karboga, Bradley Martin, Nesli Oruc, and Yifan Jiang—approached the University’s art museum about expanding its digital presence.

Says Romanazzi, “With the pandemic in mind, we wanted to expand the in-person experience so that you could observe artwork online.” The team also wanted to make the art appealing to various types of learners. “Most art museums emphasize a ‘do not touch’ policy, understandably so, but this approach can hinder engagement,” she adds. “People who may need to interact with an artwork by pointing an app at a piece to get more information.”

To get started, the group met with Nile Blunt, who was then the McPherson Director for Academic Programs at MAG, to better understand the museum’s needs and brainstorm ideas for attracting more visitors—particularly younger ones. Blunt, now the senior director of museum learning at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, had joined MAG after playing a major role in the development of in-person and online arts education as head of school programs at in Bentonville, Arkansas.

“We were thrilled in the interest to collaborate,” said Blunt, who introduced the team to several pieces in the museum’s permanent collection. “Looking at the details, interrogating the artwork, and finding ways to make the artwork personal to you are all important ways to enhance the visitor’s experience.” To appeal to younger generations, the team proposed using AR and other new educational technologies.

HOW IT WORKS: Lessons are accessible on a CocoCast AR app for tablets. On the left is a screenshot of 3D model of the painting Sunday Morning, by Jerome Myers, part of the Memorial Art Gallery collection. The model allows students to explore the painting from multiple angles. Says Stephanie Ashenfelder, director of the Undergraduate Program in Digital Media Studies at Rochester: “The recorded 3D model is then placed in a carousel in the app. Students are invited to make a work of art from a lesson plan that is built around the captured model. These works are then scanned and placed in the carousel as well. Students then record an audio ‘cast’ to go with their work of art.” (Images provided)

For example, they envisioned a downloadable app that would provide users with additional information about the museum and the pieces inside, in the form of text, images, or videos. According to Ashenfelder, in one iteration the students “imagined an AR piece where you would hover over paintings to learn more about them and the person who created them.”

At the close of their senior year, they had a detailed proposal and had completed ample work on the content. That led Blunt and Ashenfelder to submit the proposal for the $1M Museum Initiative, a joint project of Verizon and New York University’s .

NYC Media Lab and Verizon launched the early in 2022, building on an earlier program called the 5G EdTech Challenge. The Museum Initiative connects educators with museums, science centers, aquariums, and cultural institutions to showcase original educational technologies that can serve as tools in the classroom to create more engaging learning experiences.

A few days after commencement, the team learned they were one of nine winners nationally of a $100,000 grant from the initiative.

The inaugural lineup of winners included, in addition to the MAG-Digital Media Studies partnership, such institutions as the Belle Isle Conservancy in Detroit, the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, and The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

With the exception of Jiang, who went on to graduate school, the team members, now all graduates, stayed in Rochester to work as employees on the new initiative. Throughout the summer and fall, the new graduates, Ashenfelder, and staff members at MAG worked to develop new, immersive, AR-based educational content targeted to curricula for second-grade students.

Help from MAG’s Expanded Learning Collaboration

“Once we got the grant and began working on this wonderful project, I think the feeling was that our teamwork hadn’t changed. If anything, we’re more driven and more dedicated, and it’s nice to be working toward an admirable goal,” says Martin. “And working with your friends.”

Over the summer, Romanazzi and Karboga were hired as project directors, and Martin and Oruc later joined as IT. Among the assignments, Romanazzi explained that meeting the New York state curriculum requirements and working with content advisors to develop appropriate language for second graders, for example, was important. With the help of the established curriculum and assistance from Sydney Greaves, the Estelle B. Goldman Assistant Curator of Academic Programs at MAG, and from the museum’s , the grant team worked on writing lesson plans to implement with students in the Rochester City School District.

So, what kind of experiences are available to these young students? Equipped with provided tablets, a room full of second graders will use the to access multimedia casts that share galleries of 3D models of real-life objects accompanied by audio explanations. Prompted by the teacher, they will discover the painting Summer Street Scene in Harlem by Jacob Lawrence, which is part of the lesson plan “Life in a Community.” The activity allows a student to investigate the painting virtually by zooming closer into the art, examining the colors and brush strokes. Then, they can go through a lesson plan with their instructor, which could be about the community they live in, and how communities have changed over time. They might discuss where painters must have lived when they created particular paintings. A second lesson plan invites students to respond to the art by creating their own piece, and then scanning it back into the portal. The end result is a digital gallery of the students’ art—a curated environment that becomes the setting for new lessons the instructor can create.

