People

David Z. Saltz
Executive Director, ICE
Associate Professor and Department Head, Theatre and Film Studies

David Saltz is a specialist in modern drama, performance theory, the philosophy of art, and directing. His primary research focus has been the interaction between live performance and digital media. He was Principal Investigator of Virtual Vaudeville, a large-scale research project funded by the National Science Foundation to simulate a nineteenth century vaudeville performance on the computer. He has explored the use of computer technology extensively in his own work as a director and teacher. Along those lines he established the Interactive Performance Laboratory at UGA, has directed a series of productions incorporating real-time interactive digital media, and has created interactive sculptural installations that have been exhibited nationally. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and books, and is coeditor (with David Krasner) of the book Staging Philosophy: Intersections between Theatre, Performance and Philosophy.

Mark Callahan
Artistic Director, ICE
Instructor, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Mark Callahan is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a member of the European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. His work has evolved from a traditional printmaking background to experimental multimedia projects. He was commissioned to create a site-specific work for Video Culture: Three Decades of Video Art, a collaboration that joined the forces of eleven institutions in the metro Detroit area to examine video art and its impact on contemporary culture. His work has also been used in concert by R.E.M. as a large-scale video projection. He is the executive producer of AUX, an event and publication series devoted to experimental art in all forms. Internet Soul Portraits (I.S.P.), a gallery of images created for the Web, is now part of the Rhizome Artbase at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Recent group exhibitions include Memery: Imitation, Memory, and Internet Culture at MASS MoCA and You All Fell for My Act at the Showroom for Moving and Media Art in the Netherlands, and Game Change: Videogames as Art Medium and Inspiration at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia.

Carmon Colangelo
Founding Director, ICE (1999-2006)
Dean, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts
Washington University in St. Louis

From 1997 to 2006, Carmon Colangelo was the director of the Lamar Dodd School of Art at UGA. A widely exhibited artist known for large mixed-media prints that combine digital and traditional processes, Colangelo’s work has been featured in many solo shows and group exhibitions in Argentina, Canada, England, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and across the United States. His work has been collected by many of the nation’s leading museums, including the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Colangelo joined Washington University as the first dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts in July 2006. As dean, Colangelo oversees the School’s four academic units – the College of Art, College of Architecture, Graduate School of Art, and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design – as well as the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, home to one of the nation’s finest university collections of modern art. Colangelo also serves as a member of the University Council and as the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts.

Leonard V. Ball, Jr.
Charter Member, ICE Advisory Board
Associate Professor and Chair of Composition and Theory, Hugh Hodgson School of Music
Director, Roger and Phyllis Dancz Center for New Music

Leonard Ball has been a member of the Composition and Theory faculty at UGA since 1987. His principal responsibilities include instruction in undergraduate and graduate acoustic and electronic composition, technology and theory. His works have been performed across the United States, in Europe, South America, and Japan. Recently his electronic work has focused on interactivity involving dancers (movement) and sound. Dr. Ball holds the degrees Bachelor of Music in theory and composition and Master of Music in composition from Kansas State University. His Doctor of Musical Arts in composition was earned at the University of Memphis. His principal teachers were T. Hanley Jackson, John Baur, and Donald Freund.

Bala Sarasvati
Charter Member, ICE Advisory Board
Professor and Modern Dance Program Coordinator, Department of Dance
Jane Willson Professor in the Arts

