Lynn Cazabon has been CIRCA Director since 2020 and is a Professor in the Department of Visual Arts where she works with undergraduate students in the Photography and Cinema concentration and with graduate students in the Intermedia and Digital Arts MFA Program. She is also Affiliate Faculty with the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education (CUERE). Her creative projects are scalable, site-specific, and employ participation as a strategy to deepen public engagement with topics at the interface between environmental and social issues. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including with Witte Rook, Breda, the Netherlands; Maryland Center for History and Culture, Baltimore, MD; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania; Tsung-Yeh Arts and Cultural Center, Tainan, Taiwan; South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN; WRO Art Center, Wrocław, Poland; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY; and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA. She has received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund, The Puffin Foundation, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Maryland State Arts Council, Franklin Furnace Archives, The Camargo Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo.
CIRCA Advisory Board
Dustin Donahue is an Assistant Professor of Percussion at UMBC. He holds a DMA from the University of California, San Diego where he studied with Steven Schick and a BM from the University of Wisconsin. He has performed with many of North America’s top presenters of chamber music, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Monday Evening Concerts, the Ojai Music Festival, the Park Avenue Armory, La Jolla Summerfest, and the Festival Internacional Cervantino. His research investigates forgotten and under-performed works of the percussion repertoire, such as a 2022 lecture recital at the Transplanted Roots Percussion Symposium on the music of Netty Simons and her percussion work, Design Groups 1 (1967).
Shaness Kemp is an Assistant Professor of Dance at UMBC. She is a native of Nassau, Bahamas and holds both a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Master of Fine Arts from Temple University. Most recently, Kemp was invited to be a guest performing artist with the Tabanka African & Caribbean Peoples Dance Ensemble which is Northern Europe’s largest all black professional dance company. As Master Teacher of the Umfundalai technique, she has taught at various institutions, festivals and intensives, both nationally and internationally. Kemp has trained and performed with several notable artists and professional dance companies, including Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, Kariamu & Company: Traditions, Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, Eleone Dance Theatre, Philadanco! The Philadelphia Dance Company, Urban Bush Women, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Rennie Harris Puremovement, The Katherine Dunham Seminar and The American Dance Festival.
Sarah G. Sharp is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and is currently the MFA Graduate Program Director. She is an artist and curator whose studio practice and research cuts across and brings together interests in alternative social histories, language, place, technology and craft. She is the recipient of a Getty Library Research Grant, a BRIC Arts Media Fellowship and residency awards at Cortijada Los Gázquez in Almeria, Spain, The Vermont Studio Center, and ESKFF at Mana Contemporary Art. Sharp has exhibited widely including The Aldrich Museum, The Hampden Gallery at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery and Momenta Art in New York.
Graduate Assistants
Alexi Scheiber will graduate the IMDA program in 2025 with the RTKL fellowship. She serves as an assistant for CIRCA, and an adjunct faculty in Foundations. She is primarily an experimental animator. Her work has been screened in two dozen film festivals, notably Sweaty Eyeballs (2019, 2023), The Krakow Green Film Festival (2018), and the Alexandria Film Festival (2018, 2020, 2021), where she was commissioned in 2020 to make an animation for live music. She received her BFA in Animation from MICA in 2018.
Bao Nguyen (they/them) is an experimental vocalist and performance artist born in Vietnam and based in Baltimore. Incorporating improvised singing, audience participation and movement, Bao creates site-specific, one-on-one and small group performances in natural landscapes and sacred spaces to connect the audience’s life story into nature’s life cycle. Bao completed their BFA at Maryland Institute College of Art and is currently pursuing an MFA at UMBC. Bao has participated in shows at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Ewha Woman University, Korea. In 2022, they were awarded the Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award from the New Media Caucus. Bao recently completed their residency at Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art.
Accounting Associate
