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The University of New MexicoCollege of Fine ArtsCelebrating Excellence |
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College of Fine Arts Alumni Profiles (continued) |
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| The following profiles appear on the previous page. Steve Anderson, filmmaker |
The following profiles appear on this page. Judy Dubrosky, puppeteer |
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"I have heard puppets described as a 'thought in your hand' and I believe it. I love that magical moment when I transfer myself to the puppet," says Judy Dubrosky, staff writer and puppeteer for Nickelodeon television's Weinerville. Dubrosky performs and creates original puppet shows. "I have always made puppets—out of napkins, out of paper, out of socks, anything . . . I love puppets; they enthrall me. When I have a puppet on my hand and the puppet is talking, the other person talks to the puppet, not me—even if I am in full view. The puppet comes alive for them." |
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I enrolled in a writing course (puppet shows must have scripts), but I was not positive that I would remain in the class, thinking that the instructor would only want to work with 'serious' playwrights." | Judy Dubrosky's puppet of UNM Theatre Professor Digby Wolfe |
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Dubrosky recalls her initial uncertainty at UNM. "I had the intention of studying theatre as it applied to my goal of a one-woman puppet show. Fortunately during Dubrosky's first class with Professor Digby Wolfe, he reviewed his list of favorite characters—which included Winnie the Pooh. "At that moment, I decided to stay at UNM," says Dubrosky. "Over the next few years, under Digby's tutelage, I realized my artistic potential and was confident enough to pursue a career in children's entertainment." |
| Judy Dubrosky transfers herself to a puppet as staff writer and puppeteer for Weinerville. |
"I was very happy at UNM because a number of theatre faculty respected the work of children's theater and entertainment. I never felt my work was considered secondary to adult or non-puppet works. |
| With Professor Susan Pearson-Davis, a major proponent of children's theater, Digby Wolfe and other
faculty supporting my efforts, I developed my writing and puppet skills." As the right-hand person for Marc Weiner, creator and producer of Weinerville, Dubrosky says, "I'm right where I want to be." She is puppeteer, joke writer, puppet and prop builder and background painter.
Dubrosky's future looks bright: NBC-TV bought her original sketches for a season pilot and one of her play scripts is being considered by BBC for screen adaptation. Her overall plan: "In ten to twenty years, I'd like to have my own puppet empire." |
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Curator of photography at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., Sarah Greenough, has worked at the gallery's Department of Photographs since 1979, first as a guest curator while a UNM graduate student, then as a research curator. Greenough's passion for the history of photography was mentored by Beaumont Newhall, the original director of UNM's photo history program and former curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
"He was an extraordinarily inspirational figure, not only in teaching, but in his love of the medium and his passionate approach to the history of photography," reflects Greenough. Other UNM faculty who sparked her intellectual curiosity include Van Deren Coke, former department chair; Tom Barrow, photography professor; and Peter Walch, art history professor and, now, director of the University Art Museum.
Greenough received a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and both her graduate degrees from the UNM Department of Art and Art History. As a graduate student, her research focused on Alfred Stieglitz and resulted in PublishedWritings of Alfred Stieglitz (master's thesis, 1976) and Alfred Stieglitz's Photographs of Clouds (doctoral dissertation, 1984). For the latter, she received UNM's Popejoy Award for Outstanding Dissertation in the Humanities. While working on the dissertation, Greenough received both a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Award and a National Book Award for her book, Alfred Stieglitz, Photographs and Writings.