Says Abran Maldonado, director of the NYC Media Lab’s 5G EdTech Challenge: “The MAG-RCSD Expanded Learning Collaboration is a unique component of their project, and it caught our attention from the start, as it’s designed to take students out of the classroom and into the art museum so they can explore art and culture firsthand.”

Now, he says, “we’re able to enhance this learning by introducing the fundamentals of augmented reality and photogrammetry through virtual 3D models of significant artworks.”

“We’re very fortunate to have been able to work with the Memorial Art Gallery/Ģ����ý team.”

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On-stage intimacy work has become a pillar of the theater industry, and it’s becoming a more integral part of performances by the International Theatre Program at the .

Leading the program’s effort is Sara Penner, a senior lecturer of theatre in the and a voice and acting coach for the . She compares the work of an intimacy director to the role of a fight director.

“Any time you do a fight on stage, you have a skilled fight director on a set, so actors can be safe doing the work and not hurt each other,” she says. A fight director makes a safe space by carefully choreographing scenes. Intimacy directors help honor actors’ needs for bodily autonomy and boundaries by taking a similar approach.

The field of intimacy direction, coordination, or choreography began informally, about 10 to 15 years ago. Its growth accelerated along with the #MeToo movement, and training programs started to appear, as well as an accrediting agency. Access to theatrical intimacy training, through virtual workshops, grew nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Penner, it’s not necessary to be certified as an intimacy coordinator or intimacy director, but you do need certain skills. “You need to have a movement background that gives you the skills and language to explain movement in a desexualized way,” she says.

Penner’s interest in intimacy directing grew out of her work on a 2019 production for called Indecent. While playing Manke/Freida, she worked for the first time with an intimacy director. Says Penner, “I thought, ‘Why wasn’t this the way we have always worked?’”

From that experience, Penner went on to shape consent policies and practices for the International Theater Program. She was awarded a Teaching Innovation Grant in 2022 to support her work building new courses and practices. Penner also began teaching a consent and performance course through the at the .

While the International Theatre Program is no stranger to intimacy work in its repertoire, the of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses offered a suitable opportunity to introduce an intimacy director. A contemporary retelling of the ancient poem by Ovid, the play contains abstract sexual scenes, as well as depictions of drowning, incest, and simulated violence. “There needs to be a clear chain of communication for the students,” says Penner.

Brittany Broadus ’24, one of the performers in Metamorphoses, is grateful for Penner’s intimacy direction. Recalling a difficult role she played in a high school theater production, Broadus says she wishes she could have advocated for herself more and is now realizing things could have gone differently. She describes the experience of working with Penner as “being taught that it’s okay to talk about my boundaries as a person and knowing that there would be no repercussions for that.”

How does intimacy direction work?

Intimacy coordination or direction makes intimacy work collaborative. With Penner, the students work on partner-building exercises during what’s called a consent-based rehearsal. The exercises are designed to support the actors’ ability to do mentally, emotionally, and physically challenging work. During rehearsals, the actors form a circle and call out to each other, one at a time, “May I touch your arm?” The facing actor may say “yes” or “no.”

“The students are learning to ask before they touch,” says Penner. The physical boundary practices also give the students the space and tools to communicate their boundaries in the rehearsal process.

“When we look at choreographing these intensely intimate moments, I use Five C’s: context, communication, consent, choreography, and closure,” Penner says. The process always begins with collective agreements: What do you need to be able to work in a safe space? What do you need from a partner, and what do you need to bring yourself? “Then, we work with those physical boundaries, which don’t need to be justified, as specifically as possible,” she says.

Actors are also provided an exit strategy. “I spend a lot of time helping them understand ‘where is comfortable?’ and how we can stretch ourselves, but not push over into pain or trauma,” says Penner.

In Metamorphoses, the significant moments of intimacy are built one step at a time through choreography and desexualized language. The process is “very technical,” according to Penner. “It’s determining exactly where a hand goes, counting how long a kiss lasts for, the duration of each activity.” As an intimacy director on Metamorphoses, she collaborates with director, Joe Calarco, to decide what story they are trying to tell physically and contextually and if there’s another way to do a scene. “A kiss might become a gesture, an embrace or a long stare into each other’s eyes,” says Penner. In a film or on stage, the director may use imagery or non-literal storytelling, and the audience may interpret that visual however they want.

