University of Michigan

Stephen Rush has written 6 operas, over fifty works for Dance, chamber and electronic works, concertos, and four symphonies; performed by the Detroit Symphony and the Warsaw National Symphony. He has authored two books and at work on a third; including “Free Jazz, Harmolodics and Ornette Coleman.” His writing about Ornette Coleman and Coleman Hawkins were commissioned by the Library of Congress. He has recordings on Leo, Nessa, Innova, ESP Disk’, Equilibrium, Deep Listening, Centaur, MMC, RogueArts (Paris), Eroica, Summit and CALA Records (with the New York Philharmonic Chamber Musicians), and recently recorded as a conductor of the Art Ensemble of Chicago on Pi Records. He is a Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, where he founded the Digital Music Ensemble (DME) which he has directed for 25 years. DME he has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Sharp, Alvin Lucier and Robert Ashley, and premiered works by John Cage, Philip Glass and La Monte Young. Rush has performed or recorded with Roscoe Mitchell, Pauline Oliveros, Henry Grimes, Eliott Sharp, Steve Swell, Eugene Chadbourne, Peter Kowald and Art Ensemble of Chicago. He also tours and records with his electronic psychedelic improvisation band, “Crystal Mooncone”. He is also deeply invested in Installation Art, with current works in collaboration with Michael Gould and Henry Pollack (Nobel Prize winning physicist) –“World Without Ice,” as well as “Jeweled Net of the Vast Invisible” in collaboration with scientists at the Fermi Lab.

In her role as vice provost, Bertacco advocates for and supports university initiatives that create opportunities for action-based and engaged student learning, including such opportunities as international experiences, community-based curricular experiences, undergraduate student research, student projects and co-curricular experiences. She was previously associate dean for physical sciences and engineering in the Rackham Graduate School

Bertacco’s research focuses on the design of novel, distributed and specialized architectures to boost the execution of big-data applications. She works on design flows and assembly techniques, including chiplet-based design, to lower the cost of developing novel silicon designs, which in turn lowers the barrier to entering the field of hardware design.

Her research addresses critical bottlenecks in the design of future systems by making design tools more efficient and approachable, thus enabling broader participation into the silicon electronics industry.

She is the director of the Applications Driving Architectures Research Center, whose goal is to reignite the pace of computing systems design and innovation through specialized heterogeneity, domain-specific language abstractions and new silicon devices that show benefit to the application.

Bertacco earned a computer engineering degree summa cum laude from the University of Padova, Italy.  She earned a Master of Science degree and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Deb Mexicotte received her BFA and MA in Theatre from Case Western Reserve University and the University of Michigan, and worked in local and regional theatre as a designer and painter before joining the University of Michigan. She has spent her career working initially with students and student organizations engaged with the arts to help them achieve their highest developmental aspirations, and more recently with faculty and administrators to integrate the arts and design with science and engineering across the curricular and co-curricular spheres. Deb was named Student Organization Adviser of the Year in 1999 and has led research efforts on the impact of the arts on students at U-M. Prior to the last three years at ArtsEngine, she  spent eight years as the Program Director for Arts at Michigan, a co-curricular arts engagement program. Her experience in the community includes 13 years as a Trustee on the Ann Arbor Board of Education, Chairing the Arts Alliance of Washtenaw County, and currently serving on the Ann Arbor Public Art Commission.

Architect and historian Jonathan Massey is dean and a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He is an accomplished scholar of modern architecture and a leading authority on architecture and planning education.

Before joining Taubman College in 2017, Massey was dean of architecture at California College of Arts in San Francisco. Prior to that, he served as the Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University and chaired the Bachelor of Architecture program and the University Senate. In addition, he co-founded the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, which transforms the ways that history and practice of architecture and urbanism are understood and taught.

Massey’s research shows how architecture mediates power by forming civil society, shaping social relationships, and regulating consumption. In Crystal and Arabesque: Claude Bragdon, Ornament, and Modern Architecture (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Massey reconstructed the techniques through which American modernists engaged new media, audiences, and problems of mass society. His work on topics ranging from ornament and organicism to risk management and sustainable design has appeared in many journals and books, including Aggregate’s essay collection Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the 20th Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). In addition, with Barry Bergdoll, Massey edited Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions (Lars Müller, 2018), which shows how this leading Bauhaus and Brutalist designer shaped the institutions of 20th century society.

Massey is regularly featured in professional journals and podcasts addressing education for architects and planners, including “Building the Discipline We Deserve” in The Architect’s Newspaper, “Aggregating Architectures” on the Archinect Sessions podcast, “Teaching Change” on the Social Design Insights podcast, and “Changing Course in Architectural Education” in Architectural Record. His professional training includes practice experience at Dagmar Richter Studio, Brantner Design Associates, and Gehry Partners, along with teaching experience at several schools.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts and a PhD in architecture from Princeton University and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Olsen has served as the Director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) since 2017. Previously, she served as the Class of 1956 Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, where she built the museum’s national reputation around critically acclaimed exhibitions and publications, and new creative forms of faculty and student engagement.

She began her career as the associate producer at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. In 1997, she joined the J. Paul Getty Museum where she began as the editor for one of the first digital museum collection systems, Art Access, and was promoted to manager shortly thereafter. In 2005, Olsen joined the Getty Foundation as a program officer, managing and directing the foundation’s $4 million in global grants for institutional research and education. She developed and launched the Online Scholarly Cataloguing Initiative, an influential global initiative centered on developing prototypes for online scholarly catalogs for museums. In 2008, she joined the Portland Art Museum as director of education, where she developed new programs and exhibitions centered on contemporary artistic practice. She also developed the museum’s first education committee.

Olsen is a member of the American Alliance of Museums and Association of Art Museum Directors, and was an adviser to the Getty Foundation. She taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Williams College.

Olsen received a bachelor’s degree in history of art, with honors, from the University of Chicago, and a master’s degree and a doctorate in art history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Rogério M. Pinto focuses on finding academic, sociopolitical and cultural venues for broadcasting voices of oppressed individuals and groups. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, his community-engaged research focuses on the impact of interprofessional collaboration on the delivery of evidence-based services (HIV and drug-use prevention and care) to marginalized racial/ethnic and sexual minorities in the United States and Brazil. Pinto conducts art-based scholarly research. He performed “Marília,” a one-person play, on New York City’s Theatre Row in 2015 and at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, Vrystaat, South Africa in 2016. “Marília” won the United Solo Festival Best Documentary Script. In “Marília,” Pinto explores the tragic death of his three-year-old sister and how it haunts and inspires the family she left behind. Funded by the University of Michigan Office of Research and several other sources, he built the “Realm of the Dead,” an art installation to investigate his own marginalization as a gender non-confirming, mixed-race and Latinx immigrant. “Realm of the Dead” was presented at the School of Social Work as part of its Centennial celebration in 2021.