People

Acting CIRCA Director – Corrie Francis Parks

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).

Shaness Kemp is a native of Nassau, Bahamas and holds both a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Master of Fine Arts from Temple University. She is an Assistant Professor of Dance at University of Maryland Baltimore County, and continues to work as a freelance dancer, choreographer and dance educator. 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 to name a few. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally at organizations such as the International Association of Blacks in Dance Conference and the 37th Annual Choreographers Showcase where she received the Audience Choice Award for her choreography. She was also the 2015-2016 recipient of the Ellen Forman Memorial Award.

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
Xiaofei Xie