Summer Faculty Bios
Abuba, Ernest H. (SLC 1995 - ) [Creation and Invention: Summer Theatre Intensive]. Recipient of an OBIE, five New York State Council on the Arts Fellowships for playwriting and directing, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Creative Artist Public Service (CAPS) Award, Best Actor Focus Press Award. Broadway: Pacific Overtures, Shimada, Loose Ends, The King and I, Zoya’s Apartment, dir. Boris Morozov; Maly Theatre. Regional/Off Broadway roles: King Lear, MacBeth, Oberon, King Arthur, Autolycus, Chebutykin, James Tyrone,Lysander, Mishima, The Singer in Caucasian Chalk Circle, dir. Fritz Bennewitz; Berlin Ensemble. Author of Kwatz! The Tibetan Project, Leir Rex, The Dowager Empress of China, An American Story, Eat A Bowl Of Tea, Night Stalker, opera Cambodia Agonistes, all produced Off Broadway; national tours to the Cairo Experimental Theatre, and Johannesburg, South Africa. Collaborated/performed Butoh with Shigeko Suga in Spleen, Acadami Domani, by Dario Fo, and Sotoba Komachi. Film/ TV: 12 Monkeys, dir. Terry Gilliam, King of New York, Call Me, New York Undercover, Bill Cosby Show, Kung Fu. Director/Screenwriter: Mariana Bracetti, Arthur A. Schomburg, Asian American Railroad Strike, Iroquois Confederacy, Lilac Chen-Asian American Suffragette and Osceola produced by PBS/CBS. Voice of His Holiness the Dalai Lama on the audio book The Art of Happiness.
Altman, Hillary (SLC 2006 - ) [Concentrating on the Visual: Painting] is a multi-media artist and poet born and raised in New York City. Currently based in Manhattan, her work focuses on the ephemeral nature of time and space, executed as large scale light installations with a concentration on the conversation between photography, video, text, and painting. She holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Fine Art Photography from Syracuse University and the San Francisco Art Institute. Having exhibited in New York City, Syracuse, San Francisco, and Florence, Italy, she now teaches watercolor at Sarah Lawrence College and is presently working on her first book as well as her own label of handmade artist’s goods.
Dollinger, Roland (SLC 1989 - ) [Summer in the City, History/Literature]. BA, University of Augsburg, Germany. MA, University of Pittsburgh. PhD, Princeton University. Special interest in twentieth-century German and Austrian literature; author of Totalität und Totalitarismus: Das Exilwerk Alfred Döblins and several essays and book reviews on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature; co-editor of Unus Mundus: Kosmos and Sympathie, Naturphilosophie, and Philosophia Naturalis.
Downs, Patrick [Filmmaking Intensive, Directing] is an award-winning filmmaker and Columbia University graduate, whose most recent film, Broken, has received many awards. As the directing instructor, Patrick works with our students one-on-one to make sure they complete their projects in time for the final screenings.
Fauer, Jon, ASC, [Filmmaking Intensive, Cinematography Seminar] has won many awards for his work, including Best Cinematography at The NY Festival, Gold Camera Award for Best Cinematography at The US International Film and Video Festival, Cine Gold Eagles, Cindy Golds, Tellies, Boli's, Chris's, and Worldmedals. He is the author of three best-selling books on cinematography: Arriflex 16Sr3: The Book, The 16Sr Book, and The Arriflex 35 Book.
Gartrell, Amy (SLC 2003 - ) [Concentrating on the Visual: Printmaking] is a mixed-media artist who works on paper as well as in wood, metal, glass and ceramics. Born in California, she received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 1996 and has been a practicing artist in NYC ever since. She has shown her work in venues as diverse as La Panaderia Gallery in Mexico City, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, The Whitney Museum at Altria, Mary Boone Gallery, Greene Naftali Gallery, CAF Santa Barbara, and is represented by Daniel Reich Gallery. Amy is the printmaking technician at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches letterpress and silkscreen workshops. You can see her work at www.danielreichgallery.com .