Bala is a Certified Movement Analyst (CMA) specializing in the application of movement theory to dance training and performance. She holds BS and BFA degrees from the University of Utah, MA and MFA degrees from The Ohio State University. She has served on the faculty for the Jose Limon Dance Institute, the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, Seattle Dance Centre. Her dance training approach has been presented at El Contro Laban 2002 and Global Laban 2008, both in Rio de Janeiro and at Laban Centre London, UK; and International Council Kinetography Laban, Laban Centre, London. Bala has served as guest artist at numerous universities and intensive summer dance programs and choreographed over forty full-length dance pieces. Her choreography has been shown throughout the US and China, and in Brazil, Taiwan, France and Costa Rica. She has presented choreography at Judson Church and St. Marks’ Church in New York City; Seattle Bumbershoot Art Festivals, Seattle, WA; Piccolo Spoleto Festivals in Charleston, SC. In addition, she has presented choreography at National Dance Association and National American College Dance Festival conferences, and performed at two National Society for Literature and Science conferences. Shakti-The Force of Destiny, one of the many interactive computer and dance projects, was presented as a Cultural Olympiad Event during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. Her dance for camera, Springbreak, was selected for the Quinto Festival International Video Danza ’99, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has served on the board for the National American College Dance Festival Association 1995-2001 and the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, NYC Board of Directors. Bala served as Head, Department of Dance at UGA from1998-1999 and 2000-2006.

Jason Cantarella
ICE Advisory Board
Associate Professor, Mathematics

Jason Cantarella’s mathematical interests lie between geometry and topology, including optimal geometry problems such as “What is the shape of a tight knot?”, or “How can you measure the topological complexity of a fluid flow?.” He is also interested in the arts, especially in computer graphics and in sculpture. Before he came to UGA, he was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, and an undergraduate at Vassar and St. John’s Colleges. He runs the Geometry VIGRE Group which involves undergraduates and graduate students in a research project. He was honored to receive the Richard B. Russell teaching award in 2007.

George Contini
ICE Advisory Board
Associate Professor and Undergraduate Coordinator, Theatre and Film Studies

George Contini specializes in Characterization, Solo Performance, Acting on Camera and Queer Theatre and Film. In addition to teaching, George maintains a career in theatre and film. His original solo show Put It In the Scrapbook was recently performed at the New Orleans Fringe Festival. Prior to that he was seen locally in Shear Madness at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre and The Big Bang at the Horizon Theatre. He adapted and directed the first English translation of Augusto Boal’s The Misadventures of Uncle McBuck. His script Portraits of W.H. was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship for New Forms in Theatre and Opening Doors was commissioned by the Pan American Games and toured throughout the Midwest to promote that event. Among the diverse shows George has directed are The 39 Steps, 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Grapes of Wrath, Dangerous Liaisons, Iphigenia at Aulis/ Trojan Women, Children of an Idol Moon, Pippin, Laramie Project, Lion in Winter, Fifth of July, Psycho Beach Party, Company, Raft of the Medusa, and the original opera A Good Man Is Hard to Find. While at UGA George has been honored to receive many university-wide awards recognizing his outstanding teaching and research including the Richard Russell Award, Sandy Beaver Teaching Fellowship, M. G. Michael Award, Sandy Beaver Special Teaching Award, and grants from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Mr. Contini received his MFA from the University of Miami, Florida in Film Production and received his BA from Baldwin-Wallace College with a double major in Theatre and English.

Chris Cuomo
ICE Advisory Board
Professor, Philosophy and Women’s Studies

Chris Cuomo holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Formerly a professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Cincinnati, Dr. Cuomo’s research focuses on ethics, feminist philosophies, race, sexuality, environmental ethics and art. She is the author of Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing and The Philosopher Queen: Feminist Essays on War, Love & Knowledge, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and an American Philosophical Association Book Award and coeditor of The Feminist Philosophy Reader. Dr. Cuomo has been awarded grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Charles Phelps Taft Center.

John English
ICE Advisory Board
Professor Emeritus, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication

John English is a veteran freelance journalist who specializes in covering the arts, travel journalism, profiles and reporting on the media. He was a professor of arts and magazine journalism at UGA from 1970 until 2000, when he retired. He continues to live in Athens despite a long-standing affinity for Italy and Malaysia. In recent years, he has been creating art – conceptual works, installations and sculptures – that have been shown locally, in Atlanta and elsewhere.

