The Illustration and Design division in the School of Art is pleased to enthusiastically nominate Lisseth Carrillo for the 2021 Creative Achievement Award for the School of Art. Lisseth is a senior majoring in Illustration with an overall 4.0 GPA who has been named to the Dean’s List for her entire tenure at the University of Arizona. She is the recipient of the Phi Theta Kappa scholarship, awarded to community college honor students, and the College of Fine Arts Scholarship, a merit-based tuition award in recognition of her outstanding design arts portfolio.

Her nominating professor, Nicole Antebi, writes “Lisseth was a student in three of my courses in 20-21: Animation, Motion, and Illustration. In each of these three classes, Lisseth produced work that was innovative, thoughtful, and complex in ways that revealed new aspects of each medium. I call her approach to animation motion accelerated dynamism, speaking to her innate sense of timing and play. Her characters, whether her recurring scaredy cat, or the pigeon that intervened to rescue a pig from a sexual predator, tell complicated and sophisticated stories for these times and is reminiscent of fables and morality tales of the past.”

Beyond the obvious challenges of working from home last year, Lisseth challenged herself in striving, with each project, to create more ambitious solutions to the constraints of space, equipment, and the emotional weight that infused both home life and school. I’m thrilled with what Lisseth was able to accomplish this past year and I look forward to her future accomplishments.  

On behalf of the School of Art Honors and Awards Committee,
Martina M. Shenal

To College of Fine Arts,

I am writing to nominate Dakota Merritt for the Creative Achievement Award as a dancer, and choreographer at UA School of Dance. As a faculty member at the School of Dance, I have had the privilege of working with Dakota in dance technique classes, on stage performances as well as choreography composition classes where I advised several of her choreographic projects.  I was especially impressed with how Dakota transformed her artistry during the past 18 months of the COVID19 pandemic. Instead of letting this challenging period of time restrict her ability to express herself through dance, Dakota chose to hone in on her skills of creating dance on film. When I asked what fuels her creativity when choreographing, she said: “Many of my works are based on human interaction and how to find an authentic connection between the dancers and the audience.” This was apparent in her heartfelt her dance on film entitled Through Her Awakening where 4 dancers each represent an element of navigating their emotional well-being.

Dakota is a focused dance artist who is always striving to further develop and refine her craft. She has a strong desire to search for new experiences in an effort to deepen her understanding of dance and to broaden her perspective. It is my pleasure to nominate Dakota for this prestigious award and I look forward to seeing what she creates with her thoughtful and intelligent approach to dance and choreography long after she has completed her BFA degree in dance and transitions into her aspired professional career in New York City.

Sincerely,
Sam Watson
Associate Professor of Practice, UA School of Dance

To Whom It May Concern,

I am thrilled to be able to nominate Katie Baird for the Creative Achievement Award. I have known Katie since the fall of 2019, when I joined the faculty at the University of Arizona and became her applied viola professor. Katie is probably the most hard-working, dedicated student I have ever taught, and I believe she is an excellent candidate for this prestigious award.

Katie continually demonstrates her commitment to excellence in everything she does. In Spring 2021, she was named the Presser Scholar for the School of Music, and in 2020 she was awarded the Shirley and Maurice J. Sevigny First Generation Scholarship by the University of Arizona in recognition of her academic achievement thus far. As a violist, she has had the opportunity to perform for some of the world’s most celebrated violists, including international viola soloist Kim Kashkashian and former violist of the Grammy- award winning Cleveland Quartet Martha Strongin Katz. In 2021, she was also named as an alternate for two online masterclasses during the pandemic, both of which received audition applications from around the world. The first of these international masterclass competitions was to play for Milan Milisavljević, the principal violist of the MET Opera Orchestra. The second was for violist David Harding as part of the organization Music to Save Humanity. This masterclass opportunity went through several rounds of auditions and as a finalist, Katie is given mentorship and support by the organization to develop an outreach project. Katie’s project is an outgrowth of a podcast she started in the spring of 2021. Katie’s podcast, Beyond the Score, profiles living composers from traditionally underrepresented groups through interviews with the composers and performances of their works, the first episode of which aired in May 2021. In expanding this project through Music to Save Humanity, she plans to include student composers/performer collaborations to highlight the next generation of composers.

Katie is also emerging as a leader among her generation of violists. Here at the University of Arizona, she has served as a College of Fine Arts Ambassador since 2020. In early 2021, she was chosen from a competitive field of applications to serve on the Youth Advisory Council of the American Viola Society. The YAC is an arm of the American Viola Society Board of Directors made up of student and pre-professional violists from around the country. They determine and lead their own programming for violists on a national level, and also advise the Board of Directors on matters relevant to pre-professional violists. As part of this, she helped to start and coordinate the Young Artists Spotlight Series, which further expands the work of her podcast by hosting a donation-based concert series online to highlight the works of marginalized composers. They hosted their first concert in summer 2021, with the next one planned in October 2021. Katie’s interest in the work of underrepresented composers began in the summer of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests. I led a team of violists in developing a database of music for viola by underrepresented composers, of which Katie was a team member. The database (housed on the American Viola Society website) has nearly 1600 works by over 500 composers and of everyone on the team, Katie did more work towards developing this resource than anyone else. She single-handedly added over 800 of the works included in the database, which required extensive research and time, including working from sources entirely in Spanish. It is no exaggeration to say that this database would not exist without the immense time and effort Katie put into it.