“There are a million ways to tell a story,” she says.

Intimacy and consent in the classroom and beyond

Intimacy coordination and direction has started expanding beyond the International Theatre Program.

Lindsay Baker, an adjunct opera instructor and acting coach in the at the Eastman School, has also advocated for intimacy work in recent Eastman Opera Theatre productions while incorporating consent-forward practices in the classroom.

“Beyond intimacy, I’m thinking about how we create a classroom setting, or spaces, where there’s open, transparent communication—where we honor accessibility and access needs,” says Baker, who choreographed intimacy for the Eastman Opera Theatre’s spring opera Florencia en el Amazonas and is currently providing intimacy direction for the Penfield Players community theater group. Those types of spaces, she adds, are where educators “help [students] do their best learning.”

One of Baker’s students, Isaac Pendley ’23E (MM), played the role of Alvaro in Florencia. Although he had heard of intimacy coordination, he’d never experienced intimacy choreography firsthand before coming to Eastman. Singing-actors like Pendley face special challenges: in addition to the blocking and live acting required on stage, they also have to perform intense and demanding vocal techniques. But intimacy coaching before and during rehearsals can help ease that cognitive burden. “It provides a firm foundation for the scenes to be built on, freeing up the performer to focus on bringing the character to life and singing well,” he says.

Meanwhile, Penner—who this past year served as the intimacy director for the National Technical Institute for the Deaf’s production of Deaf Republic, The Company Theatre’s The Seagull, and the International Theatre Program’s The Crucible and The African Company Presents Richard the Third—is expanding her work beyond performance spaces, into clinical settings. She’s collaborating on an article for the Journal of Child and Maternal Health with Dr. Caitlin Dreisbach, an assistant professor at the and in the Goergen Institute for Data Science, and Dr. Nicholas Mercado, an assistant professor in the Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics. The team is looking at incorporating consent more effectively for nurses in birthing spaces.

“The world is rapidly changing in the way we meet people where they are; we can teach people practical tools so they can make a difference in their job,” says Penner. “If more people know this work is happening, more colleges and universities will make the space for it to happen.”

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“It was all gas and no breaks,” says Angelica Aranda ’23 of her frame of mind when she decided not to pursue law school. She was going to pursue art—even while realizing that “funding yourself as an artist is not easy.”

But that didn’t stop Aranda from figuring out how to push forward.

At first, politics and law seemed like a natural progression for someone conscious about the world around her. As a high school student, Aranda witnessed the turbulent politics of the Trump era, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the repercussions of the January 6 Capitol attack. As a result, she became motivated to think she should pursue a career in law.

But Aranda also recalled a time in grade school when she was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, and her answer would always be “an artist or an inventor.” Luckily for Aranda, she was able to take advantage of the open curriculum at the , exploring her art interests while also pursuing studies in the .

And it was after a study abroad program, where she studied terrorism and counterterrorism, that she decided for her career path to look instead for artistic ways to serve the world. During her junior year, the Queens native entered Rochester’s , interning at a nonprofit gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood called .

Art New York is set up to fully engage students in the workings of the art world in a city rich with galleries and artists. Once students are admitted to the program, they list their top 10 choices of internship sites and start to reach out to those places.

“The students do a tremendous amount of work up front,” says , an associate professor of art who recently served as the program director and its resident faculty member in New York. Layton says that fewer than half of the students accepted are studio art majors, but they are nonetheless looking to explore opportunities in the art world. “It can be difficult to get an internship in New York City,” says Layton. “We step in to assist with a match, if we need to.”

Finding herself, helping others with book art

“I was fully submerged,” says Aranda, when she began Art New York.

As an Art New York student, Aranda became fascinated with the book art form. “Book art can be any kind of documentation or art form encased in a book,” she says. “It can be difficult to define an artist’s book because it’s not what you would think of as a novel or a picture book. It could be anything.”

She began an opus of handmade books, specifically zines. Historically, zines have been voices for marginalized communities, from the punk zines of the 1970s to the 1990s riot grrrl movement of women’s self-publication. Layton says of zines: “They can carry huge ideas in small and portable forms. They’re intimate, easily shared, and inexpensively reproduced. It’s a truly democratic art form in the sense that anyone can make or distribute them. Authors bypass publishing companies completely. Zines are the original social media.”

