SOU College of Arts and Sciences – Faculty Focus Get to know our faculty a bit better.
Visual Arts
Big Fish David Humphrey Ready to Make Some Waves
One moment, one experience, one sublime afternoon can tilt your destiny. For David Humphrey, it was a sixth-grade field trip to a soon-to-be-demolished movie house, where 100 St. Petersburg Symphony musicians inspired the awestruck child to pursue a lifelong career in the performing arts. You could say he accomplished something along those lines—that is, if you count serving in leadership and consulting roles at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and New York City Opera.
David Bithell: The Music of Making Art
Don’t let his baby face fool you. With an oeuvre rivaling even the most prolific of veteran creatives, David Bithell has performed his nearly fifty experimental theatre works, instrumental compositions, and structured music improvisations at ninety-five events around the globe. That includes venues in Belgium, Lithuania, France, and South Korea as well as stateside in New York City, Brooklyn, Boston, Princeton, Providence, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Miami, Austin, Dallas, San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Diego.
Melissa Geppert Shows How Art Really Can Change the World
Melissa Geppert wasn’t a typical teen. Her idea of a good time was savoring the contemporary artworks lining the walls of Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, which she visited incessantly. Later, as an adult, she became a docent lecturer at the center that had played such an influential role in her years growing up as an artsy kid who loved to create and study art—as reflected in the BFA in studio art and BA in art history she simultaneously earned at the University of Minnesota.
Through the Looking Glass with Documentarian Robert Clift
What does a forgetful kid who’s notorious for losing retainers and jackets grow up to become? Well, naturally, an award-winning documentarian. Now Robert Clift never forgets what he records—and neither does his audience. Producer, director, videographer, editor, and writer Clift has just added one more title to his list of vocations: assistant professor of communication and emerging & digital arts at Southern Oregon University.
Art Historian Jennifer Longshore: Perfectly Postmodern
When she’s not encouraging people to slow down and study art by helping to lead the international Slow Art movement, Jennifer Longshore is racing through activities such as biking, hiking, snowboarding, and scuba diving. Although traditionally an art historian, she has spent the past decade honing her drawing skills through the local Pomegranate Group of women artists. Longshore earned her master of arts in art history from the University of California, Davis, and her self-designed bachelor of arts in art history and humanities from California State University (CSU), Fresno. While her master’s thesis focused on nineteenth century artist Mary Cassatt, her greatest passion is for the modern and postmodern art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Printmaking Artist Tracy Templeton Makes Her Mark on the World
With more than 100 exhibitions to her name, Tracy Templeton knows what it means to be a working artist. Her prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the U.S.—from Chicago to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Boulder—and around the world, including Canada, Malaysia, Poland, Mexico, Italy, Japan, Turkey, Korea, Egypt, Germany, France, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and England. Canadian-born Templeton earned her MFA from the University of Alberta and her BFA from the University of Regina, where she graduated with Distinction and The Riddell Award in Fine Arts for her printmaking and painting studies.
Web’s First Interactive Novelist Launches SOU’s New Center for Emerging Media
Crowned the web’s first interactive novelist by Wikipedia, Robert Arellano is recognized as a master storyteller in both the digital narrative and traditional publishing worlds. The Cuban-American artist was born in Summit, New Jersey, in 1969, the year in which his groundbreaking interactive novel Sunshine ’69 is set. He also submitted the first digital thesis at Brown University, where he earned both an MFA in creative writing and a bachelor of arts in English with honors in creative writing.