After an exciting couple of weeks filled with Orientation activities for the Bachelor of Global Business and Digital Arts students and a series of intensive workshops for the Master of Digital Experience Innovation students, we have now embarked on a new academic year.
I would like to take this opportunity to welcome three new faculty members to the campus:
Jessica Thompson (BFA 1998 York University, MFA 2011 State University of New York-Buffalo), Assistant Professor, Department of Fine Arts/Stratford Campus. Ms Thompson’s artistic work investigates spatial and social conditions within urban environments through interactive artworks situated at the intersection of sound, performance, and mobile technologies. She has exhibited extensively, including in Copenhagen, New York, Hong Kong and Oslo. Ms Thompson has also taught courses in sound art at Brock University and the University of Buffalo. She has extensive administrative experience with the Ontario College of Art and Design extension program and with industry partners.
Jane Tingley (BFA 1999 University of Manitoba, MFA 2006 Concordia University), Assistant Professor, Department of Fine Arts/Stratford Campus. Ms Tingley has an extensive artistic practice that is installation-based, with a focus on both materiality and the viewer's experience of space. It includes collaborative projects such as performative robotics and developing a gestural game. She has exhibited internationally, and she is now working collaboratively on a number of international projects. Ms Tingley has also worked for several years at Hexagram-Concordia, an intensive interdisciplinary research centre that fosters high-level work across Fine Arts, Computer Science, Engineering and the Humanities in new media art, design and technology.
Gerald Voorhees (BS 2002 University of Texas-Austin, PhD 2008 University of Iowa), Assistant Professor, Department of Drama and Speech Communication/Stratford Campus. Dr. Voorhees’ areas of expertise include critical-cultural rhetorical studies of digital media and popular culture; the intersection of identity, agency and cultural difference in digital games and new media; and contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism. He is the lead editor of two books recently published on digital games, and the author of several articles addressing digital culture, rhetoric, and neoliberal multiculturalism.
Jessica Thompson, Jane Tingley, and Gerald Voorhees are the first faculty hires of several joint positions we will fill over the next years as our programs continue to grow.
Welcome to our new colleagues and our new and continuing GBDA and MDEI students! I wish everyone a stimulating and fruitful semester!
Christine McWebb
cmcwebb@uwaterloo.ca