What drew Aranda to zines was how inventive she could be in their design. “I like knowing that book art lets you practice any kind of medium, while still being consistent in the final product,” says Aranda. “It’s nonconformist.”

Aranda saw in book art an opportunity to self-reflect and share the beauty of her childhood community. When students were assigned a mapping project of their first experiences living in New York for the Art New York Field Studio course, she made an . “My neighborhood is where I see myself having grown up. It wasn’t just in my house,” she says. Adds Layton: “As you flip through this gorgeous book made on semi-transparent paper and see the overlapping imagery and text, Angelica’s hometown neighborhood comes to life. Every single one of the things that Angelica does is well done.”

Internship, entrepreneurship, leadership

During her internship, Aranda also started her first commercial venture. She set up a booth at a festival to support her home community and its businesses, and she sold her first books there. Her next step was to apply for the highly competitive ��(CRNY) program. Funded by the Mellon, Ford, and Stavros Niarchos foundations, CRNY recognizes the critical role of artists by providing guaranteed income and employment to 2,700 artists living New York State.

She was among the winners. “I was blessed that I got it,” says Aranda, who will receive an income of $1,000 for 18 consecutive months with no strings attached.

“Artists are historians and community builders, and it wouldn’t feel right to take a grant like that and not do something for the community that helped me become who I am,” Aranda says. So she decided to help build up the University’s community through a project called Mart Crew.

She began by setting up a drop box at Sage and inviting students and alumni to submit original works of art on a 4-inch x 5-inch piece of paper.

“She relentlessly recruited for that,” says Layton.

Then, she scanned the submitted works and presented them in a small artist’s book, which she sent to each participant. Included in each book was also an original work of art made by another participant.

Layton, impressed by Aranda, recruited her as a teaching assistant for her performance art course. At the start of the 2023 spring semester, Aranda also taught a zine workshop to her peers, hosted in conjunction with the undergraduate Creative Arts Club and the Art and Music Library, where she’s currently cataloging and archiving the entire collection of artists’ books under the direction of the art librarian Stephanie Frontz.

Aranda plans to pursue graduate study in library science, looking forward to a career, perhaps, in an artist’s book library. Still, ideally, she wants to continue the book art form. “I always want to find a way to give back to the community,” she says. “And hopefully, wherever I’ll be, I’ll find a way to share what I do with the people I’m around.”

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Like many dramatizations based on real-life events, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible blurs the line between fact and fiction. The award-winning play presents a fictionalized account of colonial America’s Salem witch trials during the late 17th century.

Most historians agree that there are significant differences between the historical record and the actions of the play. Miller, who wrote the play in the 1950s as an allegory about the McCarthy trials occurring during his time, was working with available records. The result is an artistic interpretation, one that includes the small but pivotal role of Tituba, based on a real-life enslaved woman.

Although Miller’s play indicates the character is from Barbados, “Tituba was not African, nor was she from Barbados,” according to , a professor of history at the Ģ����ý whose expertise includes transnational history spanning the 15th through 19th centuries. Instead, records describe Tituba as being an [Indigenous] Indian. “But since she’s an enslaved person in the documents, Miller implies [her Barbadian origin] in his narrative,” he said during a public panel discussion titled “.”

Fellow panelist the Frederick Douglass Associate Professor of African American Literature and Culture and the director of the , added that the implication that Tituba is Black “makes her perceptibly an enslaved person. It also makes her perceptibly devalued, part of the lineage of the colonized.”

Understanding Tituba, engaging the community

Jarvis’s and McCune’s insights were made during a discussion about history, authenticity, performance, race, and the performance of race—a discussion spurred by the ’s fall 2022 production of The Crucible.

“The goal of the theater program has been to show serious works of theater that have resonance and also entertain our audiences,” says , the Russell and Ruth Peck Artistic Director of the International Theatre Program.

Yet as new generations of actors and students take the stage, the theater industry has had to examine its assumptions and biases, particularly with regard to marginalized characters in classic or canonical works. To do so effectively at Rochester, Maister tapped , an award-winning local actor and community advocate, to collaborate and to play the role of Tituba in Rochester’s production. In addition to roles in stage plays, short films, and web series, Davis has played Anna Murray Douglass—an American abolitionist, a member of the Underground Railroad, and the first wife of Frederick Douglass—in Watch Night 1862 by Delores Jackson Radney (Radney, a theater artist and community educator, is also the program manager for at the University’s Memorial Art Gallery).

