Acting CIRCA Director Corrie Francis Parks is a Professor of Visual Art at UMBC with a focus in animation and installation. She has been Artist-in-Residence at the Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell Colony, subnet Salzburg, Fundación Valparaíso and Klondike Goldrush International Historic Park, a Fulbright Fellow to New Zealand (2005) and Fulbright Scholar to Austria (2023), and a grant recipient from the Montana Film Office and Maryland State Arts Council. She has created projection-based installations for Light City Baltimore, USA, International Media Art Biennial SEE DJERBA in Tunisia, and the UnDARK Festival in Russia. Her award-winning short films have screened at Annecy, Hiroshima, Ottawa, Zagreb, and at major festivals around the world.
CIRCA Advisory Board
Joan Larkins Mather is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre at UMBC and an award-winning costume technologist and designer. She has designed for Bath Shakespeare Festival, Camden Shakespeare Festival, Dramatic Rep, Heartwood Regional Theatre Company, the Public Theatre, Stonington Opera House Arts, Theatre at Monmouth, and Ziggurat Theatre.
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.
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).
Carol Hess was born in New York City where she trained as a dancer and received her BA from Barnard College. Dunn’s approach to developing and manipulating movement has had a profound effect on her work as a choreographer. Her choreography has been presented in New York at the Cubiculo, Dance Theater Workshop, the Grand Finale, and Dance Workshop in Bonn, and the Flora Theater in Amsterdam. She has been Artistic Director of Oregon Dance Theater and Phoenix Repertory Dance Company. She is the chair of the dance department and has taught at UMBC since 1982. Prof. Hess teaches Intermediate Contemporary (Modern) Technique, Dance and Technology, Dance Composition and Teaching Methods for Dance.
Graduate Assistant
Alexi Scheiber is matriculating at the IMDA graduate program and serves as an assistant for CIRCA. She is primarily an experimental animator. Her work has been screened in two dozen film festivals, notably Sweaty Eyeballs (2019), 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.
Accounting Associate
