Seven new faculty members have joined the West Virginia University College of Creative Arts this fall, in the areas of musical theater, art education, music history, costume technology, interactive media, painting, and music theory and composition.

The new faculty members are: School of Art and Design Giobbia, assistant professor of art and coordinator of art education; Jeffrey Moser, assistant professor of interactive media design; and Amy Schissel, assistant professor of painting; School of Music MacCarthy, assistant professor of music history, and Joseph Dangerfield, assistant professor of music theory and composition; School of Theatre and Dance Britton, assistant professor of theater and director of musical theater, and Andrea Washington-Brown, clinical assistant professor of costuming.

“We are pleased to have such talented and experienced faculty joining the College of Creative Arts,” said Dean Paul Kreider. “I was impressed with these candidates and I am so pleased they have chosen to become members of the College of Creative Arts family.”

Terese Giobbia received a Master’s degree and a doctorate in art education from Northern Illinois University and also earned a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education. Her dissertation topic examined design education in the K-12 classroom and explored how the teaching practice of secondary school design educators can be enhanced by understanding the professional practices of fashion design professionals. Prior to joining WVU, Giobbia taught art education classes at Northern Illinois University and supervised pre-service art teachers. She has extensive experience teaching fine and applied arts in the K-12 classroom. Her research interests include design and technology education in secondary school curriculum; fashion as public art; and the hybrid identity of American youth as seen through their clothing. She has presented on these topics at numerous international and national conferences and is currently publishing a book on incorporating fashion into the K-21 art curricula.

A recent graduate of the University of Delaware, Jeffrey Moser is a digital media artist working with the transmediation of culture taking place during the 21st century, when every scrap of analogue information, sound recording, photograph and motion picture ascends from its physical form and is preserved in simulated perfection. His work celebrates this transmediation, while warning against its inevitable consequences—the loss of disintegrating or disappearing cultural history. Moser is influenced by the research of former Boston University film professor Dr. Robert Steele (1918–1981) and his studies on light rhythms in films. Moser holds undergraduate degrees in graphic design and philosophy and has most recently taught in Omaha, Nebraska. His video work has been screened in Savannah, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Wilmington, Delaware; Providence, Rhode Island; and Zegreb, Croatia, as well as being presented at the National Gallery of Art as part of the 32nd Black Maria Film Festival.

Amy Schissel completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2002 from the University of Ottawa and her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Ottawa in 2009. Her work negotiates hybrid moments where paint and modes of digital representation collide, giving rise to contemporary imagery that flips between abstraction and representation. She was a finalist in the 2011 RBC Canadian Painting Competition and her work can be found in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Department of Foreign Affairs Canada, the City of Ottawa, the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, and the Gotland Museum of Fine Arts, Sweden, in addition to numerous private international collections. She was Canada’s 2009 recipient of the Brucebo Fine Arts Award, and Ottawa’s 2013 RBC Emerging Artist Award. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Evan A. MacCarthy received an A.B. in Classics and music from the College of the Holy Cross, and a doctorate in historical musicology from Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of 15th-century music and music theory, late medieval chant, German music in the Baroque era, and late 19th-century American music. He is writing a book on the intersections of music, pedagogy, and the revival of classical literature across the Italian peninsula in the 15th century, focusing on the different spheres of humanistic and scholastic learning at Italian courts, cathedrals, and universities. He is also producing an edition and first-ever translation of Ugolino of Orvieto’s “Declaratio musice discipline” (written c. 1435) for Brepols Press. He has served on the music faculties of Harvard University (where he was the Harvard College Fellow in music from 2010 to 2012), College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

Joseph Dangerfield has lived and worked professionally in Germany, Russia, Holland and New York. He began his composition studies at Marshall University, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1999. He completed his master’s degree at Bowling Green State University and received a doctorate in 2005 from the University of Iowa. He is the recipient of many awards and recognitions, including the Aaron Copland Award (2010), the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra’s Composition Prize (2010), the Henry and Parker Pelzer Prize for Excellence in Composition (2005), the Young and Emerging Composers Award (2002), and ASCAP Standard Awards. He was a Fulbright Scholar to the Russian Federation and the Netherlands (2009-2010), where he served as composer-in-residence with the Ensemble Studio New Music at the famed Moscow Conservatory and lectured at Maastricht Conservatorium. He has been a resident in the Leighton Studios of the prestigious Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, and the Yaddo Colony in New York.

Bryce Britton received his Master of Fine Arts degree in theater direction from Ohio University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in directing from the University of Puget Sound. His extensive professional credits include Seattle Children’s Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre, ACT, Village Theatre, Lyric Theatre and Contemporary American Theatre Festival. With a passion for Original Theatre, he has worked on numerous new works with the Village Originals Festival and the Seaberry Quinn Playwriting Festival. He was the recipient of the 2009 Milo Cline Award. Some of his favorite directorial credits include “West Side Story,” “Pippin,” ” Into the Woods,” “Extremities,” “Sleuth,” The Dumb Waiter, “The Grapes of Wrath,” Humperdinck’s opera version of “Hansel and Gretel,” “An Actor’s Nightmare,” “Sweet Charity,” and “Oklahoma!” He wrote and directed an original adaptation of John Webster’s classic “The Duchess of Malfi” and recently directed Monty Python’s hilarious musical “Spamalot” and Sara Ruhl’s haunting retelling of the Orpheus tale, “Eurydice.”

Andrea Washington-Brown holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Memphis and a Master of Fine Arts from Wayne State University. She has designed many costumes for the Bowling Green State University Theatre Department, Wayne State Theatre Department and Princeton University’s BAC Drama. She received the KCACTF XLII Region III 2010 Merit Award for “The Dancing Blanket” from the BGSU Theatre production of “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown.” Photographs of her work for the WSU production of “The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God” have been published in “The Enjoyment of Theatre, Seventh Edition.” Recent designs credits include Swine Palace’s “Shapeshifter” and “King Lear” and LSU Theatre Mainstage’s “Our Lady of 121st Street.” She is a frequent guest costume designer for the eta Creative Arts Foundation in Chicago, Illinois.

-WVU-

cl/09/04/14

CONTACT: Charlene Lattea, College of Creative Arts
304-293-4359, Charlene.Lattea@mail.wvu.edu

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