‘Continue To Think Big’: Faculty Members Share Their Research And Creative Works During Annual Symposium
Faculty in the Texas A&M College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts showcased a wide variety of research during the 2025 Research and Creative Works Day.
The third-annual spring symposium was held Feb. 3 at the Stella Hotel in Bryan, and included three keynote speakers and several performances by faculty members.
Dean Tim McLaughlin said he is continuously inspired by the faculty in the college and the work they are creating.
“Each year I leave here thinking, ‘I can’t wait to get back to work with this group of people,’” McLaughlin said. “I can’t wait to see what they do in the classroom with the undergraduate and graduate students. And I can’t wait to see how they are transforming their individual disciplines and emerging disciplines.”
Dr. Ann McNamara, professor and associate dean for research and creative works, emphasized the college’s impact on research and collaboration. She emboldened the faculty to “continue to think big,” and said she hoped they would find collaborators and spark new ideas.
“We’re such an interdisciplinary college,” McNamara said. “This day is an opportunity for people to think about who they might like to work with, and what kind of projects they can imagine that might not be possible in other colleges.”
Faculty Presentations
Dr. Jong-in Lee, assistant professor in Visualization, discussed his virtual reality research. Lee said his work aims to help designers interact with virtual reality authoring tools more easily.
“My collaborator, Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, and I created a scroll-based scaling technique,” Lee said. “It separates the scaling observation into two separate hands, instead of using both hands simultaneously.”
Andee Scott, associate professor in Dance Science, presented her collaborative dance project titled “It’s Not About the Content: Nonstopping with Jeanine Durning.” Durning, a choreographer based in New York, and Scott have been researching “nonstopping” in practice together since 2020.
Scott said the 45-minute performance is a complex improvisation score. She said they track what is happening in their bodies and the timing of their movements through situational movement and speaking scores. The goal is not to do it right, but to make it through.
“It is not about content, it’s about what gets revealed by trying to do the content,” she said. “It reveals attention — it is tracking where attention goes: the performer’s attention, the audience’s attention. So, it’s not about the dance, it’s about what happens as I try to keep never stopping.”
Following her presentation, Scott invited the audience to play an interactive sensory game, lining the attendees in the center of the room for an exercise in tracking.
The audience members were tasked with creating a two-count gesture with their right hand and then repeating it in four counts. But as each person was doing their right-hand gesture, they were to look to the person on their left, and mirror that person’s hand gesture with their left hand.
Dr. Kim Kattari, associate professor in Performance and Visual Studies, discussed her research about musical experiences leading to transformative change. She shared her experience interviewing attendees at electronic music festivals and how she collected feedback from their involvement.
“As an ethnomusicologist, I am interested in how music plays a really vital part in people’s lives,” she said. “At these events, I am trying to document the impact of meaningful experiences in electronic music communities.”
Dr. Rebecca Hays, associate professor in Music Performance, discussed her research in vocal health and vocal vitality, which aims to rebuild singing voices. Hays said she is conducting a music medicine project with scientists and doctors to show singing’s effect on the vagus nerve.
“Your vagus nerve controls all of your big metabolic functions,” Hays said. “This study aims to prove that through singing you increase your vagal tone, which in succession will increase your ability to have a better heart rate variation.”
Dr. Mike Poblete, instructional assistant professor in Theatre, discussed his new book “Student Agency in Devised Theatre Education: Creating Collaborative Theatre in Virtual and In-Person Classrooms.”
Devised theatre is the process of creating a play without a completed text at the beginning. Poblete said his book looks at process-oriented devised theatre, and the role of student agency in classrooms.
“In 2021, as part of my dissertation research at the University of Hawai’i, I developed a devised theatre project with the drama class at Waipahu High School,” Poblete said. “The purpose was to assess whether as a result of engaging in devised theatre, the students experienced any shifts in their outlooks on learning and their sense of self-agency.”
Poblete will also discuss the book during a panel discussion on April 3 from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Liberal Arts and Arts and Humanities Building. The panel will feature Poblete, Dr. Dinesh Yadav, associate professor in Theatre, and Dr. Marcia Montague, clinical assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Development.
Performances
Elijah Alhadji Gibson, associate program director and assistant professor in the Dance Science program, performed a tap dance solo and guided the audience in learning simple tap steps. (Top photo by Justin Kling.)
Riti Sachdeva, instructional assistant professor in Theatre, performed a five-minute performance-art piece she wrote titled “Behind Every Favorite Song Is an Untold Woman.”
While the college’s faculty and staff members had lunch outside in the courtyard, they were treated to a performance by the Texas A&M Trombone Choir. Dr. David Wilborn, associate professor, conducted and performed alongside the students.
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Conn Holohan, director of the Centre for Creative Technologies and professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Galway in Ireland, shared insight into his “Immersive Empathy Project,” which he said addresses the homelessness crisis.
Holohan and his group collected video and audio from those who experienced homelessness, and presented their stories through virtual and augmented reality. The goal was to convey experiences of homelessness through immersive experiences, he said, and increase public awareness and empathy.
“The value was in the participant experience,” Holohan said. “As we interviewed the participants in the end, it made them feel confident and proud to be a part of this project.”
Hollis Hammonds, a multimedia artist who will be joining the faculty in the fall, creates work surrounding memory, social issues and disasters in the Midwest and the South. She presented several art projects which included a solo exhibit titled “Blanket of Fog” about a fire that destroyed her childhood home; and an exhibition and collaboration with poet Sasha West titled “A Dark Wood Grew Inside Me.”
“I am devoted to drawing in all forms, including sculptural, installation and spatial forms, as well as performance and time-based,” Hammonds said. “I am also very interested in immersive installations where the viewer can go and feel that life-size quality to have a physical reaction.”
Dr. Paul Debevec, chief research officer at Eyeline Studios, powered by Netflix, and research adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, presented his research projects in visual effects for film and media.
He discussed his process for re-creating sodium vapor matting, which is a film technique used in the 1950s and 1960s that seamlessly combined actors and background footage on camera without additional editing. This process was used in such films as “Mary Poppins” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” he said.
“If you look at Dick Van Dyke dancing with the penguins in ‘Mary Poppins,’ he is composited in there very well,” Debevec said. “He was not in front of a green screen or a blue screen, but in front of a yellow screen — which is the yellow you get from a low-pressure sodium vapor lamp.”
Debevec said to re-create sodium vapor matting, he found sodium vapor lamps, then built lights and filters to execute the process on camera. Debevec later teamed up with the vlogging group “Corridor-Crew” and re-created the process in April 2024. They were able to feature a participant with bright clothing that blended naturally into the virtual background.
“The crew had one of their staff members dress up in everything that would show up clearly on screen,” Debevec said. “She wore a green polka dot dress, a rainbow-colored wig and even the ‘Mary Poppins’ inspired transparent veil — all clearly visible in front of a Mars background.”
