Faculty Biography

"It was when I was studying in England that I started to realize the benefits of bringing different disciplines together. You see a really different picture when you try to look at the same thing through many different lenses. And coming into a discipline from the outside, you can sometimes see things that people immersed in it may not.

"All my courses are interdisciplinary, and student projects combine both critical and creative work. At Berklee I've been able to experiment with this approach and hone it to the teaching of musicians. In Approaches to Visual Culture, students make a piece of visual culture and comment on it critically: how it fits into the concepts we've been learning about all semester. I show my students animations I've done that are inspired by poems I teach. I'm trying to create models in my own artistic practice for students to use when they start thinking about their projects.

"I worked with a lot of people across the board to develop a new course called Culture, Diversity, and Artistry. We wanted to create a course relevant to Berklee student musicians thinking about their present, about their future, and about themselves as part of a larger society. It's important for artists of all kinds, musicians in particular, to think through larger issues about self, community, culture, and difference.

"In Language of Film I give students a three-part project. Their first assignment is to write an original screenplay of a scene or short-short film, and write a paper about it. Next they storyboard their screenplay and write a paper about that. In the third assignment, we improvise a scene and shoot some footage, which they edit together on their laptops; then they write a paper about editing. Students learn about how people make choices, and film scoring students gain insight into the directors with whom they have to communicate. It's probably the most exciting thing I've done at Berklee.

"I'm also the coordinator for Technology in Learning and Teaching in the Liberal Arts Department. It's really important to me to teach with technology, and for students to engage with technology as multimedia makers. Students still can make a painting, collage, or sculpture, but I also want them to experiment with podcasting, digital video editing, and multimedia making."