The College of Fine Arts welcomes 10 new professional faculty members for the new academic year. Virginia Grise and Sylvia Wu were hired as part of the Expanding Approaches to American Arts initiative, which recruits new tenured and tenure-track faculty members whose research focuses on underrepresented and interdisciplinary areas of scholarship and creative practice.
Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas
Assistant Professor
Department of Art and Art History
Barhaugh-Bordas is an artist, educator and activist whose art practice — which expands from print media into installation, as well as social and collaborative practices — works at the intersection of migration, queerness and ecology. Barhaugh-Bordas has exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at the Print Shop LA, Handwerker Gallery, Buffalo Arts Studios and Sediment Arts. Artist residencies include Casa Lu Mexico City, ACRE, Women’s Studio Workshop, the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, MI-Lab in Japan and Kala Art Institute. Barhaugh-Bordas holds an M.F.A. in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and a B.A. from Carleton College.
READ Q&A WITH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR BARHAUGH-BORDAS
Greg Cavazos
Assistant Professor of Practice and Director of Mariachi Paredes
Butler School of Music
As the new director of Texas’ Mariachi Paredes, Cavazos brings 19 years of experience as an educator and performer. Throughout his career, he’s held key positions that were pivotal in developing and enhancing mariachi programs in K-12 and higher ed. In addition to his mariachi expertise, Cavazos has served as an assistant band director and assistant orchestra director. As a performer, Cavazos has collaborated with renowned artists such as George Strait, Beatriz Montes and Jimmy Gonzalez. He holds a B.M. in Music Education from Texas A&M University-Kingsville and a M.M. in Musicology with an emphasis on mariachi music from Texas Tech University.
READ Q&A WITH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE GREG CAVAZOS
Sinclair Ogaga Emoghene
Assistant Professor
Department of Theatre and Dance
Emoghene is a dancer and researcher whose work investigates the body as a performance surface while reconstructing the ways that historical data in dance are structured, presented and archived. His work borders performance creation, place situating, cultural studies, experimental practice and dance technology. Most recently, he taught theory, creative research and dance technique as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has created works for the Nollywood audience in Nigeria/Africa, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and other prestigious institutions. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park.
READ Q&A ASSISTANT PROFESSOR SINCLAIR OGAGA EMOGHENE
Kate Freer
Assistant Professor
Department of Theatre and Dance
Freer is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, organizer and educator. Her artistic practice lives at the intersection of story, technology and civic engagement and is rooted in joy, curiosity, mutual learning and the pursuit of justice for all living beings. She is a core collaborator in All My Relations Collective and a proud member of Wingspace Theatrical Design and United Scenic Artists Local 829. Freer previously taught in the department as an adjunct faculty member.
Virginia Grise
Assistant Professor
Department of Theatre and Dance
Virginia Grise is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award and the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me, blu, The Panza Monologues and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Durito. As a writer, performer, director and creative producer, she has an interdisciplinary body of work that includes plays, multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerrilla theater, site-specific interventions and community gatherings. She holds an M.F.A. in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts and is a founding member of a todo dar productions.
READ A Q&A WITH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR VIRGINIA GRISE
Wilhelm Magner
Assistant Professor
Butler School of Music
Viola musician and educator Magner’s accolades include being named to CBC Music’s “30 under 30” list in 2022 and winning various competitions, including the Canadian Music Competition and the OSJS Concerto Competition. Magner’s passion for music extends beyond performance; he has transcribed numerous works by esteemed composers such as Bach, Lutoslawski, Paganini and Waxman for the viola. His solo engagements have taken him across Canada, the United States and Poland. Magner holds an M.M. in viola performance from Yale University and has studied with renowned instructors Ettore Causa and André Roy.
READ A Q&A WITH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR WILHELM MAGNER
Karol Murlak
Professor and Chair
Department of Design
Murlak is a designer, researcher and educator specializing in design for research and science. His practice centers
around creation and application of materials. Most recently, Murlak was a professor at Pratt Institute, New York, and he served as an associate professor at SWPS University, Warsaw, while managing his independent creative consultancy. His work ranges in scale and complexity — from patented technology of expanding wood and devices bringing relief for patients with spine and foot conditions to musical installations. He also holds a doctoral degree in Design and a master’s degree in Interior Architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland.
READ A Q&A WITH DESIGN CHAIR KAROL MURLAK
Anthony Rasmussen
Assistant Professor
Butler School of Music
Rasmussen is a music scholar specializing in music and sound studies of Latin America and Latinx communities across the U.S. His research engages (inter)personal listening histories to explore how individuals experience and draw meaning from a shared sonic experience in multivalent ways, exposing culturally inflected currents of belonging and difference. Rasmussen is also a nonprofit development specialist and community arts educator, deeply committed to creating pathways of agency and resilience for underserved communities in the U.S. and Mexico. He holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from University of California, Riverside and an M.F.A. in Integrated Music Composition, Improvisation and Technology from University of California, Irvine.
READ A Q&A WITH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR ANTHONY RASMUSSEN
Carolina Rubio
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Department of Art and Art History
Irma Carolina Rubio is an artist and educator who has dedicated more than 20 years of experience and leadership to the field of art education, ranging from designing and implementing sensitive, relevant and cutting-edge K-12 curriculum in public schools and universities to working administratively at museums and community arts organizations. Most recently, she completed her ninth year as a PK-12 public school art teacher in San Antonio. Rubio earned a B.F.A. in Visual Studies from Texas Tech University, a MAAE from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and completed three years of doctoral coursework in Art Education and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University, investigating feminist indigenous epistemologies and Zapotec weavers’ embodied knowledge.
READ A Q&A WITH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF INSTRUCTION CAROLINA RUBIO
Luke Williams
Assistant Professor
Department of Theatre and Dance
Williams is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, organizer and critic of 20th- and 21st-century Black diasporic performance and visual cultures. His in-progress manuscript In the Black: Figures of Racial Capitalism examines the practices of four Black emerging artists as they navigate the pressures of racial capitalism in the art market. He is the editor of Blood, Sweat, and Time: Emerging Perspectives on Mildred Howard and Adrian Burrell, published by Sming Sming Books and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. Williams holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University, where he was a Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence (DARE) fellow.
READ A Q&A WITH THEATRE ASSISTANT PROFESSOR LUKE WILLIAMS
Sylvia Wu
Assistant Professor
Department of Art and Art History
Sylvia Wu is a historian of medieval and early modern Islamic art. She specializes in the architecture and material culture of the Indian Ocean world, with a focus on Muslim communities in coastal China and their multifaceted engagement with the region’s other Muslim societies. She is currently developing her first book project, which examines the capacious idea of mosque construction — as imitation, recreation and a form of history (re)writing — in the medieval Chinese port city of Quanzhou. Wu received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.