Wire:
news from the Columbia community
Under Construction: Media Production Center
In February 2009, Columbia College Chicago began work on the Media Production Center, the first new-construction building in the college’s history. When it opens in the spring of 2010, the MPC will provide classrooms, soundstages, a motion-capture studio, and production space for interdisciplinary learning in film, television, interactive arts and media, and other disciplines. Photographer Tom Nowak has been documenting the building’s progress. These photographs were taken from a nearby rooftop looking south toward the construction site at the corner of 16th and State Street. For more information on the MPC, visit columbiasmoment.org.
Audio Arts and Theater Departments Appoint New Chairs
Columbia’s Audio Arts and Acoustics and Theater departments will start the fall 2009 semester with new chairpersons in place.
With scholarly and professional work in the areas of auditory science, music cognition, systematic musicology, and instructional design, Pantelis Vassilakis, Ph.D. (left photo), the new chair of Audio Arts and Acoustics, stands comfortably at the intersection of art and science.
“My passion for sound is longstanding and has shaped my life as an artist, a scientist, and a professional,” said Vassilakis. “I look forward to engaging that passion and commitment to working with the department’s highly accomplished faculty of professionals, artists, and academics who are teaching and mentoring the next generation of international audio professionals.”
Over the course of his career, Vassilakis has held research, creative, and administrative positions with a number of private and public organizations in Europe, including the English National Ballet, the London Chinese Opera, and BBC Radio 3. For the past several years he has held a joint appointment at Columbia College and DePaul University.
The Theater department welcomes John Green, Ph.D. (right photo), who joins Columbia directly from his tenure at Butler University in Indianapolis, where he contributed to artistic growth and innovation across town and gown communities. Green, who noted the strong sense of ensemble he encountered among theater faculty at Columbia, also intends to collaborate across disciplines.
“In higher education we have the resources and the time to truly explore what theater in the twenty-first century is going to be,” he said. “We need to be innovative in suggesting our own ideas and also being responsive to the quiet revolution that’s been taking place in professional theater over the past decade. How many productions do we see where live performance interacts with electronic imagery, incorporating video in interesting and stimulating ways? Our students need to be learning those tools, doing those things.”
Green succeeds longtime chair Sheldon Patinkin, who headed the department for nearly 30 years. See our Q & A with Patinkin.
Comments (0)Hair Trigger, Fictionary, Chronicle Win Awards
Hair Trigger, the Fiction Writing department’s annual anthology of student writing, has once again received a Gold Crown Award from the Columbia University Scholastic Press Association, the journal’s fourth consecutive Gold Crown. Hair Trigger has won 23 major awards in national competitions, and has never failed to place in any year that it has been eligible.
Many Fiction Writing students won individual awards as well, including first-place awards in all three major categories: Stephanie Shaw for “Afterbirth” in the Experimental Fiction category; Chelsea Laine Wells for “The Heart of God” in the Traditional Fiction category; and J.S. Gordon for “When Thinking About Corners” in the Essays category. Fictionary, the Fiction Writing department’s semiannual magazine, won a silver medal in the Specialty Magazine category.
It’s not just Columbia’s fiction writers who are winning awards—our journalists are, too. For the second year in a row, the Columbia Chroniclehttp://columbiachronicle.com/ was named the state’s top student newspaper in its category (nondaily newspaper with a school population of more than 4,000). The General Excellence award was one of more than a dozen honors the Chronicle won at the 2009 Illinois College Press Association convention competition. Individuals who contribute to the Chronicle also won first-place awards for In-House Promotional Ad (Konrad Biegaj), Advertising Campaign (Emilia Klimiuk), Advertisement Less Than Full Page (Ben Andis and Matthew Mielke), Entertainment Supplement (Jessica Galliart), and Sports Feature Story (Matt Fagerholm).
Comments (0)TV Department Scores YouTube Hit with Sexperts
Sexperts, a new Web series developed and produced by Columbia College Television students in the Internet and Mobile Media concentration, made a smashing debut on YouTube, premiering May 7 with more than 1,000 views in the first 15 minutes. After 24 hours, according to the Sexperts Twitter account, it was the most-subscribed to comedy channel on YouTube for that month.
Instructor Wojciech Lorenc, who oversaw the show’s production and distribution, expressed surprise at the demographics of early viewers in a ReelChicago.com interview: 59 percent female, 45 percent over 25, and 25 percent over 45, as opposed to the mainly young, male viewership one might expect for a sexually themed Web series. Nine episodes and 125,000 views later, just like the show’s amorous couple, Sexperts is still going strong.
In the first five-minute episode, an average small-town couple makes a sex video, then accidentally sends it via an email attachment to everyone they know. The actors (Beth O’Neill and Brian Rabinowitz) are charming, and the show’s premiere is particularly clever in the way it enlists its own medium as part of its content. In the first episode, YouTube celebrities Valentina, Tony Huyin, Michael Buckley, and Karen Alloy make cameo appearances as friends of the couple who call in on Skype in response to the racy email they inadvertently received. The episode ends with a hint at what’s to come: viewers so impressed with the couple’s sexual prowess that they begin calling in for advice. Tyler Rutledge’s script was selected from student work in professor Michael Fry’s Writing for Internet and Mobile TV class, part of a newer concentration at Columbia focusing on online and handheld digital media.
Sexperts has been reviewed at NewTeeVee.com and ReelChicago.com. All episodes are available online at sexpertstheshow.com, along with behind-the-scenes material and information about the cast and crew.