Since the moment I started working with Katie, I have been very impressed with her work ethic, attention to detail, and her desire to improve as a musician. She has made outstanding progress in her artistry, technique, tone, vibrato use, intonation, and musicality since she began studying with me. Every time she performs in studio class, the other students are astounded at how much improvement she has made. She holds herself to a very high standard and comes to every lesson very prepared and always enthusiastic about continuing to improve. This level of dedication exemplifies the commitment Katie brings to everything she does.

I would be thrilled for Katie to receive this honor in recognition of all of her hard work, artistic and academic excellence, and leadership positions. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely,

Dr. Molly Gebrian, DMA

Dear Selection Committee,

On behalf of the faculty in the School of Theater, Film & Television, I am proud to nominate Linda Varela for the 2021 Creative Achievement Award. Linda is a highly exceptional student; a double major with one foot in the Film & Television Bachelor of Fine Arts program and the other in the Theater Bachelor of Arts program. She holds a 4.0 GPA in both degrees! That she has made substantial artistic accomplishments in film and in theatre in an unprecedented way has set a high bar to which our faculty hope future students will aspire.

Linda’s first taste of film production came in Spring 2018 when she took Professor Bev Seckinger’s honors elective Digital Filmmaking and Community Media Outreach (also known as DocVisions). In this course, students create short films exploring a variety of topics related to refugee resettlement and immigration in the Tucson area. The project she produced with her filmmaking partner Lydia Wolf profiled three generations of Mexican immigrant women, exploring their attitudes toward activism in an anti-immigrant political climate. Linda excelled in the course, and soon after decided to double major in Theatre and in Film & Television, and was ultimately selected for the Film & Television BFA program. Professor Seckinger writes, “Last spring, Linda served as my preceptor for the DocVisions class and was instrumental in keeping the students motivated even after Spring Break, when the pandemic lockdown prevented them from shooting the films they had been developing for the Casa Alitas migrant shelter.  Despite these challenges, Linda continued to volunteer her time to Casa Alitas over the summer.”

In the Fiction Production course, taught by Professor Mulcahy, Linda and her classmate Skyler Cardella made Rose, a short fiction film about the complicated legacy of what a mother passes down to her daughter. Told with very little dialogue and with great care through all aspects of filmmaking –performance, directing, cinematography, sound, wardrobe, production design and editing — the film delivers a suspenseful, psychologically powerful, and emotionally moving story. According to Professor Mulcahy, “Linda’s approach to filmmaking is thoughtful and collaborative, and combines a firmness in creative exploration with an openness to feedback. She is indefatigable in her willingness to develop, plan, shoot and edit material; her finished work demonstrates inventive uses of form and style along with a high degree of control over craft.”

Linda’s work in Documentary Production class was also extraordinary. “She explored her own, highly personal and contradictory relationship to Catholicism in a uniquely creative way. The imagery of two dancers (one herself, one a performer playing Eve, mother of God) was woven together with personal scrapbook photos and intimate recollections to create a narrative that blended personal history with religious introspection and a deep longing for transcendence. The result was one of the most original and creative productions of the year,” comments Professor Jacob Bricca.

Linda has uniformly impressed the faculty across the School. Professor Jessica Maerz discusses Linda’s contribution to the fully devised theatre production, From the Fishbowl. “While Linda was originally brought onto the project to help with videography, she quickly emerged as a pivotal collaborator, not only providing videography, but also a clear vision to the whole of the piece,” notes Professor Maerz. The solo piece La Vanidos, which Linda devised and performed, was a creative and touching examination of the ways that culture often pressures people to change themselves to fit social standards. Given that this multimedia performance was developed, rehearsed, and presented during a pandemic, creating a beautiful and dynamic production in a safe and distanced way added an additional layer of complexity to Linda’s task. This extraordinary production was highlighted in two separate pieces published in April 2021 by Theatre Times. 

I had the privilege of having Linda in my Directing for Screen class last year, and like my colleagues, I have been dazzled by Linda’s creative achievements. Linda chose to learn remotely during most of my class, which meant that she had to direct and shoot scenes over Zoom. In addition to this challenge she cast actors who would be performing in separate spaces. I was skeptical about how successful the directing exercise could be executed this way, but the strength of the project – the performances, the staging and the technical craft– almost made me forget these obstacles. Her assignment was one of the strongest in the class.  Linda expanded my ideas about how the assignment could be accomplished and showed me how resourceful, creative and capable she is.

It’s evident by the aforementioned faculty praise that Linda has much talent in storytelling. In addition, she has worked as a festival programming intern for Cine Mexico, as a Theatre Development and Production Intern and Assistant to the Director at Fine Revolution, Multimedia Theatre Production. For Students on Stage she directed a play “What Lies in Candor” in 2017 and in 2018 wrote “Wish Me Luck.”

Creatively, academically and personally, Linda exemplifies the traits and accomplishments that mark her current work as excellent, and indicate a high potential for future success. Linda is deserving of an award that recognizes her ability to create vibrant culturally specific stories across the disciplines of both film and theatre. She has an incredibly bright future; we are fortunate to have her here at the UA for the time being.  The faculty are happy and proud to nominate Linda for the Creative Achievement Award.

Sincerely,
Yuri Makino
Associate Director, Film & Television program