Baltimore Dance Project presents a thrilling program that displays an eclectic range of work and performances by invited regional dance makers, including new choreography by Ryan Bailey and Ann Sofie Clemmensen, the re-staging of Merce Cunningham's 50 Looks by UMBC's Jill Vasbinder, and performances by guest artists Human Landscape Dance.
Australian percussionist Rebecca Lloyd-Jones and UMBC percussion faculty Dustin Donahue present the enigmatic work of Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925–2000). A renowned composer for the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, Dlugoszewski spent a lifetime searching for radical new ways of making sound, inventing hundreds of percussion instruments designed to create delicate and colorful textures of sound. By the time of her death, Dlugoszewski’s music was largely unpublished and unrecorded, and her invented instruments in disrepair. In this event, Lloyd-Jones and Donahue will share their reconstructive process, having rebuilt both her scores and her instruments in order to bring this historic and evocative music to life again.
The Andrist-Stern-Honigberg Trio, featuring pianist Audrey Andrist, violinist James Stern, and cellist Steven Honigberg, will present a program of works by Rebecca Clarke, Kent Holliday, and Robert Schumann. The trio was described as “a remarkably successful meeting of musical talent ... It’s a performance that is both elegant and emotionally searching” by Fanfare magazine in a review of their 2022 debut recording of Dvorák and Fauré.
The Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery presents Archive 192: Abstract Photographs by Women, featuring works by Sara Angelucci, Claudia Fáhrenkemper, Jennifer Garza Cuen, Sage Lewis, Claire A. Warden, and others. This exhibition presents a selection of objects from Archive 192, an independent archive dedicated to preserving and celebrating abstractionist works by women photographers. The prints on view survey the array of photographic processes and diverse techniques of abstraction employed by photographers over the past century. Related ephemera, including publications, artist books, and posters document the evolution of abstractionism in photography and political movements that impact women working within the medium.
The Department of Visual Arts presents a lecture by Kei Ito, an interdisciplinary artist whose work is centered around utilizing the conceptual framework of photography to visualize the invisible. Mainly employing camera-less photographic techniques, performance, and installation, Ito creates large-scale installations and a variety of photographic projects that excavate hidden histories.
Established in 2024, the Smithsonian Academy Orchestra brings together top early music specialists to perform classical works on period instruments under the direction of Kenneth Slowik. The ensemble will present a program of works by Haydn, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn.
The Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture launches its 2025 program with Conflux: Variation (2025) by Baltimore-region artist collective Collis Donadio. This public video art projection, showing nightly in the Fine Arts Building Amphitheatre, explores the intersections of industry and the environment in Baltimore, where water meets land.
The Department of Music presents Rachel Beetz, Julie Herndon, and Berglind María Tómasdóttir, in a program entitled Pareidolia Memories: Imagined faces in noises of sounds remembered. This collection of works and improvisations shared between the three musicians explores memory, recognition, time, places, people, and relationships between humans and non-humans. The works are intertwined with videos and sound interludes by Berglind Tómasdóttir reflecting on the theme in various ways.
In the spirit of armchair travelers everywhere, the Voyager Ensemble explores a new culture each year by combining standard repertoire along with a contemporary work by composers from the region, including Antonîn Dvořák, Jan Kučera, and Bedřich Smetana. This year’s concert focuses on the Czech Republic with directors Airi Yoshioka (violin) and David Yang (viola) joined by eminent musicians Li-Mei Liang (violin) and Summer Hu (cello).
Jelani Cobb’s riveting, hopeful keynotes are up-to-the-moment meditations and breakdowns of the complex dynamics of race and racism in America. Whether speaking on Black Lives Matter and activism, the battle zones of Ferguson or Baltimore, the legacy of a black presidency, or the implications of the Trump era — or, more generally, on the history of civil rights, violence, and inequality in employment, housing, or incarceration in the US — Cobb speaks with the surety and articulate passion of only our best journalists.
The Department of Music presents the UMBC Jazz Faculty Ensemble, featuring trumpeter Brent Madsen, saxophonist Matt Belzer, pianist Harry Appelman, bassist Tom Baldwin, and drummer Mark Merella. The ensemble will perform modern interpretations of classic and recent jazz compositions.
The Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC) hosts an Exploratory Research Residency that invites artists and interdisciplinary collaborators to take advantage of scholarly resources and to build partnerships at UMBC and in the Baltimore region. In 2025, CADVC hosts Tomashi Jackson’s “Pedagogy Study Hall” project as part of this program, which, in collaboration with policy analyst and economic advocate Nia Evans, will host a series of intermedia series of public discussions about investment and disinvestment in the arts and humanities, looking to Baltimore as a critical case study in grassroots organizing in a system of gross structural inequity.
In Find Your Why, presented by the Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA), Tatiana Mann will lead us to explore why we engage with our disciplines, what informs our decisions and how to light our creative fire to fuel our future success. As artists and humanists, why do we choose our career paths? Because of lucrative remuneration (supported by plentiful research grants) and a lavish lifestyle (afforded by sleepless nights working several jobs)? In pursuit of quixotic research, prestigious performances, exhibitions, publications, and accolades? Or do we choose to do what we do because at some point we couldn’t imagine a life without art, or without investigating humanity’s larger questions?
The Center for Ethics and Values holds regular public forums focusing on significant ethics issues faced by researchers across the university, by students, and more broadly by society. This event, Neuroscience, Freewill, and Moral Responsibility, moderated by Steve Yalowitz, associate professor of philosophy at UMBC, features panelists Adina Roskies, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, with an appointment in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, UC Santa Barbara, and Aaron Schurger, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology and the Brain Institute, Chapman University.
The UMBC Jazz Ensemble under the direction of Matt Belzer performs with guest artist Nicole Mitchell for a fabulous evening of jazz. An award-winning creative flutist, conceptualist and composer, Mitchell emerged from Chicago’s creative music community in the 90s, and was the former first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). With an impressive 15 year run (2010–2024) as “Top Flutist of the Year” by both Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association, she is celebrated for her development of a unique improvisational language on the flute.