Hope Hilton
ICE Advisory Board
Gallery Director, ATHICA

Hope Hilton is the Gallery Manager of ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, a non-profit art space dedicated to exhibiting challenging and innovative contemporary art. She graduated cum laude from the Atlanta College of Art in 2003 and magna cum laude from the City University of New York, Hunter College in 2008. As an artist, Hilton curates, collaborates, designs, publishes, writes, and walks. She participated in Open Engagement: Art After Aesthetic Distance at the University of Regina in Canada, and completed projects for The Kitchen in New York City, The College of the Canyons in Los Angeles, and Beit HaGefen Art Gallery in Haifa, Israel. Hilton was awarded a grant in 2010 from the Forward Arts Foundation in Atlanta and was a finalist for the Hudgen’s Prize in 2011. She joined ATHICA as Gallery Manager in 2012.

Nadia Kellam
ICE Advisory Board
Associate Professor, Biological and Agricultural Engineering
Faculty of Engineering

Nadia Kellam is an engineering education researcher with a PhD in mechanical engineering. She is an Assistant Professor with the Faculty of Engineering, an interdisciplinary institution whose vision encompasses engineering and liberal arts. Her research and teaching are aligned with the Faculty of Engineering and include the design, development, and implementation of innovative Synthesis and Design Studios within the Environmental Engineering program. The current sophomore-level Studio integrates engineering and art students with specific instruction in observation, modeling, problem framing, and creative thinking strategies within the ill-structured issue of sustainability and food. Within this Studio Sequence her research is focused on how the cognitive capacity of artistic, creative thinking informs the development of creative problem solving within environmental engineering students. Dr. Kellam’s other research and teaching interests include sustainability, complex systems, and modeling. She also teaches at the undergraduate level within the Biological and Agricultural Engineering department, is a Lilly Teaching Fellow, and is a key faculty member appointed to design the Environmental Engineering program of study.

Jed Rasula
ICE Advisory Board
Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor, Department of English

Jed Rasula has a BA from Indiana University, and a PhD from the History of Consciousness Program at University of California, Santa Cruz. He taught at Pomona College (California) and Queen’s University (Canada) before coming to UGA in 2001. Publications include The American Poetry Wax Museum, Imagining Language with Steve McCaffery, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry, and Syncopations: Contemporary American Poetry and the Stress of Innovation and Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth. Also, poetry books Tabula Rasula and Hot Wax. Work in progress: an anthology, Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity, and two critical studies, Jazzbandism and Oblique Modernism.

Martijn van Wagtendonk
ICE Advisory Board
Associate Professor, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Martijn van Wagtendonk has been on the faculty of the Lamar Dodd School of Art since 2004. He started art school in 1991 at the Willem de Kooning Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Academy of Visual Arts), in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. In 1996 he received his BFA in sculpture at the Fontys Academie voor Beeldende Vorming (Academy for Visual Forming), in Tilburg, The Netherlands, after which he left his home country to pursue an MFA in sculpture at The Ohio State University, in Columbus, Ohio, which he received in 1998. Several years later, he moved to Los Angeles and went back to school for a second Masters Degree (2002) in Experimental Animation from The California Institute for the Arts, in Valencia California.

Gene Wright
ICE Advisory Board
Interim Director and Professor, Lamar Dodd School of Art
Senior Dean of the Franklin Residential College

Gene Wright is a professor and area chair of the BFA program of Scientific Illustration as well as the chair of the AB program in Studio Art, who joined the faculty in 1992. He earned his BFA in Scientific Illustration from the University of Georgia in 1986, and his Master’s Degree in Medical Illustration from the Medical College of Georgia in 1990. Wright was selected as a Lilly Teaching Fellow in 1990 and also serves as the Senior Dean of the UGA Franklin Residential College. Beyond teaching, Wright works as a freelance medical and science illustrator creating a wide range of illustrations for journal, textbook, advertising, and multimedia Web-based applications.

