Michigan Muse Winter 2025 > Faculty Updates

Faculty Updates

Founded by Danielle Belen (violin), Center Stage Strings (CSS) celebrated its 15-year anniversary in 2024, welcoming the highest number of young artists to date and outstanding faculty members from top institutions, including SMTD professors Fabiola Kim (violin) and Amir Eldan (cello). Students produced a powerful concert of works by Latin American composers in partnership with Strings of Latin America (SOLA); this vibrant collaboration was held in UMMA’s atrium, accompanied by works of art chosen by CSS students with a museum curator. This summer welcomed new leadership roles for SMTD alums. Kristina Zlatareva, managing director, has been with CSS from nearly its inception and was instrumental in expertly navigating the challenges during the pandemic years. SMTD and CSS alum Teagan Faran joined CSS faculty in 2023 and has since facilitated numerous successful community engagements with Ann Arbor Public Libraries, Glacier Hills, University Commons, and the North Campus Children’s Center.

In July and August 2024, Daniel Cantor (theatre & drama) performed in a workshop production of He Who Has Ten Thousand Horses by actor/playwright Nikki Massoud as part of the Ground Floor, a program at Berkeley Rep for the development of new works. In the coming season, he will be performing in a production of Waste, directed by Carey Perloff, at Marin Theatre.

Reed Criddle (choral conducting), who earned a DMA in choral conducting from SMTD in 2011, joined the choral faculty as visiting professor and interim associate director of choral activities for fall semester 2024. For the past fourteen years, Criddle has served as director of choral activities at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. This fall, he led the Men’s Glee Club, the University Choir, and the Michigan Youth Chamber Singers, in addition to teaching graduate conducting.

Tyler Driskill (musical theatre) presented a program of rarely heard songs by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II at Kerrytown Concert House (KCH) on May 19, 2024. Joining him were current SMTD students Catie Leonard and Annie Hayes along with recent graduate Ben Powell. Driskill will join Professor Emeritus Brent Wagner during the 2024-25 season at KCH in a lecture series focusing on composers and lyricists of the Great American Songbook era.

In March 2024, John Ellis (piano) saw the publication of his book The Pedagogical Writings of Marguerite Long: A Reassessment of Her Impact on the French School of Piano by Indiana University Press. In addition, he published a two-part series entitled “The Little Red Music School” in American Music Teacher (February/March 2023, April/May 2023), the journal of Music Teachers National Association (MTNA). The series explores the history and curriculum of the Metropolitan Music School and its investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Ellis was also the 2024 recipient of the Harold Haugh Award for excellence in studio teaching at SMTD.

Shannon Gillen (dance) and alumnus and lecturer Jason Cianciulli (dance) were commissioned to create an original piece, which premiered in May 2024, for Icelandic University of the Arts in Reykjavik. They also taught master classes for the national contemporary Iceland Dance Company. They then traveled to Berlin to create a new work that premiered at cutting-edge theatre Dock 11 for the b12 festival, while also leading workshops. In August they welcomed 36 participants from the US, Canada, Mexico, France, and the Philippines to their training and research programming in Ann Arbor. In November 2024, their company VIM VIGOR premiered a new work, Dracula, at the Arthur Miller Theatre at U-M.

Jungah Han (theatre & drama) performed a special research project in Korea during the summer of 2024. She researched contemporary and traditional Korean performing arts in dance and changgeuk, a form of traditional Korean opera. She engaged with the artistic directors and performers while observing the rehearsal processes and productions. She developed a connection to the National Theater Company of Korea, a nationally managed company structured into four main components (theatre, dance, changgeuk, and orchestra) that practices a unique mission to develop the traditional Korean arts. This research project built a strong initiative to connect and introduce Korean performing arts in Michigan.

Christopher Harding, chair of the Department of Piano, finished a busy summer with performances and teaching at festivals and schools of music in Bangkok; Chengdu and Shenyang in China; Seoul; Indiana University and the Rebecca Penneys Piano Festival (Tampa, Florida) in the US; and the Sicily International Piano Festival in Noto, Sicily, where he also was a member of the International Sicily Piano Competition jury. He was appointed as a permanent guest professor at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music in China, a position he also holds at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music in Chengdu. He will return to perform and teach at the Tianjin Juilliard School in October 2025.