Greenough has organized a wealth of exhibitions and her publications are extensive. She curated two major Stieglitz exhibitions, both of which originated at the National Gallery of Art and subsequently traveled to a host of major American museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has published major works not only on Alfred Stieglitz, but on other photographers who played critical roles in defining the course of photography in America—including works on Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Walker Evans and Paul Strand. A number of her books have garnered awards from a variety of organizations including the International Association of Art Critics Award for Robert Frank, Moving Out and the International Center of Photography's Photography Book of the Year for On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, 150 Years of Photography.
 | For two decades, Brian Levant has kept audiences laughing. First as a writer/producer of popular television series such as Happy Days and Mork and Mindy, and more recently, as the director of the hit motion pictures, Jingle All the Way starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; Beethoven; and The Flintstones. Levant envisions himself to be halfway in his vital, fifty-year career. "I continue in the arts because I have no choice," explains Levant. |
| Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Brian Levant on the set of Jingle All The Way |
"There hasn't been a single day of my adult life when I haven't been actively translating my ideas into words or pictures." |
Born and raised in Chicago, Levant received his bachelor's degree from UNM in 1974. "At UNM, I was allowed the freedom to explore my own imagination as a writer and a filmmaker," says Levant, "while being exposed to a variety of styles and techniques in the worlds of cinema, literature, photography and art history." Levant studied film with Professor Ira Jaffe before the fledgling Department of Media Arts offered production classes or was able to allow students to major in the field. Gaining a basis in film theory, criticism and history proved to be profoundly beneficial to Levant.
"Ira really opened my eyes to so much about film, about taking each frame and dealing with it as a work of art and examining it for content and composition and how it tells a story." Levant told the Albuquerque Journal. "I read so much. I saw so many movies. We studied the length and breadth of the art," he said, citing Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Stan Brakhage and F. W. Murnau. "The people in the industry are still amazed I had this education in these things. They say 'where'd you go, NYU?' 'No, UNM,' I would respond."
Levant began his career in 1977 as story editor on Happy Days. After moving on to produce The Bad News Bears and Mork and Mindy, he returned to Happy Days as supervising producer in 1982 for the series' final two seasons. In 1982, Levant wrote the teleplay for Still the Beaver, a movie of the week which was CBS's highest rated of the year. This paved the way for the new Leave it to Beaver series which ran during 1984-89 with Levant as executive producer and for which he won the CableAce award for best director of a comedy series in 1989.
During the past decade, Levant has turned his attention to writing and directing feature films. In addition to directing The Flintstones, he wrote the screenplay, and he has written a number of other screenplays, including Casper and Leave It To Beaver.
Though he lives in Los Angeles, Levant maintains ties to UNM. He returns to participate in the Department of Media Arts's International Cinema Lecture Series and to visit. "I enjoy meeting with UNM Media Arts students," he says, "and remembering what it was like to dare to dream the impossible."
Music is life to John Lewis. As pianist and musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, he was also its principal composer and arranger. He arranged most of the music recorded on the Quartet's forty-seven albums, bringing to the group a unique musical vision which draws on American jazz and blues as well as the European musical tradition.
Lewis was born in Illinois, but grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother, a classically trained vocalist, nurtured his interest in music. As a student at the University of New Mexico, he studied music and anthropology. "UNM was a great atmosphere to learn in," says Lewis. "I had wonderful and sympathetic professors."
In 1946, Lewis became pianist and arranger for the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band. Three years later, he began playing with the Charlie Parker/Miles Davis Quintet while simultaneously earning his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Manhattan School of Music. The Modern Jazz Quartet formed in 1952 when Lewis joined Milt Jackson, Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke (Connie Kay replaced Clarke in 1955). While most of his time was spent touring with the MJQ, Lewis served as musical director for the Monterey Jazz Festival for twenty-seven years, until 1982. He has composed for film, theatre, television, ballet and works for symphony orchestras and smaller ensembles. He also taught at Harvard University and City College of New York.
UNM Director of Jazz Studies, Glenn Kostur, says "John Lewis is an extremely important person in the history and tradition of jazz. He made important contributions in the fusing of jazz music and European classical music as one of the founders of what we refer to as third stream music. The Modern Jazz Quartet is an example of the highest level of jazz chamber music, and Lewis' contributions as arranger for the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band sound as modern today as the day they were written."
As a solo project, Lewis has recorded improvised versions of Bach's preludes and fugues. And together with his wife, harpsichordist Mirjana Lewis, he has made two recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Lewis has received an honorary Doctorate of Music from UNM, Columbia College in Chicago, the New England Conservatory of Music and Berklee College of Music. In 1989, France awarded Lewis the title of Officier des Artes et des Lettres. His goals for the future? "To continue being creative."