Katz, Peter [Filmmaking Intensive, Program Director and Guest Speaker] has been producing theatrical films and television movies for the past 25 years. His credits as producer or executive producer include such feature films as Don’t Look Now (Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie), The Wrath Of God (Robert Mitchum, Rita Hayworth), One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch (Tom Courtenay), and for television, ten Perry Mason movies (Raymond Burr), Kill Me If You Can (Alan Alda, Talia Shire), The Million Dollar Field (Rob Reiner, Bonnie Bedelia), and Sophia; My Life and Loves (Sophia Loren, Armand Assante). Mr. Katz began his film career with Director Robert Aldrich as a casting director and then dialogue director on The Dirty Dozen.
Lang, Allen (SLC 1998 - ) [Creation and Invention: Summer Theatre Intensive] is the artistic director of the College’s theatre program as well as the program casting director and the co-director of the SLC theatre outreach program. He has received the Lipkin Playwright Award and Drury College Playwright Award and has conducted theatre and creative writing workshops for participants of all ages in New York City, South America, and throughout the United States. Artistic director and founder of the River Theatre Company in Central Wisconsin. Recent plays directed: The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco, On Foot by Slawomir Mrozek, The Menaechmiby Plautus, Catastrophe and Endgame by Samuel Beckett, Andre’s Mother by Terrence McNally, and Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire.
Mark, Rona (SLC 2007 - ) [Filmmaking Intensive, Screenwriting] is an award-winning filmmaker and graduate of Columbia University's graduate film program. Film awards include finalist at The Student Academy Awards, Filmmaker Magazine Audience Choice Award, Best Comedy at The Polo Ralph Lauren Film Festival, and recipient of The Milos Forman Fund Award.
Marshall, James (SLC 2006 - ) [Robotics] BA, Cornell University. MS, PhD, Indiana University-Bloomington. Special interests in robotics, evolutionary computation, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. Author of research papers on developmental robotics, neural networks, and computational models of analogy; author of the Metacat computer model of analogy.
McDaniel, Jeffrey (SLC 2001 - ) [Poetry Workshop]. BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MFA, George Mason University. Poet. Author of four books of poetry: The Endarkenment (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), Alibi School, The Forgiveness Parade, and The Splinter Factory. Poems published in many anthologies, including Best American Poetry, New (American) Poets, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Washington, DC, Commission for the Arts.
Olson, Leah (SLC 1987 - ) [Summer in the City, Science]. BA, Evergreen State College. PhD, State University of New York-Albany. Special interest in the neurobiology of circadian rhythms and in the neurobiology of learning and memory; research and papers on circadian rhythms.
Randolph, Chris [Concentrating on the Visual: Painting] Chris graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied with painter Richard Pousette-Dart, received a master’s from Pratt Institute, and took classes at the Art Students League. She is a licensed Clinical Art Therapist at 4 Winds Hospital, Katonah, NY, where she works with teens on a wide variety of art projects that encourage self-discovery and authentic expression. She has taught teens drawing and painting at the Rockland Center for the Arts, Nyack, NY. Chris has been painting for 25 years and enjoys hands-on experimental processes of picture making.
Ruiz, José [Concentrating on the Visual: Drawing] was born in Lima, Peru in 1975. He received a BA from the University of Maryland with a major in painting along with a minor in Latin American studies. Ruiz received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute’s New Genres Department in 2004. Recently, he has served as a visiting artist at Napa Valley College, Marcia Wood Gallery, and Whittier College and was also nominated to be an Alumni Representative for the San Francisco Art Institute during the 2005-2006 academic year. He has won numerous awards such as the Workspace Program Residency in Queens, NY, the Trawick Prize’s Young Artist Award, a Visual Artist Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts, and a Merit Fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work is represented by G Fine Art in Washington, DC, and Steven Wolf Fine Arts in San Francisco, CA. José Ruiz lives in NYC.
Sanchez, Misael (SLC 2008 - ) [Filmmaking Intensive, Program Director] is founder and executive director of the International Film Institute of New York, a summer filmmaking program in New York and California. He is also director of film production facilities for the Columbia University School of the Arts, where he founded the cinematography concentration in the graduate program.
