Westphal College of Media Arts & Design

Host: Art & Art History

Joy Tonepahhote is a Kiowa beadwork artist whose works have been shown at the Heye Center of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Indian City USA Cultural Center in Anadarko, and the Museum of Indian Culture in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Native women of the Great Plains are proud practitioners of beadworking–an over century-old art form founded with the introduction of glass beads by Spanish traders in the eighteenth century.  Kiowa women of the Southern Plains are especially noted for their delicate, geometric and floral designs created for the dresses, moccasins, shirts, and bags worn by men and women at powwows. 

January 9, 2023 – March 17, 2023, the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery hosted “Au Tion Ma, Woman with a Good Heart: Beadworks by Joy Tonepahhote,” an exhibition of Tonepahhote’s beaded clothing and powwow regalia. The exhibition will be on continuous view in the gallery windows during this period, and the artist presented a public lecture on March 7.

View the digital exhibition

Host: Arts Administration & Museum Leadership

Phil Chan is a co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, and author of Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing between Intention and Impact, and the President of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation. He is a graduate of Carleton College and an alumnus of the Ailey School. He has held fellowships with NYU, the Manhattan School of Music, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and is currently a fellow at Harvard University, Drexel University, and the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris.

As a writer, Phil served as the Executive Editor for FLATT Magazine and contributed to Dance Europe Magazine, Dance Magazine, Dance Business Weekly, and the Huffington Post, and currently serves on the Advisory Board of Dance Magazine. He served multiple years on the National Endowment for the Arts dance panel and the Jadin Wong Award panel presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance. His latest choreography project, the "Ballet des Porcelaines,” premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2021 and will tour throughout 2022. He is a Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor of Dance at Carleton College in Fall 2022, and was just named a Next 50 Arts Leader by the Kennedy Center.

Host: Architecture, Design & Urbanism

Coming Soon...

Host: Design Research

Liz Sanders is the founder of MakeTools, LLC where she explores new spaces in the emerging co-design landscapes. As a practitioner, Liz introduced many of the methods and tools being used today to drive and/or inspire design from a human-centered perspective. She has practiced co-designing across the design disciplines and is now bringing co-design practices to many other disciplines. Her industrial career has been focused on generating, developing and using participatory design research methods in the design and development of products, services, systems and spaces. Some of her clients have included Apple, AT&T, Coca Cola, Compaq, GE, Honda, IBM, Intel, Kodak, Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble, Roche Diagnostics, Steelcase, Thermos, 3M, and Xerox.

Liz joined the Design Department at The Ohio State University as an Associate Professor in 2011 while continuing her work with MakeTools. Her many publications, presentations, design awards, patents, as well as success in the marketplace have established Liz as a global leader in the field of design research. She co-authored Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design, that is recognized as the textbook for students of co-designing in academia as well as practice. Today Liz speaks and conducts workshops about co-design research, collective creativity and transdisciplinarity with clients, colleagues and students all over the world.

Liz has a Ph.D. in Experimental and Quantitative Psychology, a B.A. in Psychology, and a B.A. in Anthropology. She was hired in the early 1980’s by a leading design consultancy as an “experiment” to explore the integration of social science and design. The experiment is ongoing. The aim of Liz’s research today is to democratize design so that all the people who will be affected by design decisions can make creative contributions and play a role in determining their future ways of living. Her research is focused on the exploration, development and dissemination of a co-design language that can be used to generate and describe relevant transformation and sustainable innovation

Host: Graphic Design

Mr. Shu Kubo will introduce us to some of the traditional Japanese kimono fabric patters, papercutting techniques for making stencils and dying process. Ms. Rumi Hirayama, who practices “life-cycle of kimono”, through sewing techniques of kimono/yukata, will show us the engineering of the “no waste” construction. Students had the opportunity to learn how to sew yukata!

Host: Music Industry

Dr. Paul Thompson is as a professional recording engineer and has worked with local, national and international artists including Shadowlark, Sam Airey, Stereo Mike, Marcus Bonfanti, The Medieval Baebes, Utah Saints and Ian Prowse. He is a Reader in Popular Music at Leeds Beckett University and leads the MA Music Production programme and teach on Studio Production Skills, Creative Music Production. His research focuses on creativity and collaboration, audio education, informal music learning practices, popular music heritage and cultural production in popular music.

Kirk McNally is a recording engineer, music producer and sound artist living in Victoria, British Columbia on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. He received his Master’s of Music in Sound Recording from McGill University. As a recording engineer he has held positions at the Tanglewood Music Centre (Lenox, MA), Reaction Studios (Toronto, ON), and the Warehouse Studio (Vancouver, BC), working with artists including, The Boston Symphony Orchestra, Bryan Adams and REM. Kirk is an associate professor of Music Technology for the School of Music at the University of Victoria, where he is the program administrator for the school’s undergraduate combined major program in music and computer science and the graduate program in music technology. His research and creative work has been supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the Canada Council for the Arts, the University of Victoria’s Learning and Teaching Centre, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Hosts: Dance, Digital Media, Pearlstein Gallery

Obsidian: An Investigation of Black Wealth is an interdisciplinary project between Drexel's Dance, Digital Media, the Pearlstein Gallery, the Writer’s Room, and students from West Philadelphia High School and lead artist and Rankin Scholar in Residence, Maria Bauman.

Bauman is an international dance artist specializing in humanistic, anti-racist community organizing embedded in creative process. The work furthers her research on various kinds of wealth and abundance and offers the students a formative experience in being part of an original, research-based artwork. With this new dance piece, she is probing themes of luxury, abundance, and the politics of Black wealth while examining Jillian Hernandez’s Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, using autoethnography as her methodology.