For these experimental and interdisciplinary residencies, St. Mary’s College of Maryland faculty in any department or discipline can invite their research/collaborative partner to work on a project already underway or invite someone with whom they would like to collaborate in the future for an exploratory residency. Accommodation for the collaborative partner is provided in The Artist House for a 1-2 week residency.
Note: Additional information will appear here as new residencies are scheduled. If you are a SMCM faculty member and are interested in scheduling a CoLab Residency, contact Sue Johnson (srjohnson@smcm.edu)
Colab Residencies 2012 – present
Colab Artist House Residency: May 7 – 21, 2019
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Dr. Paul Hewitt
SMCM Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Ivan Sterling, Professor of Mathematics
Residency Project:
For several years Dr. Hewitt and I have struggled to understand the mathematical underpinning of various physics experiments which have led some to conjecture the existence of an as yet undiscovered “exotic dark matter”. Recently we have focused on a proposed model of the Swiss astrophysicist Andre Maeder. We are currently hoping to write two papers. One which will show how Maeder’s model can be alternatively viewed as a so called “Model with Torsion”. The second explore the mathematical relationship between the cosmological “constant” (which in Maeder’s model is a function) and the profile curves of galaxies.

Dr. Paul Hewitt
Although Dr. Paul Hewitt’s expertise is Group Theory, he is very much a renaissance mathematician with a deep understanding of nearly all branches of mathematics. Dr. Hewitt received his PhD from Michigan State University in 1987, held a named post-doc at Rutger’s 1987-1990, was a professor at the University of Toledo 1990-2015, including being the Chairman of the Department of Mathematics from 2010-2014.

Dr. Ivan Sterling
Dr. Ivan Sterling came to SMCM in 2000 and was chair of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department 2001-2007. His main area of research is differential geometry although he has also done research in image processing and general relativity. After serving in the Marine Corps, Dr. Sterling received his BA in Mathematics from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980 and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. His dissertation work appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. He had postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the Berlin Technical University. He was at the University of Toledo 1991-2000 before coming to St. Mary’s. He has published in several of the top journals in mathematics.
CoLab Residency: April 1 – 7, 2019
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Catherine Borg
SMCM Collaborator/Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Jennifer Cognard-Black, Department of English
Writer Jennifer Cognard-Black and visual artist Catherine Borg will explore the simulation of history in Southern Maryland through collaboration across word and image, using the palimpsest as their guiding form. Engaging both archival research and place-based explorations, the intent of Jennifer’s and Catherine’s collaboration is both to consider and to recover omissions of the “local story” of St. Mary’s county, especially those that elide and erase the voices of under-represented populations such as slaves, the Amish, and military wives. This professional collaboration will have a pedagogical purpose as well. Catherine Borg will also work with Jennifer Cognard-Black’s upper-level creative writing students on an historical fiction project questioning the boundaries of “history” and “fiction.” The student projects will also be structured as palimpsests, with layers of narrative and meta-narrative that simultaneously offer and interrogate the stories they’re trying to tell.

Catherine Borg
Baltimore-based artist Catherine Borg uses photography, video, and other media to reposition her audience within the narratives of recognizable cultural phenomena and specifically the evident traces and liminal space of American culture in transition. Metaphoric palimpsests recur throughout her work, reflecting a personal narrative impacted by immigration and the mobility and dislocation of contemporary life. Her work has been presented in lectures, screenings, and exhibitions in international venues, including at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, NV and most recently at the KTH Centre for the Future of Places in Stockholm, Sweden. She holds an MFA degree in Visual Arts from Rutgers University and a BA degree in Broadcasting from San Francisco State University and has received fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Jentel Foundation.