Having a community member join a campus production—as a performer, an instructor, or both—can help the program as a whole become more inclusive. “When we have the privilege of working with diverse actors in our spaces, we’re always asking about how we do that as responsibly and healthily as possible,” says , a senior lecturer in the program who was the acting and voice coach for the cast of The Crucible.

For her part, Davis agreed to play Tituba as long as she could dig into the character while taking part in the ongoing conversation exploring the character’s role and identity. “I can give [Tituba] a voice,” recalls Davis. “She deserves all that I can give her.”

Maister, Davis, the students, and the other participants collaborated to bring a version of Tituba to the stage who is “very aware of what she’s doing, and it’s not coming from a place of fear,” Maister explains. Tituba’s agency reaches its pinnacle at the end of the first act, when the character confesses to seeing the devil. Participating in both the production and the related panel discussion resonated with Davis in ways that conveyed a clear message, she says: “We don’t only see you, we also hear you.”

But bringing community members into the program also benefits the Rochester undergraduates who learn from the experience and professionalism of area actors.

Manita Opoku ’26, who played the role of Susanna Walcott in the production, was impressed by the commitment that community actors like Davis brought to the process. “As students, we’re invested in our studies, classes, and extracurriculars,” says Opoku. “Seeing someone like Kat come in from outside school to act with a busy ongoing life schedule—you could see it was her passion,” Opoku says.

Transforming the theater experience for BIPOC actors and audiences

Centering Tituba during the semester and the production allowed the International Theatre Program not only to bring diverse representation to the stage at the Sloan Performing Arts Center, but also to highlight the challenges faced by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) theater actors.

“You’re asking an actor to display their emotions for your entertainment,” says , an adjunct faculty member in the Rochester theater program and a member of Geva Theatre Center’s Artistic Council. “A real question I ask myself before choosing a play is, ‘What is this theater trying to say in this piece? And what is this piece saying about what they think of people who look like me?’”

Asking such questions—of oneself and of others—is a crucial first step to making theater spaces more inclusive, a step the program intends to continue with its future productions.

“Over the years, we’ve intentionally broadened the reach of the program into the Rochester community—and we’re now trying to broaden that reach to communities of color specifically,” Maister says.

For example, every four years or so, the International Theatre Program commissions, produces, and premieres a brand-new play from an upcoming playwright. The New Voices Initiative supports early-career playwrights while educating Rochester students about the artistic process. Before the The Crucible, the theater program presented Fellowship, a play by Asian American playwright Sam Chanse. Contemplating ideas of privilege and identity, the work explores what happens when college-age activists are brought together as part of an internship for a respected grassroots social justice organization. The world premiere of the play, which was held in fall 2022 at the University’s Sloan Performing Arts Center, featured an acting ensemble composed predominantly of performers of color.

And for its next production, according to Maister, the International Theatre Program hopes to show a different paradigm of Black theatricality on the stage: by Carlyle Brown. The work, which is based on the story of the first African American theater company, brings Davis back to campus as the production’s acting coach, while welcoming Jamaican performer, producer, educator, and activist as guest director.

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The world premiere of����takes place at the Ģ����ý’s��. Commissioned by the ��as part of its New Voice Initiative, the play was written by and first developed during her artist residency at Rochester in 2019. Chanse is a resident playwright, a��past fellow at MacDowell, Cherry Lane, Sundance Theatre Institute, and Playwrights Realm, and has��taught writing and playwriting at Columbia University and New York University, in addition to Rochester.

The story, which incorporates elements of magical realism, revolves around a group of young college-age activists taking on an internship for a social justice organization, but the location they work from is haunted. “Sam Chanse’s play is funny, perceptive, and timely. It touches on themes of identity and privilege, which are a part of today’s cultural conversation,” says Nigel Maister, director of the International Theatre Program. “But it does so by keeping a refreshingly irreverent eye on the foibles and dynamics of liberal pieties while not neglecting to acknowledge the sometimes-fraught history that gave birth to the need for them in the first place.”

Fellowship is the fifth production since 2005 to result from the New Voice Initiative, and was funded for 2019–22 by Natalie Hurst ’74. The initiative, which brings early-career playwrights to Rochester to work with students, has funded past commissions including��The Puzzle Locker��by W. David Hancock,��The Hairy Dutchman by Andy Bragen, The Rochester Plays by Spencer Christiano, and the musical Mother Courage and Her Children��with music by Matt Marks.

