WPI provides opportunities to investigate worlds beyond your major, and one of those worlds might be art. It might seem an alien world, but many art skills can be useful beyond making art. Drawing enhances spatial perception. Solving design problems hones communication skills. Dreaming up impossible ideas can illuminate what is possible. While you learn to engineer certain outcomes in many disciplines, artmaking also encourages play and if you play you may discover new ways of thinking and doing. 

Sometimes students show up the first day of my art courses worried that they lack talent or experience. Inexperience is a situation so let us find out what you can learn to do. My own education began with music but I always drew. Eventually I went on to study graphic design and illustration, then figurative painting traditions and contemporary drawing approaches. After working in New York for many years, I studied woodcarving and puppetry with Mirek Trejtnar and Leah Gaffen at Puppets in Prague (CZE). The discipline gave me a way to combine many disciplinary interests into one, including history, storytelling, design, art, and music. It also helped me to overcome stage fright and instilled a desire to collaborate with artists internationally and locally. 

I have performed at the Pflasterspektakel in Linz, the Teatro-Toč festival tours around the Czech Republic, the Borgarnes International Puppetry Festival in Iceland, and the Prague Quadrennial. For stage productions, I've created experimental work for the Bedroom Community music collective and Vavavoom visual theatre company's operatic adaptation of Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists by angela snæfellsjökuls rawlings, special effects costumes, and multi-performer puppets including a 20-foot dragon marionette for a New England production of Shrek: The Musical. My recent solo works include performances imagining the creative impulses for cave paintings and reflections on family history in woodcut printmaking. I'm currently learning metal welding, picking back up where the pandemic cut my education short. Why? Because you can always build skills that lead you to new people and projects that you couldn't have conceived were there yesterday. 

With my colleague Roshanak Bigonah, I co-founded and co-direct the Worcester Humanities & Arts Project Center for Art to study the transformation of visual ideas passed between cities and cultures globally. My research is currently focused on the evolution and uses of tessellations in art. We are working towards offering students to complete the HUA Requirement in a learning community of art-focused peers.

Also, along with Dr. N. Aaron Deskins, I co-founded and co-direct the Prague Center for the Global School's Department of Integrative and Global Studies. Our student teams have developed projects for Czech organizations in sectors including health, tourism, culture, and environmental conservation.