The Arts, Entertainment and Media Management Department of Columbia College Chicago has announced the winners of 2006-7 Entrepreneurship Award: Stephanie Clemens of The Academy of Movement and Music/Momenta will receive the lifetime achievement award; the Silk Road Theatre Project will receive the award for small not-for-profits; Victory Gardens Theater will receive the award for not-for-profit cultural organizations with budgets over $1 million; and Flatfile Galleries will receive the award in the for-profit category.
Winners will be feted at a luncheon on Wednesday, September 26 at the Union League Club. The event, which begins at 11:30 a.m., features a keynote speech by Leslie Hindman, founder of the Midwest’s leading fine art auction house. Tickets are $95 per person and can be purchased by calling 312-344-6600 or 312-344-7658.
Proceeds from the Entrepreneurship Awards Luncheon will help support scholarships for students in the Arts, Entertainment and Media Management (AEMM) department at Columbia College Chicago. The AEMM department is the second largest department at Columbia with 1,200 students; it is the largest arts management department in the U.S.
The Entrepreneurship Awards Luncheon is organized by Professor Nissan Wasfie of Columbia’s AEMM department. In addition to his teaching duties and serving as co-coordinator of the Arts Entrepreneurship/Small Business Management concentration, Wasfie provides consulting services to artists and small for profit and not for profit arts businesses. He is also the Program Chair of the Entrepreneurship in the Arts division of the United States Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE).
Stephanie Clemens is the owner and director of The Academy of Movement and Music in Oak Park and is one of the artistic directors/performers/choreographers of MOMENTA, a Performing Arts Company that has been actively involved in the reconstruction of works by Doris Humphrey. Stephanie Clemens began her dance studies with Adolph Bolm in Southern California. As a child, she made her stage debut with the Ruth St. Denis Concert dancers and then continued her dance studies with Maria Kedrina, Michael Panieff, Gene Marinaccio and at the San Francisco Ballet School. She attended Juilliard in the late fifties; there her teachers were Anthony Tudor, Alfredo Corvino, Lucas Hoving, José Limón and members of the Graham Company. She has performed on the West Coast with the American Concert Ballet and the Cosmopolitan Opera Company and in the Midwest as a guest with Chicago Contemporary Dance Theatre. Clemens appeared as a soloist in New York and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., during 1989-90, performed a one-woman concert of St. Denis solos in summer 1993 in Sao Paolo, Brazil and in 1994 at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. Since 1988 she has worked on reconstructions of works by St. Denis, Doris Humphrey and Eleanor King with Karoun Tootikian, Ernestine Stodelle, Letitia Ide and Eleanor King. Clemens is a founding member and was executive director of the Doris Humphrey Society and director of the Tidmarsh Arts Foundation. She served on the board of the Oak Park Area Arts Council for more than ten years. In 2000, she received an award of recognition from the American Library Association for her efforts in producing six videos documenting the work of Doris Humphrey. In 2001, she was awarded a Ruth Page Award for Lifetime Service and received the Oak Park Area Arts Council’s Joseph Randall Shapiro Award. Stephanie has served on the Dance Panel for the Illinois Arts Council and on the Awards Committee for the Chicago Dance and Music Alliance.
Silk Road Theatre Project: Jamil Khoury, artistic director; Malik Gillani, managing director. Silk Road Theatre Project showcases playwrights of Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean backgrounds whose works address themes relevant to the peoples of the Silk Road and their Diaspora communities. Through the creation and presentation of outstanding theatre, we aim to promote discourse and dialogue among diverse audiences in Chicago. As Chicago's first ever theatre company dedicated to representing the experiences of such a broad grouping of peoples and regions, we give voice to cultures and experiences long absent on the American stage, and we aim to integrate these voices within the canon of American theatre. Founded in 2002, Silk Road Theatre Project is a creative response to September 11, 2001. Co-founders Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury felt compelled to respond to the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments that swept the U.S. following the attacks. Their hope was to counter negative representation of Middle Eastern and Muslim peoples with representation that was authentic, realistic and grounded in human experience. The idea quickly expanded beyond the Middle East to encompass the vast geographical area known historically as the "Silk Road." The term "Silk Road" refers to the great trade routes that originated in China and stretched across Central and South Asia, the Middle East and into Europe, from the 2nd century B.C.E until about the 16th century C.E. The Silk Road is a legacy associated with rich traditions of oral narrative, epic poetry and storytelling. Thus, the celebrated trade routes serve Silk Road Theatre Project both as a geographic guide as well as a metaphor for intercultural dialogue. Today, the nations of the Silk Road comprise some two-thirds of humanity.