“Commissioning new work for the theater is one of the most important things an academic institution can do,” says Maister. “I am thrilled we can bring this new work into the world.”

Fellowship opens September 29 and runs through October 8.

• See showtimes and

The internationally recognized disability arts ensemble performed at the ’s as part of the group’s fall 2022 East Coast tour. Using art, technology, design, and dance, Kinetic Light creates, performs, and teaches at the intersections of access, queerness, disability, dance, and race.

The ensemble’s Laurel Lawson and Alice Sheppard presented Under Momentum, a duet that “celebrates the joys of continuous motion, the allure of speed, the beautiful futility of resisting gravity,” according to the artists. Lawson and Sheppard—both wheelchair users—performed on a series of ramps designed by artist and design researcher Sara Hendren. The show offered an accessible theater experience through accessible seating, sensory kits, quiet space, ASL interpreters, and audio description through the Audimance app.

“Their performance celebrated the joy of motion and the complexity of relationships in such a beautiful and moving way, and I was really thrilled that many members of the wide Rochester disability community joined us,” says , director of the and the .

The company was in residence at Rochester from September 5–9, 2022, engaging students and the community in workshops as well as performance.

Says Pfohl Smith: “Their residency taught us how access is aesthetic, cultural, and ongoing, and our work now is to continue to work towards creating a more equitable audience experience for everyone at every show.”

Presented by the Program of Dance and Movement, the residency was made possible through an ArtsConnect grant from the , University Advancement’s Schwartz Fund for the Humanities and Performing Arts, and additional support from the University’s Institute for the Performing Arts.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author will give a reading for the opening of the 60th anniversary season of the ’s —one of the oldest literary reading series in the United States, and one that has brought such figures as John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, and many others to the University for readings and discussions that are free and open to the public. The reading is part of the University’s Meliora Weekend��schedule of events.

Brown is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing and the director of the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Jennifer Grotz, an award-winning poet, director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, and professor of at Rochester, says: “While engaging with timeless subjects such as eros, death, and the natural world, Jericho’s poems are also finely tuned to our American cultural moment.” Brown “is quite simply one of the best poets working today, and we’re delighted to have him opening the 60th year of the Plutzik Reading Series.”

Brown is the author of The Tradition (2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2020, and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the 2009 American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by the trade publication Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets.

Brown’s reading��begins at 3:45 p.m., Friday, September 30, at the Hawkins-Carlson Room at Rush Rhees Library. The reading will be followed by a reception in the Plutzik Library. The Plutzik continues with five more events through spring 2023.

Series honors early poet-scholar Hyam Plutzik

The reading series is named for the poet Hyam Plutzik, who joined the faculty of Rochester’s English department in 1945 and served as the Deane Professor of Poetry and Rhetoric. With the exception of one year, which he spent at Yale University on a Ford Foundation Faculty Fellowship, he remained at Rochester until his death from cancer in 1962.

Plutzik’s death at age 50 cut short an extraordinary career in which he had published three collections of poetry, and been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for all three of them. A dedicated teacher, Plutzik believed fervently in the power of hearing poetry and prose read aloud at the podium. In 1958, he began bringing contemporary writers to give readings on campus. Following his death, the series was endowed through the generosity of his family and renamed after him.

Grotz calls Plutzik “an early example of the poet-scholar.”

“Although creative writing courses are pretty ubiquitous now in colleges and universities, this was not always the case,” she says.

The series has offered “a marvelous influx of some of the most important voices in contemporary literature,” Grotz adds, thereby deeply enriching the University’s classrooms and conversations. “Students are often transformed by the opportunity to meet a writer known previously only on the page.”

The series has included a —Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize–winning authors, National Book Award winners, and more than 22 former Poet Laureates. Nearly 400 writers have come to the University to read and interact with the Rochester community.

Plutzik Reading Series 2022–23

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Over four days in April, the Ģ����ý hosted “UR Remnants,” an interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty members and members of the local Indigenous and arts communities to tell Native American stories through performance and conversation.

With support from the��Center for Community Engagement, the project was led by Rose Pasquarello Beauchamp, associate professor of the , Stella Wang, associate professor of��, and community members Trish Corcoran (Seneca) a Native specialist and storyteller; Andrea Gluckman, photographer, and visual artist; and Greg Woodsbie, a musician.

