University of North Carolina Charlotte
The Arts at the University of North Carolina Charlotte
The College of Arts + Architecture at UNC Charlotte values innovation, community-engagement, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity. Home to Architecture, Art and Art History, Dance, Music, and Theatre, the college’s arts integration programming seeks to reach across disciplinary boundaries through the work of research centers, collaborative research teams, community partnerships, and curricular initiatives.
The Center for Community, Heritage, and the Arts (CHArt) strengthens existing collaborations and builds new research initiatives exploring the intersections between community, place-making, culture, heritage, and the arts – both globally and locally. The Digital Arts Center (D+Arts) focuses on uses of digital technology in the arts to improve community partnerships, accessibility, equity, intra-college dialogue, and diverse student and faculty research.
The ArtXSci Collaborative Exploration Grant promotes innovative interdisciplinary research and fosters collaborations between faculty in CoAA and scholars in STEM fields. Current ArtXSci projects include the development of ChoreoGPT, an interactive AI system for choreography designed to enhance the creation of dance through the integration of human creativity and computational tools, and research into the performative and functional possibilities of biohybrid materials that merge 3-D printed ceramics with mycelium composites, aiming to replace fossil-based materials that dominate the arts and architecture.
Other interdisciplinary research includes employing horizontal graphic design processes to engage and empower refugee communities and developing resources through devised theatre techniques to help nursing students learn to better communicate with patients.
In curricular work, the Arts and Architecture Honors Program brings students together from all units of the College in both coursework and extracurricular activities, where they not only explore connections between the various artistic disciplines but also between the arts and the community. We also offer courses such as a music-architecture seminar that explores how experience-oriented design and performance are enlivened, materialized, and situated in the world through the body. Arts education faculty facilitate arts-integrative lesson plans with area schools.
Performance and exhibition spaces in the CoAA include the Anne R. Belk Theater, the Black Box Theater, Rowe Recital Hall, Rowe Galleries, the Lambla Gallery, and the Projective Eye Gallery.
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José L.S. Gámez is the Dean of the College of Arts + Architecture. He was previously the Interim Dean for the College of Arts + Architecture and the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs in the College of Arts + Architecture at UNC Charlotte. He has served as the Interim Director of the School of Architecture, as the Associate Director of the School, as a Provost Faculty Fellow, as well as a Research Fellow with both UNC Charlotte’s Institute for Social Capital and Urban Institute. He is currently serving as an advisory board member for the Dean’s Equity and Inclusion Initiative and representing Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and in July 2023 will begin serving as the Second Vice President of the ACSA.
His research explores questions of culture in architecture and urbanism through action-based research and public scholarship. His work has been published in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Places: A Forum of Environmental Design, The Journal of Urbanism, The Journal of Applied Geography, and The Plan Journal. He is also the co-editor of the books Rio de Janeiro: Urban Expansion and Environment and Vertical Urbanism: Designing Compact Cities in China and he has contributed essays to books such as Writing Urbanism: A Design Reader, Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism, Charlotte, NC: The Global Rise of a New South City, and Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy and Redevelopment. His design contributions to the work of assemblageSTUDIO have been featured in New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture Around the World, Models: Architecture and the Miniature and Architectural Record.
Prior to joining the faculty at UNC Charlotte, Gámez taught at Portland State University and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He received his Bachelor of Environmental Design from Texas A&M, his Master of Architecture from UC Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Currently a member of the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) Society for Research in Music Education Executive Committee (2018-2024), Dr. Orman is widely recognized as one of the top scholars in the world in the field of music education. From 2012-2018, she served as the United States Commissioner for the International Society for Music Education (ISME) Research Commission and was Chair of the Research Commission from 2016-2018. Recently, she served as a member of a Scientific Research Review Panel for the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She is a past member of the editorial boards of Update: Applications of Research in Music Education and the Journal of Research in Music Education. Dr. Orman is author of the seminal studies in refereed research journals investigating the use of immersive virtual reality to enhance music teaching and learning. Her research appears in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Distance Education, Journal of Band Research, Journal of Music Teacher Education, Journal of Music Therapy, Journal of Research in Music Education, and Update: Applications of Research in Music Education. She regularly presents her research at national and international conferences including the National Association for Music Education, the Clifford K. Madsen International Symposium on Research in Music Behavior, and the International Society for Music Education Research Commission Seminar and World Conference.