Victory Gardens Theater: Dennis Zacek, artistic director; Marcelle McVay, managing director. One of Chicago’s most respected off-Loop theaters, Victory Gardens Theater has been the city’s #1 presenter of new work for 33 years. Since its founding in 1974, Victory Gardens has presented more world premiere mainstage productions than another Chicago theater. Today, Victory Gardens still emphasizes the work of Chicago writers and its own 12-member Playwrights Ensemble, a relationship that helped the company receive the 2001 Tony Award for Regional Theatre for "displaying a continuous level of artistic achievement contributing to the growth of theater nationally." The $11.8 million renovation of the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, which opened in September 2006, has hugely expanded the company’s artistic flexibility to meet the desires of its playwrights and enhanced its ability to welcome and honor patrons old and new. Built in 1914, the Biograph was best known as the site where FBI agents killed gangster John Dillinger in 1934. Today, the Biograph’s façade and marquee have been faithfully restored, a state-of-the-art semi-thrust stage with a modified proscenium has been retrofitted inside, 299 new seats have been installed and a contemporary interior design welcomes patrons to Chicago’s newest live theater venue.
Flatfile Galleries: Susan Aurinko, president. Aurinko opened FLATFILEgalleries in 2000 as FLATFILEphotographyGALLERY at 118 North Peoria, with a mission statement of helping young and un-shown photographers get a foot in the door of the art world, which was extended to include artists working in all media when the gallery moved to 119 North Peoria as FLATFILEphotography and expanded into a second space, called FLATFILEcontemporary. In 2004, FLATFILE moved to its current 8,000 square foot space at 217 North Carpenter, where five separate gallery spaces house simultaneous exhibitions. The gallery now shows artists from the U.S. and Europe, at all stages of their careers, working in all mediums, with one gallery space, The Library, dedicated to exclusively show young and un-shown artists. Aurinko is firmly committed to showing and promoting both emerging and established artists, as well as creating and maintaining a sense of community among FLATFILE’s artists. In her position as Gallery Director of FLATFILE, Aurinko has curated over 100 shows at FLATFILE and numerous shows in other galleries. Flatfile President Susan Aurinko serves on the boards of numerous cultural and philanthropic organizations and serves as President of the FLATFILE Foundation, an organization she founded with Morey Curtis.
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Columbia College Chicago’s explosive enrollment growth continues this fall, with the South Loop institution’s student population growing by about 5 percent, to a record 12,021. The number includes 11,366 undergraduates, making Columbia the second-largest, private, undergraduate college in Illinois.
Since 2000, when Dr. Warrick L. Carter became president, the arts and media college’s enrollment has grown by more than 30 percent.
“Today, Columbia is one of the ‘hot’ colleges at college recruitment fairs across the country,” says Mark Kelly, vice president for Student Affairs at Columbia. “Students flock to our campus because they recognize the value in what the college offers – an outstanding education in the creative disciplines, offered in the heart of one of America’s great cities.”
Kelly attributes Columbia’s success to a number of factors, including its innovative curriculum that was designed within a liberal arts context, but built “by creatives for creatives.” He adds, “We like to tell prospective students that they will work with leading faculty who understand the unique needs and learning styles of young creative people, and that, as students, they will join one of the largest assemblages of young creative talent in the nation.” Add that to our downtown Chicago location, “where the city of Chicago becomes our campus,” says Kelly, “and you have a compelling message that resonates with students.”
In addition, Kelly believes that Columbia’s success reflects the wisdom of its decision to expand its recruitment efforts from regional recruiting to national. This year Columbia enrolled freshmen from 46 states, and overall, more than 40 percent of the college’s new freshmen came from outside of Illinois – up from 29 percent just five years ago.
In the past four years, Columbia’s residential population has grown from 450 to nearly 2,750, making the school one of Illinois’ ten largest private, residential colleges.
