University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dr. Amy Gilman joined the Chazen Museum of Art as director in September 2017, overseeing all administrative, financial, and curatorial duties. Since her arrival, Gilman has stewarded a five-year strategic plan, replaced unpaid internships with paid ones, and prior to the pandemic, dramatically expanded the museum’s hours to 12 hours per day, 7 days per week. During COVID and an unusual academic year, Gilman initiated the development of flexible, adaptable, virtual curricula for use by faculty, connecting the museum’s permanent collection with course themes of resilience and surviving trauma, and art and activism. Gilman is a progressive leader in the field, and an advocate for the role of the university art museum on campus and in the community.

Prior to the Chazen, Gilman spent 12 years at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio where she served as deputy director, assistant director for collections and exhibitions, and curator of modern and contemporary art. Gilman is an alumna of the Getty Leadership Institute. She earned her doctorate in art history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, a Master of Fine Arts in photography from Columbia College in Chicago, and a bachelor’s degree in performance studies from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Chris Walker is a professor of dance and founding artistic director of the First Wave program in the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-artistic director for the #BARS Workshop at The Public Theatre in NYC, a lab series for artists to investigate the intersection between contemporary verse and theater, created by Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs. He is also a senior choreographer with the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, and program director for the New Waves Dance & Performance Institute in Trinidad & Tobago.

Walker creates contemporary dance, theater and performance artwork rooted in the visual and performance cultures of the African Diaspora. He works in the disciplines of dance, theater, film/video. He served as movement director for two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s Mlima’s Tale, which ran at the Public’s Martinson Hall and he is the recent choreographer for The Secret Life of Bees, The Musical produced by Atlantic Theatre in NYC. Walker has collaborated with Laura Anderson Barbata to develop Jus Luv/Rolling Calf a Jamaican ‘mas’ for her Intervention: Indigo project, a performance that was presented in the 2015 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Brooklyn, NY.

His concert dance work has been presented in Europe, Asia and throughout the Americas. His collaboration with Kevin Ormsby and KasheDance in Toronto titled FACING Home: Love & Redemption is currently and has been on tour internationally since its premiere in 2015. He has received numerous international and national grants and honors for his creative research work. He recently completed a Romnes Fellowship, which supported his research on homophobia in the African Diaspora and in 2020 he was named one of the School of Education’s Impact 2030 Faculty Fellows.

Dan Cavanagh is a composer and pianist who has garnered numerous awards in both areas. In 2023 he was awarded 2nd Prize in the American Prize for Composition in the Wind Symphony/Band Category. He received a 2009 gold medal prize from the International Music Prize for Excellence in Composition, and in 2017 he was awarded a Special Judges’ Citation in the American Prize for Chamber Music Composition. As a composer Cavanagh has been commissioned to write for Latin Grammy-winning AfroBop Alliance, the legendary Patti LaBelle, and a wide range of classical and jazz performers across North America and Europe. He has released five jazz recordings as a leader, including Pulse and Heart of the Geyser on Seattle’s OA2 Records, and two recordings with Minnesota-based vibraphonist Dave Hagedorn, Horizon and 20 Years. His most recent recording with James Miley and John Hollenbeck was released on Japan’s S/N Alliance Records in November 2022 to critical acclaim. His music can be heard on many other recordings both classical and jazz. His film scoring work can be heard in the documentary The Beat Hotel, a film exploring the hotel in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s where the beat poets, led by Allen Ginsberg, lived and created much of their famous work.

Cavanagh continues to be commissioned and programmed around the world, with recent performances by the Dallas Wind Symphony, the UT Arlington Wind Symphony, bassoonist Laura Bennett Cameron, duality (Vanessa Sielert and Catherine Anderson), Tracy Cowden and Tabatha Easley, the John Brown Big Band, and many more. Cavanagh’s compositions for wind symphony and saxophone/piano are published by Murphy Music Press, and his works for jazz big band are published by UNC Jazz Press, Sierra Music Publications, and E-Jazz Lines.

Cavanagh has performed extensively in North America and Europe as a pianist, and he has also performed in Asia and Central America. He has appeared in concert with Grammy-winners Irma Thomas, Adonis Rose, and Joe McCarthy and a wide number of jazz artists across the world. He has been a finalist in the EuropaFest Jazz Contest in Bucharest, Romania, and in the Jacksonville Jazz Festival Piano Competition. Cavanagh is the Pamela O. Hamel/Board of Advisors Director of the Mead Witter School of Music and Professor of Composition and Jazz Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to his time at UW-Madison he held numerous appointments at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he served for eighteen years. From 2015-2020, he served as the Co-Chair of Region VI for the Society of Composers, Inc., an international organization dedicated to new and contemporary music and composers. Cavanagh serves as the Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Dallas Winds, a five-time Grammy nominated professional Wind Symphony, and serves on the boards of the Madison Symphony Orchestra at the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Beth attended UW-Eau Claire for her undergraduate degree. She then earned an MFA in Theatrical Design from the University of Minnesota and became interested in higher education administration leading her to complete her PhD from the University of Minnesota in Educational Policy and Administration. She took her evaluation skills learned in her PhD program to the Science Museum of Minnesota where she worked in Evaluation and Visitor Learning and Exhibit Production over the next five years. Beth then became an Assistant Professor of Speech and Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. After a few more years, Beth moved to Madison where she worked at UW-Madison’s School of Education as a Policy and Planning Analyst in the Dean’s Office. In this role, she worked with departments to create new programs, conduct program reviews, and develop assessment plans while managing school-wide data requests and data reporting to external agencies. Beth is professionally interested in topics such as the management of creativity, arts integration in curricula, and transdisciplinary research. In her free time, Beth likes reading, hiking, painting, gardening, traveling, and attending museums.

Marina Kelly is an educator who works at the intersection of democratic education, creativity and collaboration. An alumna of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Marina was awarded her Master of Science in Social Work (MSSW) in 1996 and her Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) from the Art Department in 2012. Marina’s work at the UW-Madison has included teaching foundations level visual arts courses, including an online course in digital storytelling as well as interdisciplinary arts seminars for creative arts learning community students. One of Marina’s greatest passions is teaching a community based movement course, Creating Dance Through Structured Improvisation at the Hancock Center for Movement Arts and the Madison Circus Space. Marina’s current research interests include Mettler-based group improvisation and somatic teaching practices. Marina is proud to be part of the URS community where, together, we practice critical thinking while fostering a love of lifelong learning.

Samara Frame is the Advancement Manager in the Division of the Arts and serves as the Emerging Creatives Lead at the University of Wisconsin. The Emerging Creatives Lead submits nominations for students from this institution to attend the a2ru Emerging Creatives Student Summit. Please contact this Lead with an email, subject line: Emerging Creatives interest.