Faculty

Doug Geers
Assistant Professor, School of Music

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Assistant Professor of Music and Collaborative Arts Douglas Geers is a composer who works extensively with technology in composition, performance, and multimedia collaborations. He has composed in a wide range of musical styles, including classical concert music, pop songs, television and film scores, and electroacoustic music. Geers studied via scholarships at Xavier University (B.A. in English and Music), the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (Master of Music), and Columbia University (Doctor of Musical Arts). Geers’ collaborative and interdisciplinary pieces include his in-progress opera, Calling, to be premiered at the La Mama Experimental Theater in New York City in September, 2008; his 2006 violin concerto, Laugh Perfumes, which includes choreography, stage design, and lighting; his 2002 multimedia theater work Gilgamesh; and numerous other works. In addition to being assistant professor, Geers is also Director of the studios for Sound, Technology, and Research at the University of Minnesota (STRUM) and is the founder and Director of the annual Spark Festival for Electronic Music and Arts.

Martin Gwinup
Associate Professor, Theatre Arts and Dance

Martin Gwinup is an associate professor in the Theatre Arts and Dance department at the Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He teaches Audio and Video Design and Production. He has also worked in the Twin Cities area as a freelance Sound/Video designer and technician for the past 18 years. He has worked for companies such as the Frank Theatre, History Theatre, Children’s Theatre, Cricket Theatre, the Ordway, Trinity Repertory, Round House, and Eye of the Storm to name a few. Some productions include “Black Nativity”, “Red Shirts”, “A Play about the Baby”, “Civil Ceremony”, “Dragon Wings”, and “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers”.

His research involves digital audio/MIDI, Video production, and Multimedia presentation and manipulation. He also produces an all student video project every other summer where students go out and shoot a student written screenplay on location for 3 weeks, 8 – 10 hours a day. 2008 will be the 4th one of these ventures.

Lynn Lukkas
Associate Professor, Art

Lynn Lukkas is a media artist and associate professor of Time and Interactivity in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Bush Foundation Fellowship as well as Jerome and McKnight Foundation Fellowships. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including the Walker Art Center’s “Out There Series”, the “Cape Town One City Festival” in South Africa, and at the Cleveland Performance Art Festival. Her creative work spans the media arts including filmmaking, video installation, interactive media projects and photography. She is presently working on a new film project titled, “Telling Time.” This work-in-progress explores what we know about time and how we experience time as perceived across cultural and disciplinary points of view. While on a New Media Co-production Residency at the Banff Centre in 2001 she began The BioSensor Projects a series of interactive installation and performance works that employ the biological functions of the body (breath, heart rate, brain waves, eye-movement, and electrical impulses from the skin) to control interactive installations. In 1998 she launched, “The Oculus Projects,” a series of interactive video and sound installation, performances and photographs that employ a Global Positioning System to mark her presence on the globe while collecting images and sounds from the environment. This “evidence” is then combined with the GPS data in installations and photographs to comment about the nature of human consciousness.

Guerino Mazzola
Professor, School of Music

Guerino Mazzola was educated as a mathematician, but also works as a contemporary jazz pianist and composer. Apart from his disciplinary research and publications, his specifically collaborative works include computer-assisted analyses of art, computer music software for analysis, composition, and performance, direction of a major interdisciplinary exposition on symmetry in art, science, nature, and society, participation as a musican and conceptional work in documentary and art movies. Mazzola has also been active in music and science journalism, brain research and semiotics. His present interest focuses on a theory of the art of collaboration, comprising flow, gestures, and collaboratories.

Ali Momeni
Assistant Professor, Art

Ali Momeni studied physics and music and completed his doctoral degree in music composition, improvisation and performance with computers from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies in UC Berkeley. His creative works include a number of collaborative works with Robin Mandel that include large collaborative musical instruments that use pantographs and joysticks, rhythmic smoke rings. He has also woked on pervasive games that transform neighborhoods into playgrounds, played his gestural instruments in large scale operas, worked with language and accents in an interactive sound installation for the Exploratorium, and put to use stethescopes in exploring sound. His interests are in computation and interactivity in the arts, technologically mediated social interaction, gesture tosound/image mappings, kinetic sculpture and data-driven search and synthesis techniques.

Michael Sommers
Assistant Professor, Theatre Arts and Dance

Trained as a visual artist, Michael Sommers has practiced the Theatre Arts as a designer, director, composer, performer, playwright and technician, both locally and nationally. In 2000 he co-founded Open Eye Figure Theatre whose original work has been produced at the Walker Art Center (Mpls.), in New York, Chicago, Washington DC, and Mexico. Open Eye has recently opened its new intimate performance space in South Minneapolis. At the University of Minnesota Sommers has collaborated with students to create Articulations: An Evening of Student Puppetry (2003), Mississippi Panorama (2006) and the Master and Margarita (2006) with Luverne Seifert from the Theatre Department. In the Spring of 2008, through the Interdisciplinary Program for the Collaborative Arts, Sommers will initiate THE WOYZECK PROJECT a developmental workshop with students and instructors from the Departments of Theatre, Dance and Music.