It’s a Dean’s Life Vol. 10

Dean Lisa VollendorfSpring is a season of joy at San José State University! For confirmation, just ask the 33,000 students who welcomed daylight savings time with a sigh of relief as they realized they had just captured one more hour of sunlight on our beautiful campus!

The College of Humanities and the Arts has much to celebrate this spring. Every day we create opportunities to connect the university to the community through high-quality arts and culture programming. Nowhere are these connections better illustrated than in our partnership with the city of San José to operate the Hammer Theatre.

On March 2, we celebrated the opening of the Hammer (formerly known as The Rep.) with a kickoff party and the newest film from Spartan Film Studios, The Yellow Wallpaper. Films ran throughout the two-week festival, and the Mercury News covered the end of Cinequest with a fabulous piece highlighting the excitement around the Hammer 2.0 initiative. We have posted rental rates for SJSU and off-campus partners on the Hammer website, where interested parties can also fill out the rental inquiry form. If you walk by the Hammer, you can see the beautiful logotype and visual brand identity developed by Graphic Design professor Chang Kim, whose students continue to develop proposals for wayfinding and interior signage for the facility and the exterior plaza.

Our talented faculty, staff, and students continue to win major awards and inspire the rest of us to creatively express ourselves. Interior Design professor Virginia San Fratello recently won the university-wide Early Career Investigator Award for her groundbreaking work on 3-D printing of sustainable materials. San Fratello also designed the recent Inspiration to Innovation Tower Award given to alum Peter Ueberroth.

Spatial artist Shannon Wright has received one of this year’s SVCreates Artist Laureate Awards. These prestigious awards honor individuals’ artistic excellence and community service. Professor Wright is a sculptor and installation artist whose work inspires others to think about the rich connections between creative expression and our communities and lived environments. This exciting news comes on the heels of glass artist and art instructor Cassandra Straubing’s show, Poetic Ghost, at the Bullseye Glass Resource Center. In other news, Graphic Design instructor Levy Jean-Benoit has been busy promoting his students’ work, including helping them to submit to the Tiburon Film Festival poster competition. SJSU student Katherine Chen won first prize! Read the whole article here.

Philosophy instructor Michael Jordan has been active in coaching and assisting his talented Ethics Bowl students this year, and I am pleased to report that they qualified for Nationals, where they made a strong showing. I am thrilled that a Bioethics debate team is going strong this spring as well.

Like the rest of my colleagues in the College of Humanities and the Arts, I feel deeply privileged to be an educator in an environment that promotes creativity, critical thinking, and ethical citizenship. Our work is made possible by the commitment that our students and their families make to the pursuit of higher education and by our society’s commitment to funding public education. As we speed toward the season of concerts, events, exhibits, and, finally, graduation, I urge all of us to keep in mind how fortunate we are to be associated with a university that has been shaping the region’s workforce, economy, and artistic culture for 159 years.

Sincerely,

Lisa Vollendorf Signature
Lisa Vollendorf, Dean of Humanities and the Arts