Dr. Orman has served as a Director of Bands at the middle school, high school, and collegiate levels. Her previous university posts include positions at the University of West Alabama, George Mason University, Louisiana State University as the Julian R. & Sidney Nicolle Carruth Professor of Music Education, and 2015-2017 Distinguished Professor of Music Education at UNC Charlotte.
Jae Emerling is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History in the Department of Art & Art History at UNC Charlotte and the Associate Dean for Research for the College of Arts + Architecture. After attending Wesleyan University, he received his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles.
He is the author of Theory for Art History (2005, second edition 2019) and Photography: History and Theory (2012), both published by Routledge. His work has also appeared in the Critical Inquiry, History of Photography, Radical Philosophy, and the Journal of Art Historiography. His latest book Transmissibility: Writing Aesthetic History (2024) performs a transdisciplinary philosophy of aesthetic history via the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Cy Twombly, Marina Abramović, Paul Celan, Cecil Taylor, Italo Calvino, Candida Höfer, and others by focusing on the artistic and historiographic labor of art – a mode of creation whose vitality and epistemic significance is always anachronistic and futural.
He is coediting with Kamini Vellodi (Royal College of Art, London) a collection of essays tentatively titled Reinventing Theory: Art History and Criticism (forthcoming 2025, Edinburgh University Press), with contributions from Tim Ingold, Emmanuel Alloa, Mieke Bal, Whitney Davis, Georges Didi-Huberman, John Rachjman, Shigemi Inaga, Zainab Bahrani, Parul Dave Mukherji, Ali Behdad, Homi Bhabha, Stephen Melville, and others. Emerling is also Editor-at-Large for the London-based Journal of Visual Culture:
John Daniels serves as vice chancellor for the Division of Research. The division strives to advance the quality, diversity and growth of research at UNC Charlotte.
Daniels, a member of the faculty since 2001, served as chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2012-22. He also served as program director in the Directorate for Engineering at the National Science Foundation where he was responsible for research within geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering, engineering education, engineering research centers and a variety of cross-disciplinary programs.
The textbook he co-authored with H-Y. Fang, “Introductory Geotechnical Engineering: An Environmental Perspective,” was released in 2006. He also has over 100 publications in various journals, book chapters, conference proceedings and technical reports. He has worked for TRC Environmental Corp. as a project engineer and is a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) in North Carolina. He was elected Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2018, in part for advancing the concept of engineered water repellency to increase the resilience and sustainability of geotechnical systems in civil infrastructure. He leads an active research program in collaboration with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, the Minnesota Department of Transportation and the U.S. NSF.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and a master’s and a doctorate in civil engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Daniels serves on the board of the Sullenberger Aviation Museum as well as the North Carolina Board of Science and Technology. Daniels volunteers with the Boy Scouts of America and Nativity of the Holy Virgin
Orthodox Church.
Daniels became interim vice chancellor in November 2022, and he was appointed to the permanent role in November 2023.
Jennifer Troyer serves as provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, a role in which she provides leadership and oversight for eight academic colleges, Enrollment Management, the Graduate School, the Honors College, Institutional Effectiveness and Analytics, International Programs, the Levine Scholars Program, the library, the School of Professional Studies, Undergraduate Education, and urbanCORE. She was appointed provost in 2023.
Previously, she served as dean of the Belk College of Business at UNC Charlotte and professor of economics. She joined the Belk College as an assistant professor in 1999, when UNC Charlotte had approximately 16,000 students and ambitions to grow its suite of graduate programs and the research profile of the campus. In her decades with UNC Charlotte, Troyer has served in several leadership roles. Prior to becoming dean in July 2020, she served as interim dean for the Belk College (October 2019-June 2020) and interim dean for the College of Health and Human Services (July 2018-June 2019). Within the Belk College, she also served as senior associate dean, associate dean for graduate programs and research, and chair of the department of economics.
She has conducted policy-relevant research on the quality of U.S. nursing homes, the cost-effectiveness of medical interventions, and strategic behavior in the pharmaceutical industry. Her research has earned several awards and been funded by the National Institutes of Health. As a faculty member, her teaching was focused in health economics, econometrics, and micro-economics. She has chaired a number of doctoral dissertations of students from the interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Public Policy and Ph.D. in Health Services Research.
Troyer holds a master’s and Ph.D. in economics from Florida State University and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Memphis.
In her spare time, she enjoys practicing yoga, hiking, volunteering, and visiting national parks. She lives in Charlotte with her husband and daughter.