Further, the college’s tuition pricing strategy “aims to keep tuition as low or lower than other private arts and media colleges.” Over the past four years, Columbia’s tuition has risen by less than 15 percent, about two-thirds of the national average for private institutions and one-third of the average for public schools over the same period. The college’s tuition - $17,100 this fall – is among the lowest of all private arts and media colleges in the nation.
Yet, according to Kelly, “we understand that some families will be challenged by the college’s costs, and in response, we have expanded our need-based scholarship programs to provide additional opportunities for students with limited financial resources.” This fall, Columbia offered 700 need-based scholarships, up from fewer than 50 just four years ago.
Kelly also stresses the college’s unique admissions philosophy, which recognizes that “creativity, talent and drive cannot be measured through standardized tests” and that, in the end, student voices and visions are best developed through a generous approach to admissions. “This approach has positioned the college as a welcoming place in the higher education landscape and one that draws the most diverse student body of all private arts and media schools in the nation.”
The college’s historic commitment to enrolling a diverse student body has led the college to pay particular attention to the recruitment of minority students. The number of new minority students at the college this fall – including new transfers – increased by nearly 13 percent. The number of African-Americans included in this year’s freshman class rose by 21.5 percent.
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Rehabbed Historic Building Home Features Charm of 1929 Art Deco
Plus the Latest in Technological and Lifestyle Amenities
Designed by Holabird and Root, the 27-story Buckingham building at 59 E. Van Buren was commissioned by the Buckingham family (of fountain fame) with interiors that include terrazzo hallways, marble wainscoting and a spacious lobby with art deco relief panels. The building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is a contributing structure to the Historic Michigan Boulevard District (a Chicago Landmark District).
The restoration and gut rehab of the structure began in 2006 when Brownstone Realty & Development Co. and L & H Real Estate Group formed a joint venture development entity (The Buckingham, LLC). Brownstone President David S. Dewey had spearheaded a number of developments, reclaiming and rehabbing historic properties and a five-year lease was brokered with Columbia College Chicago to develop the property for student housing.
“We look forward to a great relationship with Columbia and the Columbia students,” says Dewey. “I’m confident that with the college’s emphasis on arts and culture, the students will have a special appreciation of the care and effort that went into restoring this remarkable historic property. We’ve gone the extra mile in providing a great environment in which they can live and learn.”
With an eye to the upscale demands of today’s residential college students, the apartment building, now called The Buckingham, boasts 129 studio-, one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom apartments, totaling 456 beds. The building is fully occupied for Columbia’s 2007-8 academic year. Each living unit features ensuite laundry, full kitchens loaded with Energy Star appliances including dishwasher, disposal, microwave and refrigerators with icemakers. The entire building is, of course ‘wired,’ and High Speed internet, satellite television, and central heating and air conditioning are provided.
In keeping with Columbia’s program of sustainability and creating a green campus, the developers have used a predominance of ‘green’ features including Interface carpeting, Marmoleum flooring by Forbo, programmable thermostats, high-efficiency heat pump HVAC system, Thermopane windows, new perimeter insulation and Energy Star roofing. Compact fluorescent energy efficient light bulbs are used throughout the building and management is planning initiatives for students to save energy and be environmentally friendly.
“The Buckingham project is absolutely consistent with Columbia’s track record for recycling existing buildings as part of our commitment to the environment” says Alicia Berg, Columbia’s vice president for campus environment. “We also take real pride in our role as stewards of Chicago’s historic architecture.
“The way the historic architecture contrasts with the contemporary interior design coupled with the breathtaking views, gives the Buckingham the feel of a boutique hotel,” adds Berg.
Building amenities include a 24-hour security staff, fitness center, business center, craft room, lobby level guest lounge with fireplace, study lounge, 27th floor sky lounge with a variety of games, vending machines and an internet café with WiFi.
“With our continued enrollment increases and ever-expanding residential population -- this year totaling 2,700 students living on campus -- not to mention the rising level of lifestyle expectations by students and parents, the Buckingham is an ideal fit for Columbia,” says Mark Kelly, vice president of student affairs. “The students couldn’t be happier with the apartments, the building amenities, the great location just one block from our core campus, and the great community that is already emerging among residents.”
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