Nadine Hubbs (musicology) presented pre-concert talks with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra on the subject of her book, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound. At the 2024 Feminist Theory & Music conference, hosted by SMTD, she was moderator and speaker on a panel, “Roots and Branches,” honoring Marianne Kielian-Gilbert (MM ’74, PhD ’81, music theory) and Marion Guck (professor emerita, music theory; MM ’76, PhD ’81, music theory). In the first half of 2024 Hubbs appeared in outlets including the New York Times and NPR, speaking on subjects from her book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music and the forthcoming Border Country: Mexico, America, and Country Music.

Nicole Keller (organ) recently released her first commercial album, Those Americans, available on the Raven label and streaming on platforms including Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, and YouTube. The music features five unique composers – Rayner Brown, Calvin Hampton, Florence Price, William Grant Still, and Anne Wilson – each with their own distinctive voice and personality. Together, their compositions showcase just a portion of the incredible depth of expression in the American landscape of organ music of the 20th century. The organ featured is the powerful four-manual, 64-rank Nichols & Simpson pipe organ (2009) at First Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Michigan.

Kevin Korsyn (music theory) was honored at a conference on February 3, 2024, in the Assembly Hall of the Rackham Graduate School. The event celebrated the publication of Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory: Essays in Honor of Kevin Korsyn, edited by Bryan Parkhurst and Jeffrey Swinkin (Routledge, 2024). Elizabeth Sears, the George H. Forsyth Jr. Collegiate Professor of History of Art at U-M, gave the keynote address. David Gier delivered some concluding remarks, followed by a performance of Korsyn’s completion of Contrapunctus 14, the unfinished quadruple fugue from Bach’s Art of Fugue, played by harpsichordist Shuntaro Sugie.

Gustavo Souza Marques (musicology), also known by his stage name, Gusmão, is an ethnomusicologist, drummer, and beatmaker. He produced the legendary Mexico City rapper MC Luka’s album Japomex (2024), which features other renowned Mexican rappers such as Sociedad Cafe. He also produced singles for MC Luka, including “Lupita Taco Shop, Vol. 2” (2024). Gusmão is also producing his new beat tape Urso Futurismo, an album that combines Brazilian music genres such as samba and bossa nova with Caribbean styles such as raggamuffin and experimental American hip-hop. It will be released by early 2025 on his YouTube channel, Manuvah Records. Marques’s next scholarly project lies at the intersections between magical realism, ecomusicology, and transmodernism in hip-hop across the Americas.

Kenneth Kiesler Receives American Prize National Arts Award

On July 4, Kenneth Kiesler (orchestral conducting) was selected as a 2024 winner of the American Prize National Arts Award, “in recognition of a career of exceptional accomplishments of sustained artistic excellence over an extended period of time.” He recently led the world premiere and recording of Nkeiru Okoye’s When the Caged Bird Sings. In June and July, he taught 39 conductors from 11 countries at the 28th summer of the Conductors Retreat at Medomak, an intensive program for conductors. He conducted several University Symphony Orchestra (USO) concerts throughout the fall semester, including, on October 6, the Samual Barber Violin Concerto with Fabiola Kim (violin) and the world premiere of Braxton Blake’s Toccata.

In July 2024, Fangfei Miao (dance) was invited as a plenary speaker at the Dance Studies Association (DSA) annual conference in Buenos Aires. She took on DSA’s legacy with a very successful performative talk titled “How to Dance Asian.” Miao translated her widely influential article on the American Dance Festival in China in the late 1980s (published in Dance Research Journal, May 2022) into Chinese. Her Chinese-language article is now available in 当代舞蹈艺术研究 (Contemporary Dance Research), China’s leading dance studies journal. Miao was re-elected to the board of directors of the Dance Studies Association and started her second term in fall 2024.