Jennifer Cognard-Black
Jennifer Cognard-Black is Professor and Chair of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she teaches the novel, Victorian literature and culture, fiction writing, and the literatures of food. A former Fulbright Scholar to Slovenia, Cognard-Black has published a writing textbook as well as two books on Victorian novels and letters by Anglo-American women. She is also the co-editor of two other collections: Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal and From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines, which won a gold medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Writing under the pseudonym J. Annie MacLeod, her short fiction has been nominated for Pushcart prizes and has appeared in journals such as Versal, So To Speak, Poem Memoir Story, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among others. Cognard-Black is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council award for fiction as well as a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation grant, and she has collaborated with visual artists for exhibitions at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia and the Painting Center in New York City. Currently, Cognard-Black is writing a novel that’s taking great liberties with the life of Edith Wharton, under the working title Making Up.
CoLab Residency: March 25-31, 2019
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Mary Adelle
SMCM Collaborator/Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Karen Leona Anderson
Faculty poet Karen Leona Anderson and SMCM alumni poet Mary Adelle collaborate on a primarily pedagogical project to help introduce students in a upper-level poetry class to the range of independent publishing processes (including self-publication) and presses. With her background in book arts and her current position as co-editor of a press, Mary Adelle will work with Professor Anderson’s upper-level creative writing students to introduce these options and to help students begin on a final project that will be sent out for publication or published in house. Mary Adelle will also be featured in a VOICES reading on Thursday, March 28 with another alumni writer (Clare Hogan).
Mary Adelle is the author, artist, and designer of Girl Flame (Babe Press, 2016), a book of spells disguised as poems. Her work has been seen in Alien Mouth, Ink Press Productions, Baltimore Style, and more. She is the founder of The Consent Collective, an organization with the mission to better sex education through facilitation of honest, open dialogues about consent, problematic gender roles, and healthy relationships. She currently lives in Downtown Frederick with her partner and their two cats. In her free time, she roller skates.

Karen Leona Anderson
Karen Leona Anderson is the author of the poetry collections Receipt (Milkweed Editions) and Punish honey (Carolina Wren). Her work has most recently appeared in Little Star, Alaska Review Quarterly, ZYZZYVA, The Best American Poetry 2012, and other journals and anthologies; her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Grant. She is an associate professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the director of the VOICES Reading series, and the recipient of an Aldom-Plansoen Honors College Professorship.
CoLab Residency: Nov 9 – 20, 2017
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Virginia Chu
SMCM Collaborator/Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Kevin Emerson, Department of Biology
Ms. Chu and Dr. Emerson are collaborating on an NIH-funded project to understand the relationships among populations of the mosquito Anopheles darlingi, the primary vector for malaria in the Neotropics. While visiting SMCM, Ms. Chu will be learning computational techniques to analyze genomic variation assessed via high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques. This analysis and project is a portion of her dissertation research and should yield at least one publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Ms. Chu’s Ph.D. dissertation advisor, Jan Conn, has been an active collaborator of Dr. Emerson’s for many years and has resulted in two publications and others currently in preparation.
Previous publications from the Emerson-Conn collaboration:
Campos, M., J.E. Conn, D.P. Alonsoa, J.M. Vinetz, K.J. Emerson, P.E.M. Ribolla. 2017. Microgeographic structure in the major Neotropical malaria vector Anopheles darlingi. Parasites and Vectors 10:76.
Emerson, K.J., J. E. Conn, E. S. Bergo, M. A. Randel, and M. A. M. Sallum. 2015. Brazilian Anopheles darlingi Root (Diptera: Culicidae) clusters by major biographical region. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0130773.

Virginia Chu
Ms. Chu is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the department of Biomedical Sciences at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her advisor, Dr. Jan Conn, is a professor in the same department and a research scientist at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health. Ms. Chu received her bachelor’s degree in biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology and her master’s degree in epidemiology from University of Alabama, Birmingham, School of Public Health. She completed a year of research at the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Sao Paulo, Brazil on a Boren Fellowship in 2016. Her current research interests lie in vector biology, ecology, and population genetics of the major Neotropical malaria vector Anopheles darlingi, and their implications for malaria transmission. Her dissertation research will focus on the population genetics and life history traits of An. darlingi from across Brazil.
Dr. Emerson, in his sixth year as a member of the Biology Department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, studies evolutionary processes – how does genetic variation, mediated by physiology and development, then filtered through processes of natural selection, result in adaptation in natural systems? His research combines both historical and modern physiological data with new molecular genetic and genomic data to study the evolution of interactions between the environment and the genome and the evolutionary divergence of natural populations in sibling species. His research has been broad in scope. He has studied the control of seasonal development in mosquitoes, the early stages of reproductive isolation and speciation in Rocky Mountain wildflowers, and evolutionary divergence among populations of the primary Neotropical malaria vector, Anopheles darlingi. It is the latter work that led to his work with Ms. Chu.
CoLab Residency: October 30 – November 5, 2017
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Nicole Bindler
SMCM Collaborator/Faculty Sponsor: Daniel Bear Davis
Nicole Bindler and Daniel Bear Davis are both Jewish American choreographers who have been brought together through solidarity work with Palestinian artists, activists, and refugees. This residency will allow them to share tools, exchange experiences, and explore future possibilities for collaboration at the intersections performance, activism, and publication. In 2017, Bindler and Davis began collaborating on methods to catalyze conversations about Palestinian solidarity and political engagement within the global Contact Improvisation dance community. In 2018, Davis will guest teach at Bindler’s newly formed Institute for Somatics and Social Justice (www.somaticsandsocialjustice.org).
During her stay, Nicole guest taught a number of classes and made a presentation to the campus community entitled Embodied Palestine Solidarity. The presentation briefly covered the history of the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were exiled, the current apartheid system and how it affects Palestinians on a bodily level, the conditions under which Palestinian artists live and make work, and information about how western artists can support their endeavors. She shared her experiences collaborating with Diyar Dance Theater to make and tour, WOMEN, a hybrid folk/contemporary dance that contains stories and images of women living under occupation.

