DENTON (UNT), Texas -- Four University of North Texas professors will receive time to work on personal projects – ranging from writing poetry to creating a new method of printmaking – after receiving an Institute for the Advancement of the Arts fellowship.

The Faculty Fellows program allows UNT faculty members to take a semester off from teaching to pursue creative research in the arts. The IAA serves to promote artistic and creative expression at UNT.

Fabiana Claure, assistant professor and director of music business and entrepreneurship

Claure will create a multimedia lecture-recital program focused on the entrepreneurial careers of female concert pianists Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Teresa Carreño. Special emphasis will be placed on the context of each woman’s successful, long-term career as pianists and composers while still handling domestic life, raising children and facing the gender-discrimination barriers of their time.

The final program will be a 50-minute multimedia lecture-recital featuring a live performance of the three women’s works, as well as a multimedia presentation created in collaboration with Tania Khalaf, filmmaker and associate professor in the Department of Media Arts. Claure’s program was chosen from more than 400 submissions for presentation at the 2019 College Music Society’s National Conference in Louisville, Kentucky in October.

Lari Gibbons, professor of art
Gibbons will produce and exhibit a series of artworks exploring how the language of print shapes the understanding of the natural world. The series will be circulated in the United States and the United Kingdom during the fellowship, with the goal of presenting the work at the 2020 International Mokuhanga Conference in Japan.

Gibbons will mesh non-toxic water-based printmaking methods with computer-numerically-controlled etched plates to update time-honored, non-toxic printing techniques with contemporary attributes of efficiency, accessibility and scalability.

This new approach will be shared in publications, conferences and visiting artist workshops.

Panayiotis Kokoras, associate professor of composition
Kokoras, the director of the UNT Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia, will travel to Zurich for a residency at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology where he will work on 3D Ambisonics with an immersive lab research team. His time will be spent creating a proposed immersive multisensory intermedia work called “Zoomusicology”.

“Zoomusicology” will be a 45-minute-long, three-part intermedia performance featuring electroacoustic music, visual designs for video mapping, 10-20 micro-robotic sound installations, aromatic diffusers and synchronized audio, video, lights and robotics.

Special equipment will be used to create 360-degree sound. Robotic sculptures will further assist in creating an omnidirectional sound environment.

The premiere of “Zoomusicology” in Fall 2020 is projected to coincide with the completion of a renovation of the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theater in the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia.

Corey Marks, Distinguished Teaching Professor and director of creative writing
Marks will work on finishing a poetry manuscript entitled “My Satellite” that explores the natural world, a theme that runs through all of Marks’ previous works.

Marks said growing up in the rural Michigan countryside heavily influenced his writing. His new work started with a cloudless summer night on the shores of Lake Superior. As he sat watching the stars, a satellite streaked across the sky, inspiring a series of new poems focused on the relationships between nature, technology, history and politics and how those relationships shape experience and identity

Marks, who has taught English at UNT since 2000, was also a recipient of the 2011-2012 Institute for the Advancement of the Arts Fellowship. During the previous fellowship, he worked on a set of poems about the modern zoo and how it embodies a complicated set of impulses, including intellectual curiosity, preservation, entertainment, titillation and the performance of power.