Ithaca College

Please join us for short presentations and performances at 5PM each day. The Zoom link is available in the Fine Artists at Five forum of the Keep Teaching Sakai site. This week’s artists include:

Susannah Berryman, Monday, May 11

Patricia Zimmermann, Tuesday, May 12

Laura Amoriello, Wednesday, May 13

Sarah Sutton, Thursday, May 14

Aaron Witek, Friday, May 15

Fine Artists at Five is hosted by the Center for Faculty Excellence.

Susannah Berryman, Monday, May 11

SUSANNAH BERRYMAN (Nora) is a forty-year member of Ithaca’s theatre community. She teaches in the BFA performance program at Ithaca College and acts and directs regionally, most recently appearing in On the Other Side of the Sea  and Felt Sad, Posted a Frog with the Cherry Arts, The Roommate and The Children, both at the Kitchen Theatre, and A Doll's House Part Two at the Hangar.  Susannah is a charter member of the Cherry Arts collective.  Some other acting venues include the Homecoming Players, the Signature Theatre, Syracuse's Redhouse Theatre, Cortland Repertory Company, the Tampa Playmakers, and the American Stage Company. Directing venues include Ithaca College, Opera Ithaca, the Kitchen Theatre, the Cider Mill Playhouse, the University of Illinois, and the Greenbrier Theatre. She has recently enjoyed exploring more on-camera work in Paper Spiders (Natalie and Inon Shampanier), Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Losing (I.C.'s John Scott), and The Tenders (I.C.'s Becky Lane). Susannah would like to thank Eric Brooks for kindly agreeing to recreate his role for this reading today, Beth Milles, the director of this segment of Felt Sad, Posted a Frog, and Samuel Buggeln, the artistic director/producer of the Cherry Arts production, for letting this segment be used for Fine Arts at Five. 

ERIC BROOKS  (Rafael) Collective member. Previous Cherry: The Missing Chapter, The Snow Queen, andTestosterone. Many shows at Kitchen Theatre Company, including The Price, Talley’s Folly, Peter and the Starcatcher, and the world premiere of Precious Nonsense (also at Auburn Public Theatre). Other regional credits include A View from the Bridge, The Iceman Cometh, Macbeth (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis), Comedy of Errors, She Loves Me, Guys & Dolls (Meadow Brook Theatre, Detroit). New York theatre includes Henry V, Richard II (11th Hour Company), Naked Will (PS 122). Several years as Dr. Louis Darnell on the CBS soap Guiding Light. 

Patricia Zimmermann, Tuesday, May 12

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor of Screen Studies in the Roy H. Park School School of Communications and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environment Film Festival at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. Her most recent book is Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). She is the author of Open Space Collaborative New Media: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice, with Helen De Michiel (London and New York: Routledge Press, 2018); The Flaherty: Fifty Years in the Cause of Independent Cinema, with Scott MacDonald (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2017); Open Spaces: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds in International Public Media (St. Andrews, Scotland: University of St. Andrews Press, 2016); Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places with Dale Hudson (New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). She is coeditor with Karen Ishizuka of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Her new book, Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar, with Scott MacDonald, will be published in early 2021 by Indiana University Press. She also serves as a Documentary and New Media Envoy for the US State Department.

Laura Amoriello, Wednesday, May 13

Laura Amoriello is a pianist, piano pedagogy specialist, and budding mindfulness instructor. In her teaching at IC, she guides music majors through the development of keyboard skills, mentors piano majors as they learn to teach, and promotes student mental health. She is faculty advisor for the Mental Health Awareness for Musicians Association and frequently presents on mindfulness and self-compassion and their impact on music teaching, learning, and performance. Laura began playing the piano at the age of seven in order to learn holiday songs; thankfully, that purpose evolved to champion the music of underrepresented composers. In Fall 2019, Laura presented "The Girl Gershwin: Music of Dana Suesse" at IC. Her current project is exploring the piano music of Florence Price, a rich heritage for students of all levels. The three pieces by Price in this program--"Memory Mist," "Song without Words," and "Meditation"--represent stages of coping with suffering and uncertainty. Price's gift for melody and harmonic color comforts us, and her legacy emboldens our spirit.

Sarah Sutton, Thursday, May 14

Sarah Sutton is a painter who is interested in visual perception, biology and speculative futures. She was born in the Appalachian coal - mining region of Northeastern Pennsylvania and lived there for the first 11 years of her life. The town that she grew up in rests over flooded anthracite coal mines. She then moved to a suburb of Cleveland, 10 miles from a very large power plant. The cooling towers overtook the landscape. Both places had a lurking environmental threat, yet life marched forward. These early visual landscapes had an impact on her paintings and ideas. In her paintings, the human realm is organized like rhizomatic mycelium, connecting things that aren’t supposed to go together to focus on symbiotic relationships that span time, species and place.  Her work has been shown in Europe and across the United States. She attended the Millay Colony artist residency, Santa Fe Art Institute residency funded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation and has an upcoming residency at Yaddo.

Aaron Witek, Friday May 15

Aaron Witek is a trumpeter who has performed throughout the United States, China, and Australia. He has played with the Shreveport Symphony Orchestra (LA), Monroe Symphony Orchestra (principal, LA), Sinfonia Gulf Coast Orchestra (FL), Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra (FL), Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra (FL), Albany Symphony Orchestra (GA), and the Orchestra of Northern New York. He has performed as a soloist with the International Shanghai Symphonic Band, Monroe Symphony Orchestra, Florida State University Symphonic Band, University of Louisiana Monroe Wind Ensemble, and the University of Louisiana Monroe Symphonic Band. Witek has won awards for both his playing and teaching, has given recitals and master classes at many universities and conferences, and is in demand as a clinician with ensembles throughout the United States.