The UVA Department of Drama is returning in person to theatres in 2021-22 with a carefully curated season of plays that highlight the unique array of challenges we face in our lives and around the planet we call home – and celebrating the increasingly vital human power of resilience.
With a father hailing from a family of actors, Caky Winsett was exposed to the theater at a very young age. Yet she never had any interest in becoming an actor herself. However, as Winsett grew older, she realized that she had a love for all of the other elements of theater. That love then turned into a full-on passion at the University of Virginia.
Niya Bates, a University of Virginia alumna who has worked at Monticello for several years, appeared on the recent Netflix series, “High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America,” to tell a story in episode three.
Author Rabih Alameddine has spent time “floating” between professions and continents since college. Concentrating on writing since his mid-30s, he is doing what he feels he is supposed to be doing, Alameddine said recently in an email.
When University of Virginia School of Nursing student Davon Okoro recalls his first foray into fashion, he smells bleach. As a 16-year-old, he’d cut T-shirts in half and stitch the mismatches together at a vertical seam, experiment making distress marks and holes, and test the effects of applying bleach with a paintbrush or spray bottle to further alter his fabric canvasses.
Susan Hellman, Anne Bruder, and Catherine Zipf first met in UVA’s School of Architecture when they were pursuing master’s degrees in architectural history, graduating in 1996 or ’97. They kept in touch professionally and started exploring Green Book locations soon after they were digitized.
A trio of literary scholars at the University of Virginia are among those reacting to a new film dramatizing a British tale of King Arthur’s court, held for a year due to the pandemic and now in theaters. “The Green Knight,” released this summer, is based on “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” an English poem that has survived more than seven centuries.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, University of Virginia faculty scrambled to find ways to deliver a traditional college education online. But as faculty in UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences worked to educate their students despite the obstacles presented by COVID-19, they found themselves creating the foundation for changes to the practice of art education – changes that may make it just a little better than it was before.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the University of Virginia to send students home and later to cancel in-person Final Exercises last year, staff across the University began searching for new ways to safely celebrate the Class of 2020 and honor its accomplishments.
What does a performance artist do in the middle of a pandemic? Student and faculty musicians in the University of Virginia’s jazz program went into the studio. The UVA jazz program, led by trumpeter/composer John D’earth, consists of the Jazz Ensemble, the UVA Jazz Chamber Groups, the UVA Jazz Singers; for this project, they were joined by collaborators from the dance program, visual arts, and media studies. With the pandemic, live performances were out, but the music could still be captured, an album made.
The Virginia Film Festival, a program of the University of Virginia and the Office of the Provost and the Vice Provost for the Arts, is returning to theaters in 2021 after presenting an exclusively virtual and drive-in format in 2020.
Beginning around 5:00 PM on a September 2021 Tuesday, those passing by Carr’s Hill might have heard some beautiful jazz music floating in the late afternoon air, as trumpeter John D’earth welcomed University of Virginia students back in his own special way.
