University of Georgia

Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center and holds an endowed Professorship in the Humanities. His latest book, Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled, was published in December 2020 by Oxford University Press. He has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Irish Research Council.

Mark Callahan is the Artistic Director of the UGA Arts Collaborative, an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts at the University of Georgia, and serves on the faculty of the School of Art. He is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a member of the European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. Callahan’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), Club Internet, MAMA: Showroom for Media and Moving Art in the Netherlands, the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia, and used in concert by R.E.M. as a large-scale video projection. He is a co-principal investigator of “Enhancing imaginative and collaborative STEM capacity through creative inquiry,” an arts + STEM graduate workshop project supported by the National Science Foundation and a contributor to “Critique Is Creative” by Liz Lerman and John Borstel (Wesleyan Press).

Dr. Connie Frigo is an accomplished soloist, chamber musician, teacher, speaker, and founder of numerous festivals.  She is sought-after presenter on topics relating to professional development, entrepreneurship, creativity, and women in music, and is a steadfast organizer of interdisciplinary events with a focus on the creative process and engaging new audiences. She has taught saxophone at UGA since 2011, and is the inaugural Chair of the North American Saxophone Alliance’s Committee on the Status of Women, where her leadership has overseen the launch of a women’s mentoring program.

Highlights of Frigo’s career include six years with the premiere U.S. Navy Band, Washington, D.C., a position she won as a junior in college; seven years touring nationally as the baritone saxophonist with the New Century Saxophone Quartet; and faculty positions at the Universities of Tennessee, Maryland and Ithaca College prior to UGA.  Frigo has been a part of commissioning and premiering the works of many composers including JacobTV, Bang On a Can co-founder David Lang, Ben Johnston, John Fitz Rogers, Joel Love and Peter van Zandt Lane, among others.

Dr. Marisa Anne Pagnattaro assists with all matters of academic administration, policy and planning, and acts on behalf of the Provost when he is not available. She also chairs the UGA Arts Council and oversees the Georgia Museum of Art, Institute of Higher Education, the Performing Arts Center, and the Office of Global Engagement. Prior to being named Vice Provost for Academic Affairs in 2019, she served as associate dean for research and graduate programs in the Terry College of Business. Her scholarship focuses on international trade and business ethics, and she is the author or co-author of more than 30 journal articles and book chapters and numerous shorter works. Pagnattaro is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor and was the I.W. Cousins Professor of Business Ethics in the Terry College. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Colgate University and holds a J.D. from New York Law School and Ph.D. in English from UGA.

David Saltz is a Professor of Theatre and Film Studies, and Executive Director of the UGA Arts Collaborative. He is a specialist in modernist theatre and performance, performance theory, the philosophy of art, and directing. His primary research focuses have been performance philosophy and the interaction between live performance and digital media. He was Principal Investigator of Virtual Vaudeville, a large-scale research project funded by the National Science Foundation to simulate a nineteenth century vaudeville performance on the computer. He has explored the use of computer technology extensively in his own work as a director and teacher. Along those lines he established the Interactive Performance Laboratory at UGA, has directed a series of productions incorporating real-time interactive digital media, and has created interactive sculptural installations that have been exhibited nationally. He is co-director for the NEH Institute on Digital Technologies in Theatre and Performance Studies. His recent work focuses on robotic theatre. He is co-author (with Sarah Bay-Cheng and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck) of Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (University of Michigan Press, 2015), coeditor (with David Krasner) of the book Staging Philosophy: Intersections between Theatre, Performance and Philosophy (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and books. Before coming to Georgia, Dr. Saltz taught at State University of New York at Stony Brook and The College of William and Mary.

Isabelle Loring Wallace is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Her research focuses on a wide range of objects and images, ranging from mid-twentieth-century American painting to early twenty-first-century photography, video, and installation. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on artists such as Manet, Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Steven Meisel and Paul Pfeiffer, and the co-editor of two anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Ashgate 2011) and Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility co-edited with Nora Wendl (Ashgate 2013). She is currently preparing a third anthology, also with Jennie Hirsh on Ventriloquism and Contemporary Art. In addition, Professor Wallace is also author of Jasper Johns (Phaidon, 2014) and is currently completing a second book on Johns that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis. Simultaneously, she is working on a new project that considers recurring intersections between new media art and assorted Judeo-Christian themes. At the Dodd, she teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on postwar visual culture, as well as the art history area’s required seminar on historiography and methods.