Assistant Professor of Dance Marielis Garcia has been a teaching artist since she was barely a teenager—a gutsy teenager who knew exactly what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to ask for it: 

“My parents are both immigrants from the Dominican Republic and there just wasn’t a whole lot of surplus cash for extracurricular activities, so everything we did was through our public school or free. When I was thirteen, my dance class took a field trip to a studio. One of the teachers said I should take classes with them because I showed some talent. I said, ‘My parents can’t really afford this, and besides you’re just trying to make money. If you really mean it (and I don’t know where I got the courage to say this) then I’ll need some sort of work study.’” 

Garcia says she didn’t really know what work study was, but the teacher did. The studio turned out to be one connected with Dance Theatre of Harlem, and so Marielis began studying and acting as an assistant with the younger students in the program to pay for her classes: 

“Even back then, there was an element of teaching dance while doing my own dance. It’s never been about me singularly. It’s always been about bringing myself in as authentically as possible and sharing, which inevitably is both performance and teaching. It’s finding this two-way connection. We’re creating or facilitating spaces where we can connect. That really speaks to my pedagogical and creative approaches.”  (more…)

Smart-Tillman Artist-in-Residence and Musical Theatre Coordinator Dominick Amendum has been Wicked busy. 

 Amendum, who is an alumnus of UNCG’s School of Music (’01 BM Piano Performance) spent a year in London acting as the Production Music Supervisor for the Wicked films, Universal’s adaptation of the Tony-Award-winning Broadway musical, which is based on the 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire.   

Amendum had worked with composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz on the Broadway production as the show’s Musical Director. Still, he says he was surprised to get the call: 

“Universal had talked about making the films for a decade. But even though I had a long involvement with the show when it was on Broadway, I never in a million years dreamed that I’d be asked to work on the films. I had dabbled in some film projects, but this is the largest movie musical ever shot, so to go from dabbling to that has been amazing.” 

And so, the teacher became a student: 

“That was what was so exciting about it. And terrifying. I know Wicked like the back of my hand. I know Broadway. The film element was what was new for me. I was out there doing the work, but I was also a student again and learning so much about that industry that I was able to bring back to our classes here at UNCG.”   (more…)

As an undergrad, Daria “Toni” Clarke ’21 set aside ambitions to be a dermatologist or veterinarian for her first love, dance. Upon graduation, she set her sights on the Garth Fagan Dance company, based in upstate New York. Her professor and mentor, Dr. Janet Lilly(Professor of Dance), had sent her a flier on tryouts. 

“This is a modern dance company with African, Caribbean, ballet, and post-modern aesthetics!” Clarke explains. 

The company was founded by Garth Fagan, the Tony award-winning choreographer who brought Disney’s The Lion King to life on the Broadway stage through dance and puppetry.

When Clarke was called for three days of auditions, she was elated. But it was a trial by fire. On the final day, Garth Fagan himself was on hand to make a decision. She was hired!

Clarke will be performing with Garth Fagan Dance as part of the UNC Greensboro Concert & Lecture Series, and will participate in a masterclass with School of Dance students.  It will be her first time back to UNCG since graduation.

Garth Fagan Masterclass

April 4th @ 2pm

201A Coleman Building

Class for selected dance majors, but open to all UNCG students to attend

Garth Fagan Dance Public Performance

April 5th @ 8pm

UNCG Auditorium

Tickets can be purchased at ucls.uncg.edu

By Mike Harris and Terri Relos
Photography by Steven Pisano 

College of Visual and Performing Arts Dean bruce d. mcclung has announced the appointment of Billie Feather as Lecturer in Commercial Guitar.  

Feather is a guitarist/songwriter/banjoist/bassist who hails from the Allegheny Mountains of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. She was most recently an assistant professor at Washington State University where she taught “Group Guitar,” “History of Film Music,” and “History of Women in Music” and designed a “Country Music History” course with a focus on equity, diversity, justice, and inclusion. Feather has also taught at Meredith College in Raleigh, teaching both college and community music school students. A certified Suzuki Guitar Instructor, Feather maintains an active and varied teaching studio with students of all ages and levels. Awarded a Career Development Grant from the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Billie founded her own mobile recording endeavor called Feather Farm Recordings.  (more…)

Claire Ittner is a historian of modern and contemporary art in the Americas with particular interest in the art and visual culture of the African Diaspora in the American South and the Caribbean. Her research interests include questions of mobility and migration, patronage networks and theories of artistic value, and notions of expertise and training.  

Her current book project, Fellow Travelers: The Artist-Researchers of the Rosenwald Fellowship Program, 1928–1948, examines the relationship between the non-profit sector and the arts, focusing on the merit-based fellowship programs that emerged as an important source of artistic support in the first half of the twentieth century. Examining one such fellowship program, the Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship program, the project tracks the ways its support was utilized by a generation of Black artists and its role in forging new ideas about artmaking as a form of research.   (more…)