In 2022, the College of Fine Arts launched an initiative to recruit new tenured faculty members and early-career academics whose research focuses on underrepresented and interdisciplinary areas of scholarship and creative practice. Under the Expanding Approaches to American Arts initiative, the college hired four new tenured faculty members and a cohort of three Early Career fellows. Three Early Career fellows were hired with support from the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost. The selected fellows receive research funding, an office or studio space and robust mentorship to help prepare them for careers in academia.
Faculty Hires
Jacqueline “Jacky” Avila
Associate Professor, Butler School of Music
Avila is a musicologist who specializes in film music studies, sound studies and the intersections of identity, tradition and modernity in the musical cultures and new media of Mexico, Latin America and the Latinx community in the United States. She joins the college from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her book, Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity in Mexico’s Época de Oro, was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press’ Music and Media Series.
Rosemary Candelario
Associate Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance
Candelario writes about and makes dances engaged with Asian and Asian American dance, butoh, ecology and site-related performance. She was awarded the 2018 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for her book Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies (Wesleyan University Press 2016) and received the 2022 Mid-Career Award from the Dance Studies Association. Recent choreographic premieres include aqueous (site version, 2021), aqueous (stage version 2019) and 100 Ways to Kiss the Trees (2018). Candelario is the Dance Studies Association vice president for publications and research and holds a Ph.D. in culture and performance from the University of California Los Angeles.
Ondine Chavoya
Professor, Department of Art and Art History
Chavoya is an art historian with a focus on Chicanx avant-garde art and performance, and he is a leading figure in the field of Latinx art history and visual culture. Chavoya is the author of numerous publications on Chicanx art, including experimental video and performance. His award-winning curatorial projects include Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, the first museum retrospective to present the wide-ranging work of the performance and conceptual art group Asco with Rita Gonzalez, and Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. He joins the college from Williams College.
Will Wilson
Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History
Wilson’s art projects center around the continuation and transformation of customary Indigenous cultural practice. He is a Diné photographer and trans-customary artist who spent his formative years living in the Navajo Nation. Wilson received an M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico and a B.A. in Studio Art and Art History from Oberlin College. In 2010 he was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Sculpture, in 2016 the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for Photography and in 2021 the Native Arts and Culture Foundation SHIFT Fellowship. Wilson has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Oberlin College and the University of Arizona. In 2017, Wilson received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. In 2020, Wilson was Doran Artist in Residence at the Yale University Art Gallery, and in 2022 he co-curated Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography, a nationally touring exhibition. Most recently, Wilson served as program head of the photography program at Santa Fe Community College.
Early Career Fellows
Henry Castillo
Henry Castillo is an artist and former member of the Colombian avant-garde theatre collective Teatro Experimental de Cali, with whom he toured the world performing and facilitating workshops on Latinx theatre. He is also an interdisciplinary scholar of performance studies whose research and teaching interests span the relationship between the underrepresented archives and repertoires of Afro-diasporic communities in the Americas as modern forms of marronage, as well as the construction of cultural heritage discourses within Latin American societies. His work explores how Blackness embodies and/or resists these challenges in “multicultural” societies; and how Black performance signals a new form of democratization that manifests itself in the liberation and emancipation of people of African descent in the Americas. In addition to his professional theatre training, Castillo holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, as well as a B.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of California Los Angeles.
Dylan McLaughlin
Dylan McLaughlin was born in the Navajo Nation and is a sound and video artist looking critically to ecologies of extraction. His work often weaves Diné mythology, ecological data and environmental histories while holding space for complexity. What transpires is the sonification of relationships to land through experimental music composition, improvised performance and meditations of new forms of cartography and viewing land. In his multimedia installation and performative works, McLaughlin looks to engage the poetics and politics of human relations to place. He is a recipient of the NACF LIFT award and the Fulcrum Fund award, and he has held residencies at Mass MoCA, Slow Research Lab and BOXO projects. He received a B.F.A. in New Media Art from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and he completed an M.F.A. in Art & Ecology at the University of New Mexico in 2021.
Bella Maria Varela
Bella Maria Varela is an artist based in El Paso and Austin whose research uses video and cultural objects to explore the intersections of immigration, sexuality and gender identity through the lens of contemporary pop culture and mass media. Her teaching focuses on combining found objects, digital, photography, green screen performances and experimental video into nontraditional and virtual classroom environments to guide students to explore their relationship with identity, culture and community. Varela graduated from the Photo, Video and Imaging master’s program at the University of Arizona School of Art. In 2020, she received first place in the 5 Minute Film Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson for her work, Triathlon. During spring 2021, she was accepted into the Mellon-Fronteridades Graduate Fellowship Program and exhibited her work @border_becky at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. In 2022, she exhibited @border_becky at the Cristian Anthony Vallejo Memorial Gallery in Las Cruces and other galleries in the El Paso area. Last spring, Varela exhibited at Soy de Tejas at the Centro de Artes Gallery in San Antonio.