After the launch of her open online course “Equitable Stage Makeup and Hair,” available on Michigan Online and Coursera, Sarah M Oliver (theatre & drama) presented at the Media & Learning 2024: Back to the Future? conference in Leuven, Belgium, in June 2024. Her article “‘Choosing Your Own Adventure’ in Equitable Stage Makeup and Hair MOOC” was published in the August Media & Learning newsletter. With support from the Center for World Performance Studies (CWPS), Oliver traveled in May to Kyoto and Tokyo with students to complete a field study on Japanese matsuri (festival) performance costume. 

In March, Doug Perkins (percussion) produced and directed a recording of Michael Gordon’s Field of Vision at Hill Auditorium. This work, an epic hour-long work for 36 percussionists, was written for the U-M Percussion Ensemble in 2022; the recording will come out in the coming months on Cantaloupe Music. The premiere performances and recordings were funded in part by SMTD Research and Catalyst Innovation (RCI) grants. Perkins recently co-directed the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s Crossing Open Ground at Lincoln Center, featuring choreography by Pam Tanowitz, for Juilliard’s Earth Month celebration. In November, Perkins performed Adams’s epic drum set solo Ilimaq at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention. Additionally, he is collaborating with the Limón Dance Company, playing a solo drum set in Hazel Johnson’s Scherzo for their New York City season at the Joyce Theater.

Stephen Rush (performing arts technology) is working on four compositions: a big band piece, text by late U-M professor Robert Hayden; a choral piece by a Palestinian poet; a collaborative jazz work with trombonist Steve Swell; and his Black Pilgrims hip-hop opera (a conversation between Malcolm X and MLK). He will contribute book chapters on musical subversion (an Australian project) and on a sleep study with the Mayo Clinic (a Swiss project). His book Fundamentals of Music (a music theory primer that is focused on decolonization) is to be published by University of Michigan Press next year. His compositions were recently performed in Japan and in the United States.

Jeremy Sortore (theatre & drama) was the voice and text coach for Macbeth at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, presented on three panels at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, and taught workshops for the Fitzmaurice Voice Institute and Theatrical Intimacy Education. With the support of a Center for Research on Teaching and Learning (CRLT) Faculty Development Fund grant, he completed teacher certification in Vocal Combat Technique, an evidence-based instructional method for extreme vocal sounds such as growls and screams that reduces vocal fatigue and mitigates dysphonia, pain, and vocal handicap.

Amy West (dance) was the choreographer for the Encore Musical Theatre Company’s production of Oklahoma! Another important recent project was a concert titled “Women Defining Themselves” that West conceived and curated as a benefit fundraiser for Michigan Medicine’s ALS Center of Excellence. The evening’s concert had a cast of dancers, instrumentalists, vocalists, and internationally ranked ice dancers from Michigan Ice Dance Academy. West was honored to have had an incredible team of people and amazing performers all coming together to raise awareness and funding for ALS research.

In July, Robin Wilson (dance) performed on the Henry J. Leir Stage at Jacob’s Pillow in What We Ask of Flesh with INSPIRIT, a dance company. Future performances are scheduled for spring 2025 in New England.

Julie Zhu (PAT), part of the U-M President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, premiered ornithologie for sheng, electronics, and a novel drawing instrument in a spatial dome at the GMEM Festival Propagations in Marseille; it was performed by renowned sheng player Wu Wei and computer music engineer Alexis Baskind. The work was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture. In addition, she worked with 60 teenagers for several weeks playing and rehearsing walking bells, for custom ceramic bells alongside percussion and carillon, for the city of Rockenhausen, Germany. Her piano quintet solastalgia for the Fire & Music Project toured Northern California in the spring, spreading awareness about the importance of cultural burns and land stewardship.

Julie Zhu (PAT), part of the U-M President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, premiered ornithologie for sheng, electronics, and a novel drawing instrument in a spatial dome at the GMEM Festival Propagations in Marseille; it was performed by renowned sheng player Wu Wei and computer music engineer Alexis Baskind. The work was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture. In addition, she worked with 60 teenagers for several weeks playing and rehearsing walking bells, for custom ceramic bells alongside percussion and carillon, for the city of Rockenhausen, Germany. Her piano quintet solastalgia for the Fire & Music Project toured Northern California in the spring, spreading awareness about the importance of cultural burns and land stewardship.