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  • Chris Fink
    Chris Fink
    Literary Arts: Writer
    Professor Chris Fink specializes in fiction writing and teaches courses in creative writing, literature and journalism at Beloit College is Wisconsin. He serves as editor for the Beloit Fiction Journal and coordinates the Mackey Chair in Creative Writing. His book of stories Farmer’s Almanac: A Work of Fiction came out in the spring of 2013 from Emergency Press. Since 2000, he has published more than twenty five stories and essays at various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Malahat Review North Dakota Quarterly, Other Voices, The Pinch, South Dakota Review and others. He was a founding faculty member of the MFA program at San Jose State University, where he taught for five years and edited Reed Magazine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Silicon Valley Artist Laureate, and founder of the John Steinbeck Award for the Short Story.
  • Diane Frank
    Diane Frank
    Performing Artist: Choreographer
    After completing a B.F.A in Theater (Ohio University) and an M.A. in Dance (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), Diane Frank taught for four years in the Dance Department at the University of Maryland, where she was a founding member of the Maryland Dance Theater. She then moved to New York City to begin an eleven-year career with Douglas Dunn and Dancers, touring nationally and internationally. As a scholarship student, she was invited by Merce Cunningham to join the teaching staff of the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, where she taught for eight years. At Cunningham’s request, she taught both technique and repertory at the American Center’s Atelier Cunningham in Paris. A frequent guest teacher at the Paris Opera, she assisted Douglas Dunn in both the creation of new work for the Opera and the setting of established repertory. Frank has been the recipient of seven NEA Choreography Fellowships for collaborative choreographic projects with Deborah Riley, as well as commissions from the Jerome Foundation, DTW, Dance Bay Area, and Meet the Composer, and Arts Silicon Valley. Her work has been performed both in the United States and abroad. At Stanford since 1988, Frank teaches intermediate and advanced modern technique, choreography, and mentors graduate and undergraduate student dance projects. She organizes and advises Stanford’s student participation in the American College Dance Festival as well as other Divisional dance education and performance projects on- and off-campus. She is the Co-Director of the Dance Division’s annual concert. She also organizes numerous choreographic commissions by guest artists for Stanford student dancers, frequently acting as Rehearsal Director, setting and maintaining works by choreographers as diverse as Elizabeth Streb, Holly Johnston, Brenda Way, Parijat Desai, Hope Mohr, Janice Garrett, among others. In 2005, she played a significant role in the development of Stanford Lively Arts’ campus-wide interdisciplinary arts event “Encounter: Merce,” organizing its “Music and Dance by Chance” commissions, as well as an IHUM lecture series on Cunningham’s video dances and concert repertory. She has twice taught Cunningham repertory in Stanford workshop classes. Frank has been instrumental in developing a number of residency projects and artistic collaborations for the Dance Division. Highlights include: the repertory reconstruction project of Anna Halprin’s “Myths”; Hope Mohr’s “Under the skin,” a collaborative performance project bringing together artists, physicians and residents from the Medical School, and community performers; Elizabeth Streb’s “Crash” performed with Streb’s company on Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium stage; and “Cantor:Rewired,” site-specific outdoor iterations of Parijat Desai’s work fusing Southeast Asian classical Indian dance with post-Modern choreographic strategies. Originally performed throughout the galleries and grounds of Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, this work was most recently performed at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum in May 2010. in Spring 2010, she assisted Ann Carlson in the organization of her walking performance event, “Still Life with Decoy”. In 2011, she is assisting in the reconstruction of Anna Sokolow’s signature masterpiece, “Rooms”. Frank also teaches “The Duets Project,” a performance class that examines partnering through duet repertory. Strongly interested in site-specific performance, Frank has taught the theory course “Figure/Ground: Site-Specific Dance Performance in Outdoor Environments.” Complementing this course, she conceived and organized “Red Rover,” a series of commissioned site-specific dance performances traveling the grounds of Stanford campus. Frank instituted and currently directs the Firework Series, a quarterly informal showing of student work followed by discussion among artists and audience. She also conceived and organized the Bay Area Dance Exchange, a day-long intensive hosted by Stanford for Bay Area college and university dance programs; eight schools gather to share studio practices, creative processes, and performances of works. Frank’s recent choreography includes the site-specific duet “Cleave,” from which she developed a video dance with film maker David Alvarado, as well as “Sea Change,” a series of duets. Her current work, “Twilight Composite” will be performed at the American College Dance Festival in March 2012. Frank is a frequent guest teacher at Bay Area dance studios, colleges, and universities. A strong proponent of arts education, she consults and volunteers in the development of dance and live arts activities for public schools and the community. She has also directed the Dance Division’s summer dance intensive for high school students through US Performing Arts. Frank is Acting Director of the Dance Division for the Academic Year 2011-12.
  • Don Fritz
    Don Fritz
    Visual Artist: Painter
    My work has evolved from an early interest in Pop Art and icons of American pop culture expressed through popular imagery and cultural artifacts. I explore visual symbol for what it represents both literally and metaphorically. I am fascinated with the psychological disavowal that is required to live with and accept the pervasive cultural narratives of childhood, power, and gender. Simultaneous acceptance of contradicting information is rooted in these narratives. Childhood, as a concept, is a place charged with fantasies of freedom and innocents. It is addressed in my work by appropriating familiar imagery and reconstructing it on an image surface in a self-reflexive and highly material approach. Through techniques of layering and erasing of visual element conflicting ideas and develop a trace of my psychological process. In reworking the surface, each layer brings me further into the dialectics of the issues being addressed. Toys and children’s books become objects of ritual when in a culture like ours they are imbued with conscious and unconscious meaning. The various meanings are based in cultural constructs of gender and power. To illustrate the construction of childhood imagery, larger-than-life ceramic sculptures of iconic toys and books demonstrate a banality that comes from being oversized and heavy while also fragile; mimicking the duality in childhood mythology. I use humor to juxtapose the underlying presence and psychological consequence of the menacing cultural narratives intrinsic in children’s toys and books. Power is trivialized and becomes symbolica accessible in stylized toys such as guns, jet planes, and rocket cars where the violence is hidden under their glazed surfaces. Fantasies of power are closely linked to gender identities. Gender identities that are formed in childhood depend greatly on visual representation in media images and toys. The toys that seem to reflect the innocence and freedom of childhood are embedded with weighty social contracts dictating gender identities. I incorporate images of toys and children performing gender roles in combination with ghost images into my investigations of American pop culture and its fantasies to show the disparity between our idealized fantasies and our physical based realities.
  • Ray Furuta
    Ray Furuta
    Performing Artist: Musician
    Hailed as “The Rockstar of the Flute” (Informador de Guadalajara) and “The protégé of the great flutist, Carol Wincenc [Professor of Flute at The Juilliard School]” (San Jose Mercury News), Ray Furuta has toured worldwide as a soloist and teacher in countries including Canada, Mexico, Japan, Czech-Republic, Poland, Spain, and throughout the Middle East. He has been a featured performer for Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, United Nations, and the Mainly Mozart, Okayama, Yellow Barn, and Banff Music Festivals to name only a few. He is the Artistic Director and founder of Chamber Music Silicon Valley and has professionally collaborated with renowned artists including Jon Nakamatsu and members of the Kronos, Juilliard, Brooklyn Rider, and Emerson String Quartets. He is a Music Professor at Santa Clara University and has also guest taught at Stanford University, New York University, and Lebanese American University of Beirut, among many others. Honored as a distinguished alumnus in 2016, Furuta earned a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree from Stony Brook University.
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