Profiles

Danae Falliers

With a mother who was a painter and a Greek-born father captivated by opera, Danae Falliers, associate director of the Arts Technology Center, gravitated toward the arts.

She seriously pursued drawing and painting at a Denver magnet high school and secured a full scholarship to the California College of Arts and Crafts. In her junior year, she turned toward photography, especially typology, and earned her photography degree with a film/video minor. She then spent three years working for a San Francisco photographer whose specialty was high-tech special effects.

Falliers earned a master's degree in photography from the University of Southern California. Thereafter, she became intrigued with Adobe Photoshop and obtained more training in digital art.

"It was empowering to be able to manipulate an image any way I wanted to or create new images from nothing," she says. "It was also a way to blend into one all the disciplines and interests I'd had--music, film, video, drawing, painting and collage."

After seven years in Los Angeles, Falliers returned to the Rocky Mountains. In 1996, she helped establish the Santa Fe College of Design.

At UNM since 1997 Falliers continues to teach studio classes in computer art and is exploring a theory that addresses a connection between vernacular, rural architecture and the human body. The final result will be an installation that displays moving and still imagery on a wall.

Maria Williams

Music factored heavily in the life of Maria Williams, research assistant professor of music, who grew up in Anchorage. Her father is a member of the Tlingit Tribe and Maria grew up hearing Native Alaskan music. She learned how to play the viola, violin and piano, confessing to an inferior command of the latter.

Williams' love for music propelled her to her music degree from the Dominican College of San Rafael in California. She earned a master's degree and Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in ethnomusicology because of its ethnomusicology because of its embrace of all music.

"At UCLA I was like a kid in a candy store--I was able to play the violin in the Mariachi ensemble, the Near East ensemble and the American Folk Music ensemble," she says. "I played terribly, but loved, the music of Ghana in West Africa." However, Williams has concentrated her scholarly research on Alaska Native music.

Williams came to New Mexico in 1993 to chair the Performing Arts Department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She joined the UNM faculty in 1999 and teaches Native American music, serves as the associate director for the Arts of the Americas Institute, and continues her research.

Her current passion is writing a book on Alaskan history from the Native perspective. A 1998-1999 Ford Foundation grant enabled her to conduct research of surviving Alaska Native ceremonial music and dance, specifically Tlingit clan songs and the Inupiat Wolf Dance ceremonial complex.

Jo-Anne Green

Jo-Anne Green, program coordinator for both the Arts Technology Center (ATC) and Arts of the Americas Institute (AAI), traces her arts interest to ballet lessons she began at age 4. She also remembers fashioning clay sculptures in the mud outside her home in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Despite her early interest, her professional training came by default. With a limited choice of subjects available in high school, she opted for art, and continued that interest at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg where she majored in printmaking.

Green, however, preferred painting. "I liked the texture and how oil paints smelled--very seductive," she says. She earned a master of fine arts degree in painting at the University of Massachusetts after arriving in Boston in 1983 to escape the oppression of her homeland. In 1997, she moved to Albuquerque, which offered a climate kinder to her arthritis and similar to her hometown.

A job at UNM's Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center introduced her to computer technology. Within a year, she became adept at graphic design and began to envision a relationship between the center's high technology capabilities and the College of Fine Arts. Green points out that to progress in their work, scientists and engineers need artists to create visual illusions.

As program coordinator, Green edits grant proposals, looks for funding sources and runs the AAI and ATC offices. "I would like to see the Arts Technology Center draw world-renowned artists to work here," she says, "and then the students could be exposed to new benefits and uses of these technologies."

finearts@unm.edu