Comments (0)Faculty and Staff Launch Grassroots Scholarship Initiative
Columbia’s faculty and staff—those who work most closely with students—witness firsthand the financial challenges that can complicate so many educational goals. College adviser J. Wayne Tukes and his colleagues in the Academic Advising offices wanted to do something to help. Beginning with a core group that met over brown-bag lunches, their effort has developed into a fully realized scholarship program.
Their faculty and staff committee, in cooperation with the Office of Institutional Advancement, has established the Columbia College Faculty/Staff Scholarship to assist students in need. This new fundraising initiative provides an opportunity for employees of the college to give to the scholarship fund and see their contributions matched by the college.
“It was a spontaneous, collective response across several departments,” explained Tukes, who serves as chair of the Faulty/Staff Scholarship Committee. “It’s really about giving something back to our college and community. We hope to represent a model not only for Columbia but also the country with the notion of internal giving.”
The college’s major scholarship initiative, Scholarship Columbia, is partnering with the faculty/staff initiative, providing matching funds to maximize fundraising efforts. New and increased gifts from faculty and staff are matched 1 to 1, while new and increased giving by faculty and staff who are also alumni is matched 2 to 1. More information is available at colum.edu/donate
Comments (0)Lecture Series to Focus on 21st-Century Media Arts
Conversations in the Arts is an annual speaker series that brings notable figures in the arts and culture to Columbia’s campus. This fall, the series begins a multiyear cycle that will focus on subjects related to each of the college’s three schools—Media Arts, Fine and Performing Arts, and Liberal Arts and Sciences—over the next three years.
The 2009/10 season, Media Arts in the 21st Century, features speakers who will address major trends and issues in the realm of media, including social media, print and broadcast journalism, and the moving image. Each speaker in the series will spend a day on campus meeting with students in the afternoon, providing them the opportunity to pose questions to the leaders in their fields. The evening lectures are open to the public, and each will be followed by a reception for members of the President’s Club.
The first speaker to join us this fall will be Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, the real-time, one-to-many social network that is changing the way people communicate around the world. Prior to launching this 140-character sensation, Stone helped build other popular social-media services, including Xanga, Blogger, and Odeo. Stone will speak at Columbia on October 6.
On January 27, Arianna Huffington, cofounder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post, will come to campus. Huffington, a nationally syndicated columnist, author, and cohost of NPR’s popular Left, Right, and Center political roundtable, launched The Huffington Post in 2005. The news and blog site quickly became among the most widely read media presences on the Internet.
Film Director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay! and The Namesake) will speak on April 28, 2010. She is one of the most formidable directors working today. Her company, Mirabai films, recently established Maisha, in support of screenwriters and directors in East Africa and South Asia. She is currently filming Amelia, starring Hilary Swank, about Amelia Earhart, and is in pre-production for the film Shantaram, to star Johnny Depp.
Tickets for Conversations in the Arts can be reserved at no charge on a first-come, first-served basis. All lectures begin at 7:00 p.m. at Film Row Cinema, 1104 South Wabash Avenue.
Comments (0)Photography Faculty Awarded 2009 Guggenheims
Photographers Anna Shteynshleyger and Brian Ulrich, faculty in Columbia’s Photography department, are among the 180 artists, scientists, and scholars from the United States and Canada who were awarded fellowships in the eighty-fifth competition of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship program. The fellows were selected from a group of nearly 3,000 applicants.
Guggenheim fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. Shteynshleyger and Ulrich join six other Photography department professors who previously won this prestigious award: Dawoud Bey, Paul D’Amato, Terry Evans, Barbara Kasten, Melissa Pinney, and department chair Bob Thall. Laura Salmon, an alum of the program, is also a past Guggenheim fellow.
Additionally, Photography department faculty member Greg Foster-Rice was a winner of this year’s Terra Foundation for American Art Fellowship in Art History.
Comments (0)ESB Institute’s Congo/Women Exhibit Heads to the U.N.
Lynsey Addario, photograph, from Congo/Women
“The arts play a powerful role as mirror and map to influence social change. Art allows us to be the most human we can be—it advocates for humanity and human response, and art does have consequences,” said Jane M. Saks, codirector and cocreator of the international touring exhibition Congo/Women. “Congo/Women sheds light not only on the situation facing women of the Democratic Republic of Congo, but on gender-based violence around the world.”
Saks, executive director of Columbia’s Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media (ESB Institute), created the exhibition in collaboration with Leslie Thomas, director of Art Works Project, an organization dedicated to raising awareness of human rights and environmental issues through design and the arts. Congo/Women, a photography exhibition and educational program, opened at Columbia College Chicago in February 2009 and has since traveled to Washington, D.C., (twice) and New York.
The second D.C. showing, at the invitation of Senator Barbara Boxer, was timed to coincide with the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Joint Subcommittee hearing, Confronting Rape and Other Forms of Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones. The exhibition, scheduled to tour the United States, Europe, and Africa over the next two years, will have its official opening in early October and be installed until November 2009 at the United Nations Headquarters’ exhibition space in New York, in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The exhibition and educational initiative was supported by the UNFPA, Humanity United, Oak Foundation, and Pritzker Pucker Foundation as well as Leadership Donors and other private donors of the ESB Institute.
Featuring photographs by photojournalists Lynsey Addario (2009 Pulitzer Prize winner and 2008 ESB Institute fellow), Marcus Bleasdale, Ron Haviv, and James Nachtwey, the exhibition and educational campaign are designed to raise awareness of the widespread sexual violence facing women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo and illuminate the global epidemic of gender-based sexual violence that confronts women and girls worldwide.
For information and exhibition schedule, visit colum.edu/congo/women.
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