Sizer, Lyde (SLC 1994 - ) [Precise Stories and Creative Essays: Writing Across Your Life]. BA, Yale University. MA, PhD, Brown University. Special interests include the political work of literature, especially around questions of gender and race, U.S. and European intellectual history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the social and cultural history of the American Civil War. Her book, The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and The American Civil War, 1850-1872, won the 2000 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians. Currently co-editing, with Jim Cullen, the forthcoming The Civil War: A Textbook Anthology of Sources; book chapters included in Love, Sex, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, Divided Houses: Gender and the American Civil War, and A Search for Equity.
Smith, Edward [Filmmaking Intensive, Screenwriting] is a screenwriter and graduate of Columbia University’s Film Division. He currently works with The Film Program at Brooklyn Academy of Music In New York City.
Soiseth, Alexandra (SLC 2000 - ) [Precise Stories and Creative Essays: Writing Across Your Life] is the assistant director of the graduate writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, where she also teaches. She is a recipient of a Canada Council grant and an Ontario Arts Council grant. She has a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing (fiction) from Sarah Lawrence College. Her stories have appeared in Global City Review, Life Rattle, McGill Street Magazine,and other journals.
Stayrook, Chad (SLC 2004 - ) [Concentrating on the Visual: Sculpture] is an artist and graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute’s New Genres MFA program. Chad has exhibited extensively in San Francisco as well as New York and London. He has taught installation, performance, ceramics, and photography classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Columbus Museum of Art. Outside his life as an artist/conceptualist, Chad works as the administrator for the visual arts program at Sarah Lawrence.
Stein,Joan[Filmmaking Intensive, Directing] won the 2000 Student Academy Award and The Director's Guild of America Award for her short film, One Day Crossing. She has taught the documentary film course at Columbia University, where she received her MFA in film.
Stringfellow, Rodney (SLC 2008 - ) [Telling Stories for the Screen; Summer in the City, Filmmaking] BA in visual communications design from Purdue University. M.S. in communications design from Pratt Institute. Stringfellow works as a children’s television writer for Nickelodeon, Playhouse Disney, Sesame Workshop, PBS Kids, and Peach Blossom Media (Singapore). Previously, he was director of development for Dorado Entertainment and associate producer on Nickelodeon’s live-action series Taina and Gullah Gullah Island. Prior to his work at Dorado, Stringfellow worked in film and television development at Russell Simmons’s Rush Communications and at Hudlin Bros., Inc. He wrote and directed the one-act play, The Solid Milk Chocolate Man, for the Urban Fairytale Festival in the spring of 2000 and subsequently directed The Solid Milk Chocolate Man as an independent short film.
Strype, Fred (SLC 2003 - ) [Filmmaking Intensive, Works in Progress]. BA, Fairfield University. MFA, Columbia University School of the Arts. Postgraduate study: American Film Institute, New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Award-winning screenwriter, producer, and director. Awards, grants, and film festivals include Tehran International Short Film Festival; Best of Berlin Film Festival Shorts; Uppsala International Film Festival (Sweden); U.S.A. Film Festival; Washington, DC, Jewish Film Festival; Cleveland International Film Festival; Temecula Valley International Film Festival—“Best of the Fest” Award; Rome, GA, International Film Festival—Best New Film Award; Portugal Film Festival—Press Award; Fade In magazine—Fade In Award/Best Short Screenplay; Angelus Film Festival—Triumph Award; Austin Film Festival—Screenwriting Award; Heartland Film Festival—Crystal Heart Award; Rhode Island International Film Festival—Best Feature Screenplay Award; Polo Ralph Lauren Filmmaker Development Award; New Line Cinema Filmmaker Development Award; Hamptons International Film Festival; Schomburg Cultural Program grants, 2002-2004. Production company, Raindance Pictures: film projects include screenwriter/ producer, Anna Down East—David Foster Productions. Screenwriter, Esperanza—WolfFilms. Screenwriter, producer, director, Got Next—Cinehaus/Raindance. Independent feature film credits include producer, All or Nothing: A Moscow Detour; producer’s consultant, Filmic Achievement; co-producer, American Saint; associate producer, Detention; co-executive producer, Ninth Life.