The program included dance, storytelling, music, visual art, and a screening of a documentary film.��On the final day of the program, the Allegany River Indian Dancers—founded in 1979, one of North America’s most widely known Native dance groups—showcased traditional songs and dances of the Iroquois. The performance included opportunities for participation by faculty and staff.

Rainy weather necessitated some modifications to the events. For complete information on the program and its germination, the participants, the documentary film The Good Mind, and video excerpts, visit the website.

As a mere tween, Gabrielle Meli ’22 had already fallen in love twice: first with art; then with science.

“I loved art my entire life. My mom encouraged my artistic path, and then in eighth grade, I fell in love with the earth sciences,” she explains. She thought she would pursue a career either in art or in geology. Then, she says, “the older I got, and the more I took high school and college classes, I thought, ‘why do they have to be separate?’”

Meli is one of seven senior studio art majors in the����who presented an interdisciplinary thesis exhibition at the end of the 2022 spring semester. Her show is called Birefringence—a phenomenon that occurs when plane-polarized light passes through minerals under a microscope. Geologists can identify minerals by how they behave in this cross-polarized light. “It will be kind of brownish, and sometimes it can be green depending on what mineral you’re looking at,” she says. “When you cross those polarized lights, you get this beautiful, colorful image of the minerals.”

STEM fields and art are “more related than people think,” says Meli, a Henrietta, New York, native who will graduate in May 2022 with a double major in geology and studio arts.

In the summer of 2021, she participated in a field camp in Cardwell, Montana, through Indiana University, where she got hands-on experience on how field geologists work. “It was a great experience,” she says. “We went to Glacier and Yellowstone and studied the local geology in the Tabacco Root Mountains.”

Serendipitously, for Meli, the work that geologists do involves maps, drawings, and diagrams. Researchers are encouraged to sketch what they see as they take field samples and look at rocks. “We map and plan out what we think the rocks are doing underground. In my notebook, there are so many sketches of rocks that I see or cross-sections that I see of potential folds or faults,” she says.

Tapping foraged minerals and tackling gender inequality

Meli uses ordinary materials in her show, like acrylic paint and CMYK screen-printing, but true to form, she experiments with foraged materials from her geological finds to create her paint pigment. “It was a super interesting process,” she says. One of her pieces, Beartooth, includes an ink derived from a copper oxidation reaction. The process involves soaking copper scraps in a salt and vinegar bath; the salt is a catalyst for the reaction, but the vinegar helps oxidize the copper and creates a “beautiful blue liquid,” says Meli.

Meli became a teaching assistant in an introductory printmaking course taught by Mizin Shin, an assistant professor in the art and art history department. Shin, who taught Meli in advanced printmaking, recalls recommending to Meli a book by owner Jason Logan called Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Ink Making during a class critique of one of Meli’s works. Meli made good use of the suggestion. “In a short time, I saw that she had a lot of professionalism in her work,” Shin says.

Combining art and science isn’t the only thing on Meli’s mind these days. She also uses her art to address women’s inequality in STEM fields. One of her pieces is a crochet textile that depicts a mineral under a microscope and a thin section of rock. She observes there’s a stigma against craft arts, such as crocheting, knitting, and quilting, which are often not seen as serious art forms. “I wanted to show how you can get to the same image by taking a picture of it or crocheting it, but one will be seen more seriously than the other”—even when the crocheted image involved significantly more work than the photograph.

Meli will continue at the University in the one-year teaching and curriculum program at��. She sees a future for herself in a nontraditional teaching setting where she can focus on STEM and art. “I never pictured myself being a teacher, but I realized I liked the community and the togetherness when you are teaching and helping someone learn,” she says. “It will be a fun way to combine my science.”

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Rivera is the first Puerto Rican writer nominated for an Academy Award (for the screenplay for the film The Motorcycle Diaries) and is one of the most significant Latinx writers at work in theater and film today. The contemporary drama dives into a post-apocalyptic world where Angels and God spill over to the earth, while centered on the struggles of a young Puerto Rican woman named Marisol Perez. The play—infused with poetry, dreamscapes, and magic realism—explores religion, politics, and war.

Get a preview

The cast and crew of Marisol share a behind-the-scenes look at the production process.

Attend Marisol

The show opens Thursday, April 21, at 8 p.m. and continues through April 30 in the Sloan Performing Arts Center on the River Campus. Catch a 3 p.m. matinee on Sunday, April 21. Tickets are $8 for Ģ����ý students with ID card; $12 for faculty, staff, alumni, and seniors (65+); and $15 for general admission.