In conjunction with the installation Conflux: Variation (2025) by Baltimore-region artist collective Collis Donadio, on display nightly through June 30, the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture presents a public talk featuring Shannon Collis and Liz Donadio.
Join us for a special evening with writer and actress Anna Deavere Smith in conversation with Kimberly Moffitt, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. The recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, several Obie awards, two Drama Desk awards, the George Polk Career Award in Journalism, and the Dean’s Medal from the Stanford University School of Medicine, Smith is credited with having created a new form of theater. Her plays, sometimes called “docudramas,” focus on contemporary issues from multiple points of view and are composed from excerpts of hundreds of interviews.
The Department of Music presents Pianorama, a keyboard spectacular featuring pianists Audrey Andrist, Teodora Adzharova, Hui-Chuan Chen, and Hsiao-Ying Lin, who will perform works by Ravel, Debussy, and Stravinsky.
The Department of Music presents renowned percussionist Aiyun Huang in a solo recital utilizing video and live electronics. Huang enjoys a musical life as soloist, chamber musician, researcher, teacher and producer, and has been globally recognized since winning the 2002 First Prize and Audience Prize of the Geneva International Music Competition.
In this Humanities Forum talk, Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist Antonia Hylton will read from and discuss her recent book, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Madness chronicles the 93-year history of Crownsville State Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system.
The Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) presents artist Kelley Bell, who will present a talk entitled Projections, Inflatables, and Artistic Spectacles. An artist/designer/educator celebrated for creating vibrant projection mapping works on a grand scale and gallery installations that emphasize joy, community, and human connection, Bell will take us on a tour of her best, worst and wildest art adventures and discover how delight and imagination can lead to contemplation and meaningful interpersonal connection, and how art doesn’t have to be big or in the public eye to be spectacular.
The Department of Music presents the INTERFERENCE: new music collective (William Brent, computer, visiting artist and dancer Miřenka Čechová, and Nancy Jo Snider, cello). Their concert will feature a group of three new works in a lecture demonstration format that will describe the artistic processes involved in the technological interplay that exists between the performers in each of the selected works. The discussion will invite questions and input from the audience.
Artist Marc Archambault will unveil his in-process artwork concept for the new Sherman Hall public art installation at UMBC. Come meet Archambault, hear about the artwork, and provide feedback on the design process.
The rapid evolution of tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude confronts us with urgent questions: How do we understand and use these tools? How might we integrate these technologies effectively? Where do we set the academic and ethical boundaries for their use? John G. Schumacher's talk, Generative AI and Higher Education: Practical Insights for Today and Tomorrow, will explore the current generative AI landscape, offering practical insights for educators and institutions.
The Intermedia and Digital Arts Master's Program presents The Only Way Out Is Through: The 2025 Intermedia and Digital Arts (IMDA) MFA Thesis Exhibition. On view from March 25 through April 12, the exhibition features work by graduating students McCoy Chance, Ahlam Khamis, Ghazal Mojtahedi, Alexi Scheiber, and Mariia Usova.
The Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA), presents Thomas Talawa Prestø, a pioneer in Africana performance studies and a foremost specialist in polycentric dance technique. As the founder of the internationally acclaimed Tabanka Dance Ensemble, Prestø has performed in over 30 countries and developed the Talawa Technique™, which has significantly enriched the field of dance with over 80 novel terminologies and concepts.
The Shriver Hall Concert Series presents charismatic rising stars the Ivalas Quartet in a program of three works traversing the musical heavens. Osvaldo Golijov took inspiration for his poignant Tenebrae from a planetarium visit with his son. Sparked by a lecture on physics, Eleanor Alberga’s rich and spellbinding quartet explores the ideas of swirling particles and stargazing from outer space. Finally, the group infuses one of Beethoven’s final works with “tremendous heart and beauty” (The Strad).
Join us for the grand finale of UMBC’s 2025 Guitar Fest, a one-of-a-kind concert presenting guitar artistry across eras, geographies, and traditions. Featuring works ranging from J. S. Bach to Pat Metheny, this concert brings guitarist Felipe Garibaldi performing highlights of the classical and popular repertoires, along with original compositions. He is later joined by jazz guitarist Tom Lagana and classical guitarist Andres Palacios, creating an extraordinary fusion of guitar worlds, promising an unforgettable evening of music.
Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture artist resident Levester Williams was recently featured in all matters aside, a survey exhibition curated by Lisa D. Freiman. The exhibition featured a selection of works produced during Williams’s artist residency research into the histories and mythologies of Cockeysville marble, a material used in both the Washington Monument in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood and the iconic exterior steps of local rowhomes. On April 1, the CADVC presents a webinar featuring Levester Williams in conversation with sound designer Dan Shields, moderated by Lisa D. Freiman.
The Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) presents artist Melissa Hyatt Foss, an instrument-maker, musician, composer-performer, researcher, and teaching artist who develops artistic and educational projects that explore pre-Colonial sound artifacts of the Americas and their applications in contemporary art and music. Foss is the Maryland Traditions Artist-in-Residence at UMBC where she shared her tradition and practice with Linehan Artist Scholars students and is guiding them to develop teaching materials that will enable public school teachers to introduce the practice, history, and cultural significance of clay instrument making to their students.