Andrew Zawacki
ICE Advisory Board
Associate Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program, Department of English

Andrew Zawacki is the author of three poetry books – Petals of Zero Petals of One, Anabranch, and By Reason of Breakings – and of several chapbooks: Georgia, co-winner of the 1913 Prize; Glassscape; Lumieretheque; Arrow’s Shadow; Videotape; Roche Limit; Bartleby’s Waste-book; and Masquerade, which received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, and elsewhere, including the anthologies Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Walt Whitman Hom(m)age, 2005/1855, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers’ Association and the recipient of a Slovenian Ministry of Culture Translation Grant, Zawacki has edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 and Ales Debeljak’s new and selected poems, Without Anesthesia. His translation from the French of Sebastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is forthcoming. Coeditor of Verse and of The Verse Book of Interviews, he has published criticism in the TLS, Boston Review, Talisman, How2, New German Critique, Australian Book Review, Religion and Literature, and other international journals. He has a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Katie Gregg
Graduate Assistant in Interdisciplinary Arts Research
MFA candidate, Theatre and Film Studies

Katie Gregg is a filmmaker and animator from St. Simons Island, Georgia. She graduated from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington with a BA in Film Production and Animation. While living in Seattle, Katie co-founded a film production company that was included in festivals throughout the country. Her current work seeks to marry concepts in new media with classical performance techniques.

Taylor Hobson
Graduate Assistant in Interdisciplinary Arts Research
MA candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Taylor Hobson graduated cum laude from Georgetown University with a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and English. Having written about the ways in which photography has affected the contemporary art object and the study of art, he is interested in the tensions between art and its dispersal. Taylor is currently working toward a Master’s degree in Art History, focusing on contemporary art.

Hanna Lisa Stefansson
Graduate Assistant in Interdisciplinary Arts Research
DMA candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music

Hanna Lisa Stefansson is a music composer and pianist. She received her BA from Emory University in music with a focus on piano performance and her Masters degree in music composition from Georgia State University. Her interests spotlight composition in both the acoustic and electronic music realms for film, theater, dance, and other multimedia genres.

Brandon Raab
Graduate Assistant in Interdisciplinary Arts Research
MFA candidate, Theatre and Film Studies

Brandon Raab is a writer and animator with an interest in the relationship between story narrative and 3D animation. He received a BA in Playwriting at DePaul University in Chicago. He is exploring the areas where dramatic theories can be juxtaposed with current interactive media to create a genuine immersive experience. As a writer, his work focuses on the integration and assimilation of social media in everyday life. This includes work that incorporate live use of popular media combined with current cultural memes.

Kai Riedl
Graduate Assistant in Interdisciplinary Arts Research
PhD candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music

Kai Riedl is a composer, performer, and director, whose latest collaborative project, Our New Silence, combines the work of musicians in Southeast Asia and Athens, Georgia. Riedl is based in Athens, where he has recorded and performed extensively, and where he has taught on Asian religions, music and religious culture, and ethnomusicology at UGA. Riedl appears on many recordings by Athens bands, including the “supergroup” Tuatara (with members of R.E.M and the famed poet Coleman Barks). Riedl recorded and produced Javasounds, a twelve-volume series of traditional Indonesian music, over the course of six years and multiple trips to western and central Java, Indonesia. This monumental work became the basis for Our New Silence, through which Riedl and a collection of diverse local musicians built upon portions of the multi-track recordings to produce new works. Riedl’s overall interests are in trans-local performance, generative music environments and researching stylized multiculturalism. He is currently a PhD student in ethnomusicology.

Victoria Weaver
Graduate Assistant in Interdisciplinary Arts Research
MA Ed. candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Victoria Weaver received a BFA in Visual Communications and a BA in English Literature from Truman State University, where she was awarded an Undergraduate Research Grant in interdisciplinary studies for her research on the Bloomsbury Group. Her work has been featured in Creative Quarterly, Jane Says: An Anthology of Women’s Creative Works, and in an exhibition at the Dallas Society of Visual Communications.