The exhibit is curated by Juana Clem McGhee and made possible through generous support from the university and other organizations in the Atlanta area.

For more information, see www.emory.edu/mandala

Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts announces the recipients of the 2011 Creativity & Arts Awards, recognizing Atlanta and Emory community members who have made significant artistic and administrative contributions to the arts.

Among the winners are Chris Appleton, co-founder and executive director of WonderRoot; James W. Flannery, director of the W.B. Yeats Foundation; Malina Rodriguez, artistic director and co-founder of Dance Truck; and D. Patton White, artistic director of Beacon Dance.

Awards will be presented at the Creativity & Arts Soiree, September 9, from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. in Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. The soiree celebrates the opening Arts at Emory season with performances and arts activities; it is free and open to the Atlanta community. For details, visit arts.emory.edu

Community Arts Administrator: Chris Appleton

Chris Appleton is co-founder and executive director of WonderRoot, a nonprofit organization dedicated to arts advocacy and fostering social change through art. The organization serves a multigenerational, multiracial audience through adults art education, youth arts-enrichment and collaborative public arts initiatives. WonderRoot believes that “artists have the potential to change the world.” http://www.wonderroot.org/

Community Artist: Malina Rodriguez

Artistic director and co-founder Malina Rodriguez “brings dance to the people” via her mobile dance center, Dance Truck. With a truck, dancers, lighting and sound, Rodriguez and her company perform all over Atlanta. Dance Truck has partnered with Le Flash Festival, Decatur Arts Festival, Eyedrum, Garden*Hood, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, MondoHomo, Museum of Design Atlanta, Good Food truck, and the MINT gallery. She recently co-produced “PLOT,” created by Emory alum Blake Beckham. Rodriguez also works in the theatre community as a set builder, rigger and lighting technician; and is a lighting designer and technical director for dance and performance artists. http://www.dancetruck.org/

Faculty: James W. Flannery

James W. Flannery, the Director of the W. B. Yeats Foundation and the Winship Professor of Arts and Humanities at Emory University, came to Emory in 1982 to found the university’s theater program. The Yeats Foundation presents a wide range of lectures, concerts, poetry readings, exhibitions and major international symposiums. From 1989 – 1993, the Yeats Foundation sponsored, with the help of the Coca-Cola Company, the Yeats International Theatre Festival at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Under the direction of Flannery, the Festival featured productions of the poet’s one act plays. Flannery also directed and produced the Atlanta Celtic Christmas Concert, an Atlanta and Emory tradition for eighteen years. The concert celebrated in music, dance, poetry, song and story the spirit of the Celtic and Appalachian Christmas traditions.; in 2010 it was filmed by PBS and will be broadcast to a national audience later this year. http://college.emory.edu/program/wbyeats//index.html

Alumni: D. Patton White

A 1983 Emory graduate, D. Patton White has been working as a performing artist and choreographer for over twenty-five years. Since 1990, he has held the position of artistic director of Beacon Dance. Under his tenure, Beacon Dance evolved into a professional, multi-faceted dance organization presenting a variety of programs to the community. He and the company have had numerous commissions from many of the leading arts organizations in the Atlanta metro area. In addition, he conducts workshops around the country and recently served as an artist in residence at the University of Nevada. http://www.beacondance.org/

Staff: Mary Catherine Johnson

Mary Catherine Johnson, Assistant Director of Emory’s Visual Arts Department and Gallery, works closely with Emory students and faculty, as well as with artists, scholars, donors, and a curatorial committee toward the planning and implementation of exhibitions and events that engage significant issues through contemporary visual art. One of the highlights of her work at Emory was the coordination of a major public art commission with renowned photographer Dawoud Bey that communicated Emory’s diversity through portraits of staff, faculty, and students. http://visualarts.emory.edu/

Graduate Student: Joey Orr

Joey Orr was instrumental in founding The Visual Scholarship Initiative (VSI), a student-run organization committed to visual and multi-media practices in contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship. The VSI provides opportunities for Emory University students, faculty, and staff to meet and discuss visual scholarship issues and topics and their relation to issues of both theory and production. The organization seeks to create an intellectual and, at times, physical space for support, reflection, and critique. http://emoryvsi.wordpress.com/

Undergraduate Student: Charlotte Watts

Charlie Watts founded the Emory Arts Club and now serves as president for the STIPE Society of Creative Scholars, which fosters creative scholarship and arts awareness at Emory College. She is invigorating the visual arts culture on campus among students through club meetings and her own art projects. With a grant from the Center for Creativity & Arts, she recently completed a series of paintings on the art of hooking up, to be presented in an interactive exhibition this October.

Volunteer: Jennie Saliers

Jennie Saliers serves on the board of directors for Emory’s Friends of Music. She has spearheaded membership recruitment and marketing for Friends of Music and supports Emory through her attendance at concerts, financial support, and her active board leadership.

Salman Rushdie will continue to enlighten, enrich and inspire the Emory community, albeit with a new title — as University Distinguished Professor. For the last five years, he has served as Distinguished Writer in Residence.

“I am delighted to be continuing my relationships with Emory,” says Rushdie. “The students have been bright and fun, the faculty engaging and stimulating, and the librarians exceptionally helpful in processing and cataloguing my archive. I very much look forward to these next few years with Emory.”

