Connecting Students with Industry Professionals
Up Next: Guest Artists for “Everybody”
“Everybody” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins performs Oct. 5–8, 2023
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Lighting
Jackie Fox
Jackie Fox is an artist and designer interested in, above all else, telling stories that explore the vulnerability of the human condition and human behavior in the face of conflict. She believes that the best art is disruptive and subversive, and pushes us to examine the most difficult elements of our psyche. Fox has designed both regionally and internationally. She recently earned her master’s of fine arts in stage design at Northwestern University where she was awarded the Merritt Academic Prize and the John Woodbridge Award. Selected credits include: Rasheeda Speaking (Shattered Globe Theatre), Kiss (PARA.MAR Dance Theatre), Sister Act (Mercury Theater), Native Guard (Northwestern University), re: CLICK (American Music Theatre Project), Peter and the Starcatcher and Pride and Prejudice (Wagon Wheel Theatre), Hundred Days (Kokandy Productions). During her tenure at Northwestern, Fox designed The Cherry Orchard (Louis Theatre), Ascension (Louis Theatre), The Flick (Wallis Theatre), Machinal (Louis Theatre), Legally Blonde (Barber Theatre), and Turn of The Screw (Ryan Center for the Musical Arts). View Jackie’s Website
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Music
Putu Hiranmayena
Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena is an Indonesian artist-scholar serving as assistant professor of music (performance and creativity) at Grinnell College, where he directs the Balinese Sound Ensemble and teaches courses on heavy metal music, electronic music, and noise and activism. He also is a founding member of the Balinese experimental duo ghOstMiSt, with dancer-anthropologist, Dewa Ayu Eka Putri; PAK Yeh (free-improvisation trio) from Denver, Colorado; and T.A.T.W.D. (improvised noise-metal trio) from Urbana, Illinois.
Hiranmayena’s academic, performance, and compositional research focuses on the intersections of cosmology, indigeneity, environmental activism, and performativity in Balinese gamelan, heavy metal, and noise. He takes post-colonial, performance studies, and creative ethnographic approaches to looking at the state of sound in the social sciences and humanities. His work constitutes equitable forms of knowledge production in the form of public-facing academic articles and global creative artistic pieces.
As a creative ethnographer, Hiranmayena has written articles, coupled with artistic compositions, that interrogate the state of performance in South-East Asian performing arts. Most notably, his articles, “If a Dragon Dies in the Forest, Do Humans Hear a Sound?” (2022); “‘Fix Your Face‘: Performing Attitudes Between Mathcore and Beleganjur,” (2022); “ghOstMiSt’s Trails of Indigeneity,” (2021), discuss myriad of perspectives on traditional, popular, and experimental Balinese performance idioms. Hiranmayena continues to perform and compose internationally while also maintaining status as board member of Insitu Recordings and Gamelan Tunas Mekar. View Putu’s Faculty Page
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Scenic
Kaelen Novak
Specializing in theatrical, experimental, and virtual design for live entertainment, Kaelen Novak is a recent theatre design Master of Fine Arts graduate from the University of Iowa concentrating in costume and scenic design.
Interested in finding the overlaps in live performance, interactive art, and emerging technologies, they strive to expand their artistic knowledge and skill set to better enable and collaborate on the unique projects they become a part of.
They recently have been designer for a variety of projects including character designer for Pieces of Me (a live virtual reality based theatrical show), scenic designer for The Bacchae: A Tragedy in One Act, and costume designer the musical Something Rotten. They are currently collaborating with Wright House of Fashion to create and show two fashion shows while teaching classes on CLO3d, digital fashion, and incorporating the virtual world into our actual one.
They plan on continuing their research and expanding their artistic outreach to help teach the future live performance innovators and artists of the future. Documentation of their research work will be showcased in Iowa Magazine and USITT Theatre Design & Technology in the upcoming months, going more in depth into the developments they have made over the past year. View Kaelen’s website.
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Dance and Movement
Dewa Ayu Putri
Dewa Ayu Eka Putri is a Balinese artist-anthropologist and is currently a lecturer of dance at Grinnell College. She teaches courses on Balinese dance and performing arts, specializing in traditional and contemporary dance styles. Putri also maintains her position as dance instructor at the critically acclaimed arts organization, Sanggar Cudamani, from Pengosekan, Bali, Indonesia.
She received her bachelor’s degree from Universitas Udayana in cultural anthropology and is a leading figure in women’s gamelan ensembles all around Bali. Born into a family of artists, Dewa Ayu is internationally known for her collaborations of traditional and contemporary works in theater, music, and dance while actively working as a freelance research assistant. The majority of her work advocates for the legal protection of women and children which is highlighted in various discursive artistic modalities.
Currently, Putri has international projects with organizations in Mexico, Switzerland, and Japan, as well as annual projects in Indonesia. She also organizes the performing arts shelf in the virtual library at BasaBali Wiki. View Dewa’s Faculty Page.