BIOGRAPHIES FACULTY
ELIZABETH BENSON | P 1
KELLY BRYANT | P 8
ANNIE B. CAMPBELL | P 10
Praised for her “delightful” (The Boston Globe) and “delicately compassionate” (Times Herald Record) singing, Elizabeth Ann Benson is recognized as a dynamic and versatile performer. In her Carnegie Hall début, she created the title role of Lucy by Tom Cipullo, and her performance was acclaimed as “excellent” (The Big City). As a 2015 winner of The American Prize Chicago Musical Theatre Award, she made her solo début at Chicago’s Symphony Center singing music by Rodgers and Hammerstein with the Chicago Bar Association Symphony. Dr. Benson trained at The New England Conservatory (MM) and The City University of New York Graduate Center (DMA). She specializes in crossover vocal technique, spanning from opera to musical theatre to rock. She is the leading scholar on the art songs of Tom Cipullo, and completed extensive research for her dissertation, The Art Songs of Tom Cipullo (2011). She has presented on Cipullo at conferences for the National Association of Teachers of Singing and her article “Reclaiming ‘Romantic’: The Art Songs of Tom Cipullo” is forthcoming in the Journal of Singing. The proposed lecture-recital of the same name combines research findings from the article with live performance. At Auburn University, Dr. Benson is an assistant professor of music theatre singing and serves as music director in the theatre department’s production season.
Bryant is a practicing designer and artist whose work explores the beauty of typography. Her research has focused on integrating the more traditional forms of tactile art making (collage) with ever-evolving computer technology in the form of poster, identity and publication design. This research has been recognized both nationally and internationally through exhibitions; work published in nationally and internationally distributed graphic design books and has received various awards. More recently, her research has moved into the area of painting and collage as a means to work in an analog manner where typography is explored as shape, pattern and/or texture. This work was published this fall in Uppercase 35, an international design magazine, as a 6 page feature entitled “Kelly Bryant: Collages and Paintings inspired by Playful Typographic Details” and recognized this spring in Creative Quarterly 50, The Journal of Art and Design as a Fine Art Winner.
Annie B. Campbell received her BFA from the Department of Crafts and Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004, with a focus in ceramics. She spent time between degrees participating in ceramics programs in Italy, at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, Maho Bay Clay Works in the US Virgin Islands, and Sugar Maples Center for the Arts in New York State. She was awarded her first solo show at the Gumenick Gallery in Glen Allen, Virginia in 2007. She received her MFA in Studio Ceramics from Indiana University, Bloomington in May 2010. In 2011 she was awarded an Emerging International Artist Residency at The Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. She was also awarded a year-long residency at Studio 550 in Manchester, NH in 2012 and was a Distinguished Fellow at Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences in 2015. She taught ceramics and 3-D design at Concord Community College, NH and Endicott College in Beverly, MA prior to joining the faculty at Auburn University as an Assistant Professor of Ceramics in 2016. She maintains an active studio practice and continues to exhibit her sculpture and installations nationally and internationally.
BARB BONDY | P 7 Barb Bondy is a visual artist and professor of art in the Department of Art & Art History. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a BFA from the University of Windsor, Canada. Bondy has taught primarily drawing at Auburn since 2003 and was recently inducted into the College of Liberal Arts Academy of Outstanding Teachers. Since 2005, she has taught drawing classes with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project (APAEP) and more recently for the APAEP Degree Program. Bondy, who is a past recipient of an Alabama State Council on the Arts fellowship, is currently involved in a collaborative research project with cognitive neuroscientist Jeffrey Katz. Their pilot project, funded by the AU Intramural Grants Program, combines art training and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to investigate the behavioral and neural changes (brain plasticity) behind students learning to draw. Bondy has exhibited nationally and internationally and has presented papers on the topic of her work and on drawing practice at professional conferences.
BEN BUSH, ISDA | P 9 Benjamin Bush is an assistant professor of Industrial Design at Auburn University. He joined the School of Industrial and Graphic Design in Fall of 2017 after years of advancing industrial design curriculums at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the Savannah College of Art and Design. Benjamin has championed the importance of studio culture and teamwork. His students have designed and built artifacts from kid’s toys to kayaks. He has led collaborative studios with some of the world’s most famous companies such as BMW, Snap On, Michael Kors, and HP to name a few. He has spoken at numerous universities across Ireland, given sketching workshops in San Jose, Costa Rica and San Paolo, Brazil, facilitated design camps in Tuscumbia, Alabama and Foel Ortho, Wales, and led students to redesign the visual brand language of the Apt cultural center in Apt, France. In 2013, Benjamin was awarded the IDSA Young Educator of the Year Award. This annual award is given to an educator who has earned the respect and admiration of colleagues and students for his/her teaching of industrial design and maintained unwavering commitment to the values and principles of the industrial design profession.
TESSA CARR | P 1 Tessa Carr earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in communication studies with an emphasis in performance studies and a portfolio in women’s and gender studies. She teaches and directs productions for Auburn University Department of Theatre and she also serves as the Artistic Director of Mosaic Theatre Company - a company sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts that is committed to creating original work fostering conversations about issues of diversity. Mosaic Theatre Company performs original work dealing with issues of diversity and social justice numerous times each semester at a variety of campus and community venues. Her research focuses on devised performance in practice and theory, autobiographical performance, feminist performance strategies, and performance as pedagogy. She enjoys creating print scholarship as well as performance as scholarly inquiry. Her latest autoethnographic performance art work, Hauntings: Marking Flesh, Time, Memory is an original work co-written and performed with Dr. Deanna Shoemaker. This work has been featured at California State Northridge, the Patti Pace Performance Festival at Southern Illinois University, The National Communication Association Conference, and Villanova University. The full script is published in Text and Performance Quarterly. Her current print scholarship endeavors examine the work of Mosaic Theatre Company and the possibilities for performance as civic engagement and dialogue.
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