As University Distinguished Professor, Rushdie’s teaching role will expand to include participation in courses across the university and engagement with faculty in areas of mutual interest. He will continue to give an annual public lecture or discussion on campus, and to be involved with the Emory Libraries, which is the repository for his archive. He also will continue to be based in the Department of English in Emory College of Arts and Sciences.

See news release

At the Decatur Book Festival, held this Labor Day weekend, more than 60 Emory-affiliated authors — faculty, staff, and alumni — will give readings, serve on panels, or  sign books. At the Emory Stage, located at the Decatur Presbyterian Church, you can hear many of these authors talk or read from their works.

See more details and a complete schedule of events

See a list of some of the Emory authors featured at the festival

Their bundle of characteristics echoes the ceaseless curiosity and willingness to take risks noted by other experts. Networking, Mr. Gregersen explains, is less about career-building relationships than a search for new ideas. Associating, he adds, is the ability to make idea-producing connections by linking concepts from different disciplines — intellectual mash-ups.

“Innovators engage in these mental activities regularly,” Mr. Gregersen says. “It’s a habit.”

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The current edition of Oxford American (August 2011) “hunted in colleges throughout the region to find influential educators admired by their students and colleagues, whose classrooms serve as forums for social change, whose homes become their classrooms, and, in some cases, whose assignments become homes.”

It should come as no surprise to anyone at Emory that Marshall Duke, Candler Professor of Psychology, was chosen. According to the article:

Professor Marshall Duke’s classes always start off sweet. This approach is based on an old Talmudic practice, where teachers begin their lessons by putting something sweet on their students’ tongues. “I bring in cookies or lollipops to tend to the basic needs we all have. The notion is that learning is a sweet thing.”

Duke has taught psychology at Emory University for the last forty-one years. Two decades ago, he began offering interdisciplinary courses, a method that was particularly groundbreaking, and has since increased in popularity. “It’s more than a trend, it’s a movement,” he explains. “The disciplines are artificially separated. We are in different buildings but we don’t have to be in different places intellectually.” These classes focus on concepts like “Personality in Theater, Art, Music, Literature, and Dance” or “A Novel Approach to the Study of Human Behavior: The Psychology of Fiction.” This past spring he hosted a course called “Fictional People in Literature and Real Life” with his colleague, Professor Walter Reed of Emory’s Department of English, with whom he’s been planning and trading ideas for ten years. “It is challenging to co-teach. We meet for an hour before the class starts and an hour after class is over.”

Professor Duke’s teaching involves Socratic-style dialogues—he asks maddeningly hard questions like “Is there a relationship between creativity and personality?” “Socrates had it right,” Duke says. “Asking questions is much more important than providing answers. It’s more important for people to live with confusion and come up with ideas on their own than to have answers presented to them. I give puzzles and won’t provide answers for weeks.” In this vein, he once showed his students a YouTube video of Salvador Dalí tearing himself out of an egg with a knife and throwing fake blood. He asked his students if they thought Dalí was crazy. Duke says simply, “It’s a question, you know. Is it art or insanity?”

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Publishers Weekly (April 4, 2011) calls it “an exciting and richly detailed historical swashbuckler…. Thoroughly researched, fast-paced, and tense, this coming-of-age adventure doesn’t sugarcoat the dangers of the era, even as it embraces the mythical glamour of a pirate’s life.”

Check out videos about the book below (from his opening reception at Decatur’s Little Shop of Stories and another made by the publisher, Simon & Shuster).

Heather Christle is making news — and lighting up phone lines – with her poetry these days. The Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory has set up a special phone line so she can read her poems at the request of callers.

“It was not something I planned out when I was writing the poems,” she says of her new collection, The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), which contains several references to the telephone. “At some point it came to me that it would be a cool experiment to see what would happen if I set up a phone number where people could call me and actually hear a poem.”

Read the full Emory Report article (July 11, 2011)

About Emory’s Creative Writing Program

Video of Cristle reading her poems

Ien Chi (a rising junior at Emory College) brought home awards for both Best Movie and Best Director at the 2011 International Campus Moviefest, held June 26 at Warner Brothers Studios in Hollywood, Calif.  He won for “Tick Tock,” a film that he wrote, directed and edited. The film previously won the Grand Prize in Emory’s Campus MovieFest, qualifying the film for the international competition.

Last year as an Oxford student, Chi was a winner at the 2010 Emory Arts Showcase in the visual arts category.

About Campus MovieFest (CMF)… The world’s largest student film festival and a premier outlet for the next generation of filmmakers began ten years ago when four students at Emory University provided fellow students with everything they needed — including camcorders and Apple laptops — to make movies in one week. Since then, more than 350,000 students at colleges and universities globally have received all the necessary technology and training to tell their stories on the big screen through film. CMF is free to students thanks to corporate partners and schools. (Source: http://www.campusmoviefest.com/)

See more details on Chi’s Campus MovieFest award

See video

Video profile of Chi

THE crowd is taking over. Tasks that have traditionally been performed by highly skilled professionals are increasingly being outsourced to the masses, often with surprising results. And it’s not only production that is being crowd sourced. Judgments about the quality of that production, traditionally determined by experts, are also being turned over to the crowd. Champions of crowd sourcing claim that tapping the talents of the many, even the amateur or untrained many, can often meet or surpass the efforts of the expert few.

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