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"As a Chicana artist, my work, interpreted as an alternative to the mainstream, stands as a personal statement that evokes an identity. I aspire to originate the artist's voice," states Delilah Montoya. Her work, however, is more than a personal statement, for it is rooted in and informed by history. Montoya's Master of Fine Arts exhibition explored the manifestation of El Sagrado Corazon/The Sacred Heart as an icon embedded in the religious fabric of her own Chicano culture. She concluded that the Baroque religious symbol represented a synchronic relationship between European and Aztec philosophy and imagery. |
| Montoya's El Sagrado Corazon/The Sacred Heart collotype series explores contemporary manifestations of the heart as a cultural icon. |
The Sacred Heart collotype series spring from Montoya's historical investigation of the symbol and evolved into a collaboration with young Chicano aerosol artists. In order to depict the Sacred Heart as a cultural icon, Montoya involved the community in the work's development. |
She photographed members of the Albuquerque Chicano community with an eight-by-ten view camera. She shot the portraits in a constructed space with spray-painted images on the studio walls, using the murals as backdrops for the portraits which were then reproduced as collotypes. "This collaborative experience not only gave the young artists a safe place to work, but I was equally inspired by their creative growth," reflects Montoya.
Among Montoya's subsequent projects is a photo installation, Saints and Sinners, investigating Chicano spiritualism with iconography used by a penitente brotherhood for the transmutation of sin to absolution. She created Inca Street, a photo journal of Denver's west side; La Gente, a slide presentation of the Mexican Nebraskan; and Crickets in My Mind, an artist's book in collaboration with Chicano poet Cecelio Garcia Camarillo.
"My goal is to create art continuously throughout my life," says Montoya, "and my commitment to art-making runs parallel with my teaching philosophy." Montoya is currently on the faculty at Hampshire College and previously taught at UNM; California State University at Los Angeles; the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe; and Working Classroom Story Tellers, a community-based outreach program for inner-city youth. Her degrees from UNM include a Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio art in 1984, a Master of Arts in printmaking in 1990 and a Master of Fine Arts in studio art with distinction in 1994. She was one of five graduate students in the nation to receive a College Arts Association Professional Development Fellowship in 1993, the first year of the awards.
For Montoya, "Individual success happens because of a supportive community." She credits UNM's "promotion of interdisciplinary studies, diverse student and faculty, non-western curriculum offerings and faculty who provided mentorship and sponsorship."
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New York Metropolitan Opera star, Kurt Streit, performs on the world's stages. He is regarded as one of the leading Mozart interpreters of our time. His signature role is Tamino in The Magic Flute, which he first performed at UNM's Popejoy Hall a decade ago and has since sung at the Metropolitan Opera and other major opera houses around the world. "There aren't any important opera houses left for me to sing in, I'm happy to say," says Streit. "But to be asked back to them is a new and tough challenge!" Streit received a Grammy Award nomination in 1997 for his Brahms recording, Liebeslieder Waltzer, on the EMI label. He has recorded Cosi fan tutte twice, once with Daniel Barenboim for Erato and once with Simon Rattle for EMI. His other recordings include The Magic Flute with Ostman for L'Oiseau-Lyre, The Abduction from the Seraglio for Sony Classical, The Yeoman of the Guard with Sir Neville Marriner for Philips and a solo compact disk of Othmar Schoeck songs. |
Streit initially built his career in Europe. He moved there after performing as an apprentice with both the Santa Fe Opera and the San Francisco Opera following his graduation from UNM College of Fine Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music in 1984. "My most positive influence at UNM is—not was—Marilyn Tyler," says Streit. "She, more than anyone else, guided me on my way into a tough career. I learned more than singing from her; she taught me to deal with the pressures, the travel and the politics."
Streit and his wife, Hamburg Opera soprano Gertrud Hoffstedt, moved to Albuquerque in 1996; our city now serves as a base for their international operatic careers. The talented couple have donated their time to star in benefit performances presented by UNM's Opera Theatre Program. "It is a hands-on experience for our aspiring young opera artists," says Tyler who directed the grand scale 1997 Streit-Hoffstedt benefit. "It is an opportunity for our students to work with and learn from world-class performers."
