J.E. Johnson is Scenic Studio Supervisor at Texas Performing Arts and an instructor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at The University of Texas at Austin. Johnson specializes in an emergent pedagogy to create safe, dynamic learning environments to unleash student creativity and capability. He has enabled a generation of inexperienced students to fabricate professional quality scenery for over 100 productions. He has adapted his approach for the K-12 classroom to teach children how to construct functioning clocks, automata, and large scale Rube Goldberg machines with the DeBusk Enrichment Center for Academically Talented Scholars and the Austin Tinkering School. In 2015, he co-founded Maker Ready, a consulting and educational product company which has trained teachers to bring hands-on, project-driven learning into K-12 classrooms from Texas to Hawaii. Johnson has also served as a fabricator and consultant for feature films, startups, and international sculptors.

Karen L. Maness is the principal instructor of scenic art, figurative painting, and co-instructor for practical effects classes for the University of Texas at Austin, Department of Theatre & Dance. She is the Scenic Art Supervisor at Texas Performing Arts, directing the scenic art execution of all Department of Theatre and Dance, and Butler School of Music Opera productions. She has worked extensively in regional theatre, themed attractions, industrial display, film. Ms. Maness studied studio art and set design at Whittier College in Los Angeles, CA and continued her studies at Cobalt Studios in White Lake, NY, and The Florence Academy of Art. Her paintings have been exhibited nationally and are held in private collections worldwide. Ms. Maness is a proponent of digital analog fluidity for artists and hands-on, project-based, interdisciplinary team collaboration. Ms. Maness is the co-author of the award-winning The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop, the definitive behind-the-scenes history of one of Hollywood’s most closely guarded cinematic secrets—painted backdrops and the scenic artists who brought them to the big screen. The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop received the USITT Oscar G. Brocket Golden Pen Award (2018), and the University of Texas at Austin Cohen Hamilton Faculty Literary Award- Runner-Up (2017).

Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock, without legal protections. After emancipation, white racism continued to menace black marriages. Recognition of the right of African Americans to enter into wedlock on terms equal to whites would remain a struggle into the Jim Crow era, and its legacy would resonate well into the twentieth century. 

Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of History and Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of two award-winning books: Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017) and To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997). She has written opinion pieces for the New York Times, The Root.com, WashingtonPost.com, Christian Science Monitor.com, Ebony.com, (among others) and has been interviewed on National Public Radio. 

This info session will provide students with tips on applying for the Professional Development Travel Initiative Grant. The PDTI grant provides up to $700 per student for short-term group travel to professional development opportunities.

Headed by Director Joshua Gall, Symphony Orchestra presents a program with pieces by David Maslanka, Jan Van der Roost, Patrick Schulz, Aaron Meacham and Eric Whitacre.