Design professor receives NSF grant from NSF
By New and Media Relations Intern Hayley Morris
, assistant professor in the 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis Department of Design, has been awarded a Stage 1 grant from the National Science Foundation. The Civic Innovation Challenge is a research and action competition that aims to fund ready-to-implement, research-based pilot projects that have the potential for scalable, sustainable and transferable impact on community-identified priorities.
Maiorana and his collaborators Kenichi Soga, professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Berkeley, and Louise Comfort of the , received this grant to extend their work on their 鈥淩ehearsing Natural Disasters through Games and Simulations鈥 project. Maiorana, Soga and Comfort have been working with the community of Bolinas to help prototype ways of dealing with evacuations in case of wildfires.
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KQED and other media spotlight Bogad's activism
Professor Larry Bogad, Department of Theatre and Dance chair, has been featured by KQED, San Francisco public television and radio, in an article titled, 鈥淭he People鈥檚 WPA Isn鈥檛 Waiting Around for a Future 鈥楴ew Deal鈥欌 for his efforts in spearheading the creation of Delivering Democracy, a cohort of dancing mailboxes first deployed in Pennsylvania in order to encourage voting by mail.
鈥淵ou create an image that tells your idea... it contains your point that you鈥檙e trying to make and it鈥檚 so beautiful or troubling or weird that everybody reproduces the image, including people who don鈥檛 like you. That鈥檚 when you know...ok we鈥檙e onto something.鈥 With Delivering Democracy, photos of his band of merry mailboxes showed up in the New York Times, while on the ground, they distributed flyers in Joe Biden鈥檚 birthplace of Scranton, Pennsylvania detailing how to get votes in by mail.
The article also discusses his long-running 鈥渆conomusic鈥 project, which uses charts of economic data translated into music scores to create live performances of dissonance with an audience participation component.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a different way (for the audience) to get the numbers and learn the data,鈥 he explains, adding that he himself is no economist 鈥 and no musician. But by encouraging the audience to embody the charts he presents, they鈥檙e able to internalize their peaks and valleys, highs and lows. He and his dancers took to the streets on Inauguration Day (pictured) too to celebrate that mailboxes were instrumental in the election results. They danced in Berkeley and three other cities throughout the nation.
Read the full article . Read the Department of Theatre and Dance mention . Read more about his project, which he deployed in four cities on inauguration day, here.
Theatre and Dance graduate student featured in New York Times
新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis alumna was among eight actresses who were featured in the New York Times for her role as Emily Webb in Thorton Wilder鈥檚 鈥淥ur Town鈥 in 2009. At that time, Grace played the character in Tony award-winning director David Cromer鈥檚 critically acclaimed production, which she performed in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. The article features an excerpt of a conversation with Grace where she shares her experience playing the character.
鈥淚 was engaged when we started the show. It was three months after I got married that I got the call to go to New York. My new husband stayed behind in Chicago. So it was this strange thing of leaving to go to New York, a newlywed, alone, about this girl who doesn鈥檛 leave. The sort of longing that I was having was the almost polar opposite of her longing. But I was accessing those fears and that feeling of loneliness and yearning in service of Emily.
As I stand now in my life as a mother and as a widow, I鈥檓 really grateful that I had those years with that play and with Emily. I didn鈥檛 know at the time that it was preparing me for my own experience with death and with saying goodby. Not many years after having stopped 鈥 my child was a toddler, near the same age as George and Emily鈥檚 child 鈥 my husband died. And I had this sensation: All of that time preparing as Emily, only to find out that I鈥檓 George.鈥
Read the New York Times article . Read about the Department of Theatre and Dance mention .
Graduate student awarded commission for new work
新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis graduate student has been awarded the 2021 commission for a new work, which will be composed for solo piano. The commission, offered through SF Search for Scores, provides for a 鈥減rivate score reading and feedback session with the Contemporary Players and SF Search panelists, a premiere of the commissioned work on [their] at the CROSSROADS series concert held in San Francisco on April 10, 2021, plus an archival recording.鈥
Applicants this year were asked to consider two works by the late Bay Area composer which will be performed on the same program: Echoes (1974) for solo clarinet and tape, and A City Called Heaven (1988) written for septet.
Josiah鈥檚 music has been performed across North America by individuals and groups such as the Empyrean Ensemble, the Lydian String Quartet, Ensemble Mise-en, Chris Froh, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, Jennifer Ellis, and Miranda Cuckson.
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