Reflecting upon his career, Streit confirms, "I couldn't imagine doing anything else."
"I do love my job," beams Shirien Taylor, principal second violinist of the renowned Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Taylor works with the great artists of our day from Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo to Seiji Ozawa, James Levine and Carlos Kleiber. She earned her promotion to the principal chair in 1991, having played in the orchestra's second violin section since 1987.
"Working at the Met is endlessly fascinating," says Taylor, "from the vast and varied repertoire, to the parade of various conductors, to the stars on stage, to being part of such a wonderful orchestra. There's never a dull moment. The orchestra is not only great to play in, but there's a very familial feeling—good people, good players, good friends."
Before joining the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Taylor performed for five years as first violinist with the Andrea String Quartet in New York. She originally went to the city to attend The Julliard School after studying with UNM Music Professor Leonard Felberg since she was twelve years old. "I realized I had been thoroughly schooled," she says of her studies with Felberg. "UNM's excellent music staff was a positive influence on me. Not only are they wonderful teachers, but they are all beautiful performers, setting a high standard as role models for UNM students. Leonard Felberg continues to be my mentor to this day."
Taylor has performed in South America, Japan and Europe, including a tour through Germany and Japan as concertmaster and concert soloist with the North Carolina School of the Arts. While still a student at UNM, Taylor was the assistant concertmaster of both the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra of Santa Fe. As a child, she played concertos with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, having moved to Albuquerque after beginning her violin studies at the Eastman School under the personal tutelage of Shinichi Suzuki.
"Music has always been such a part of my life that I never considered getting into another field," says Taylor. "I plan to finish out my thirty-year stint at the Met."
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"Those who understand what I do appreciate the determination, love and courage it takes to find wonder and beauty in people who are considered by society to be damaged, unclean, dysfunctional or wretched," says Joel-Peter Witkin. "My art is the way I perceive and define life. It is sacred work, since what I make are my prayers. My life and work are inseparable. It is all I have. It is all I need." Witkin began photographing at the age of sixteen. That same year, one of his photographs was selected by Edward Steichen for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. |
| The Fool, Budapest 1994 by Joel-Peter Witkin | |
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After serving in the army as a photographer and photographic technician, Witkin became a professional freelance and commercial photographer. He attended The Cooper Union on the GI bill, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Entering UNM as an older student, Witkin continued his graduate work in photography, receiving his Master of Arts in photography in 1976 and his Master of Fine Arts with distinction in 1986. "UNM did not have 'big city' aggressiveness, even though it is a big university," says Witkin, who still lives and works in Albuquerque. "He was a terrific student, very involved," says Professor Tom Barrow. "We urge students to take a wide range of classes outside their focal interest and Joel-Peter typifies our successful graduates in this. He works in a lot of media, including sculpture and drawing, to create his photographic tableaux. He is an artist, not just a photographer." Witkin told a Lagniappe reporter in 1996. "I am not interested in post-modern ideas and irony. I consider myself a classicist, engaged with the overriding issue of mortality. The truth is, our age offers less for the artist. We have improved communications, but are less able to communicate. . .My need is to understand existence. That need becomes art when it reaches into the extreme limit of the possible." Witkin has received prestigious grants and awards including four National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Ford Foundation grant, the International Center of Photography Award and both the Distinguished Alumni Citation and the Augustus Saint Gaudens medal from the Cooper Union. In 1990, the French Minister of Culture awarded Witkin the title of Chevalier des arts et des lettres. Tracing Witkin's exhibitions is like taking a trip around the world. In 1995 alone, he had solo shows at the Guggenheim Museum, Interkamera in Prague, and Il Castello de Rivoli in Turin, and was a highlight at the group show, Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France. In addition to the Museum of Modern Art, Witkin is represented in permanent collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, George Eastman House in Rochester, the Getty Collection, Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum and others. |
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