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Faculty and Staff News
New hires, summer faculty news and more.
NEW FACES:
H. Caitlin McLeod, Assistant Professor, Stage Management/ Production Coord.
hcm4t@virginia.edu
After months of work from our search committee headed by Doug Grissom, we are pleased to announce that Caitlin McLeod has been hired as our Assistant Professor of Stage Management and the Department’s Production Coordinator. Before moving to Charlottesville, Caitlin worked as Professor of Stage Management at Loyola University, New Orleans. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, Caitlin was Resident Stage Manager and Production Manager at Southern Rep Theater – a New Orleans-based Equity Theater specializing in world or regional premiers. Before joining Southern Rep, Caitlin stage managed at the Public Theater in New York where her credits include: Caroline or Change, Henry V, New Works Now! and Radiant Baby. Caitlin holds an M.F.A. from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts and is a member of Actor's Equity Association.
Benoit Beauchamp, Lecturer, Dance Production Manager
bb5gr@virginia.edu
Benoit taught at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA during the 07-08 year. While teaching, he designed an adaptation of Hamlet, The Laramie Project, Bartered Bride and Empire Builders. He has been involved with inFluxdance for the past couple of years and served as production designer for shows including An Absence of Fences, This Fairytale is not Working Out and Found & Lost: Goals for 2002, which received a Best of the Fringe award in San Francisco. Prior to that, Benoit’s lighting was seen in the premiere of the Center for New Theater’s Macbeth with Stephen Dillane. The work was shown at REDCAT in Los Angeles, Almeida Theatre in London and Sydney Theater in Australia. Originally from Quebec, he received a B.F.A. with a specialization in Theatre Design from Concordia University. Benoit received his M.F.A. in Lighting and Scenic Design at California Institute of the Arts where he worked on many projects including Spit Shine Glisten, produced in collaboration with the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the workshop production of Jose Rivera’s Brain People. His extensive credits in lighting design for dance include This is Not My Beautiful House, choreographed by Rose Pasquarello, and Sleeping with the Ambassador, a site specific piece at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, choreographed by Heidi Duckler. He also has collaborated with many dance artists including the GreatFruit Collective, Ella Ben-Aharon, Lauren Gordon, Sumi Kim and many more. In his spare time, he likes to collaborate on various projects with different artists. He plans on getting back to his love of light installation, painting and sculpture.
Autumn Proctor, Lecturer, Dance
aip7d@virginia.edu
Autumn holds an M.F.A. in dance performance and choreography from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. She received her B.F.A. in Dance with a concentration in Modern from Marymount Manhattan College and was also a scholarship student in the Contemporary program at the school at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival for two consecutive summers. After six wonderful years in the Big Apple, she most recently finished a year of teaching in the School of Theatre and Dance at East Carolina University. In the summer of 2005, she spent time studying abroad and has worked with various artists including: Bill Young, Cheryl Therion, Rodger Belman, Bridget L. Moore, Kyle Abraham, Merle Holloman and Milton Myers. She has also performed works by Preljocaj, Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon and others. She is currently teaching and choreographing for the Ann Catherine Cross School of Dance, and in the spring of 2008, she served as an adjunct Faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University. Autumn is also excited to be currently working with Rose Pasquarello Beachamp as part of InFluxdance as well serving as part-time faculty in the Dance Program at the University of Virginia. Aside from teaching, Autumn is co-director of we are artists, a newly established program that works to enhance the young artists' experience of creating individual artistry as well as creating a true concert dance performance process. She is grateful for the gift of movement and for the ability to use her body as her living instrument in life and in art forms.
FACULTY NEWS:
John Frick, Professor, Theatre History and Dramatic Literature
jwf8f@virginia.edu
John Frick this summer presided over the meetings and activities of the American Theatre and Drama Society, of which he is President, at the annual ATHE convention in Denver. He also presented a paper, "'A Play to Which No Apologist for Slavery Could Object:' Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage," at the conference. This past Spring, Frick delivered a series of lectures on Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the University of Iowa and next May, he will deliver a keynote address titled "Whose Culture is it Anyway ?: Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Violence of Representation, and the Appropriation of Race on the Antebellum American Stage" at the International Conference on American Theatre and Drama to be held in Cadiz, Spain. This August, Frick's book Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-century America, a 2004 winner of a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles award, was re-issued in paperback by the Cambridge University Press and articles he has written were recently published in What Should I Read Next (Virginia University Press, 2008).
Marcy Linton, Assistant Professor, Costume Technologist
mjl2f@virginia.edu
Marcy worked at the Utah Shakespeare Festival this summer in Cedar City as a draper for the designer Bill Black on The Two Gentlemen of Verona. She is also wrapping up a project with Animal Planet this Fall where she is designing production samples and patterns of children’s costumes that will be produced to sell. The four costumes she is working on are a snowshoe hare, walrus, rescue dog and penguin.
R. Lee Kennedy, Associate Professor, Lighting Design
rlk3p@virginia.edu
Over the summer, R. Lee Kennedy served as Festival Lighting Designer for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival where he designed productions of Taming of the Shrew, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged and Titus Andronicus. He is currently designing the lighting for productions of Bury the Dead with Director Joe Calarco for Transport Group; 70 Scenes of Halloween for JMU School of Theatre; and Dracula for Purdue Theatre.
Michael Rasbury, Assistant Professor, Sound Design
mr2xk@virginia.edu
Michael Rasbury was granted Sesquicentennial Research release time during the spring of 2008 to explore the project titled: Phonography (Field Recording) utilizing Binaural Recording. The result of this research is a free Internet based, “phonographic” resource to sound designers and enthusiasts called earthrecordings.com. A primary goal of this endeavor has been the exploration of HRTF sound recording. During this release time, Michael also traveled to Switzerland in order to complete a multi-track recording of an American/Swiss blues band on tour there. Upon returning to the States, he served as sound designer for the Lost Colony Outdoor Drama in Manteo, North Carolina. During the month of June, Michael provided sound design and music composition for Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Macbeth. From there, he traveled to the Eugene O’Neill National Music Theatre Conference in Waterford, Connecticut, to present his new musical script Max Understood, written with co-writer Nancy Carlin. During the month of August, Michael spent time installing a new theatre technology classroom in the Culbreth Building using funds obtained from the Arts Council’s Annual Fund and Equipment Transfer Funds. During this semester, he will provide sound design for the Department’s first production, Some Girl(s), and then travel to New York City as sound designer for a new adaptation of Bury The Dead, produced by the acclaimed Transport Group. The Mead Endowment has recently named Michael as an honored faculty. The Mead Endowment group has provided financial support for his proposed student led research project based on converting physical objects into representative sounds or music.
Betsy Rudelich Tucker, Assistant Professor, Acting and Directing
art9y@virginia.edu
Betsy spent May and some of June opening and closing The Beard of Avon at Live Arts. It was a terrific cast, show, set, costumes and audience experience. July in England and France; theatre in London, walking the Cornish coast, the Avignon Theatre Festival. And Maine. August: swimming. Fall: teaching both Graduate and Undergraduate Script Analysis and having a good time, as always. Only four students in Acting II, we're making an ensemble. And a First Year one credit seminar on Theatre and Science, with four plays on the same...in preparation for The Love Song of J.Robert Oppenheimer in the spring. Recruiting courses to read and see Oppenheimer from across campus and have so far secured two large ethics courses. And planning 491 for the Spring, with a grant from the Academic and Community Engagement initiative. We'll do nine weeks of workshops in two juvenile correctional facilities this Spring. What will we do? I said planning.
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