Nicole Bindler
Nicole Bindler is a Body-Based performing artist, Body-Mind Centering Practitioner, and the Founder/Director of The Institute for Somatics and Social Justice. Her work has been shown throughout the U.S., Canada, Argentina, and in Berlin, Tokyo, Beirut, Bethlehem, Mexico City and Quito. Her dances have been supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Leeway Foundation, Puffin Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ellen Foreman Memorial Award. She has taught Somatics, Anatomy, Yoga and Improvisation in the dance and theater departments at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, University of the Arts, and Drexel University. Her writing has been published in Critical Correspondence, Contact Quarterly, BMC® Currents, Emergency Index, Curate This, Jewish Currents, thINKingDANCE, and Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices. www.somaticsandsocialjustice.org

Daniel Bear Davis
Daniel Bear Davis, MFA, has a creative practice driven by awe and wonder for humanity and curiosity and respect for the more-than-human world. His work prioritizes content over genre, weaving together text, dance, video, music and new media. He considers all work to be site and context-specific and is interested in mobilizing audience agency through interaction and unconventional use of space. Daniel has performed in theaters, on submarines, desert rocks, construction scaffolding, and art galleries. He’s made pieces about dementia, war, heritage, identity. He cares about image, awe, and beauty. In creating a wide and rich acceptance of what it is to be human. He has been blessed with opportunities to perform with Guillermo Gomez Peña, Nita Little, Nancy Stark Smith, Pipaluk Supernova/Live Art Installations, Felix Ruckert, Kira Kirsch, Erika Tsimbrovsky, Scott Wells, and many other inspiring body/minds.
Daniel’s recent performance work focuses on creating new communities through collaboration with marginalized populations engaging with personal story. He has directed this work with Krista DeNio and EchoTheaterSuitcase project in collaborative ensembles of veterans and non-veterans as well as assisting Amie Dowling in choreography of a performance of The Artistic Ensemble of San Quentin Prison. His most recent work explored intersections between the experiences of students at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and the experiences of oppression expressed in interviews he conducted with Palestinians in the West Bank.
Daniel’s work has been presented at Performaticá in Mexico, in the Imagining Bodies Symposium in Tallin, Estonia, Dancing in Place Festival in Malaysia, the San Francisco International Arts Festial, SoWat Now Contemporary Performance Festival, and Looking Left Festival in California, and at the SEEDS Festival and E|MERGE Residency at Earthdance Center, MA (which he also produced and curated for its first three years).
CoLab Residency: July 21- Sept 10, 2017
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Ms. Maryam Hakim Elahi
SMCM Collaborator/Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Kristy A. Lewis
Ms. Hakim Elahi continued her dissertation research under Dr. Lewis’s guidance, while also collaborating in various food web modeling projects. As the ecological modeling work in Dr. Lewis’s lab uses latest innovations in the software, Ecopath with Ecosim and Ecospace, Ms. Hakim Elahi learned and applied these new techniques during her visit. As a result of this collaboration, Dr. Lewis worked with Ms. Hakim Elahi to investigate the Southern marine ecosystems of Iran, including mangroves and coral reefs of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, as well as the marine environments of the Indian Ocean. Both scientists will be looking to facilitate a broader institutional collaboration with St. Mary’s College of Maryland and Marine Iranian Institutes and Universities having joint workshops and conferences in both countries in near future.

Maryam Hakim Elahi
Ms. Maryam Hakim Elahi is currently a Marine Ecology PhD student at Khorramshahr Marine Science and Technology University (KMSU) in South Iran adjacent to the Persian Gulf. She also works at the Iranian National Institute for Oceanography and Atmospheric Science (INIOAS) as a researcher and expert in the International Affairs Office, Iranian National Institute for Oceanography and Atmospheric Science (INIOAS). In addition, she is the executive manager of the Journal of Oceanography. As her present research project seeks to understand how environmental factors influence food webs (Persian Gulf, Iran), she will seek to expand her knowledge of ecosystem modeling with Dr. Lewis.

Dr. Kristy A. Lewis
Dr. Lewis is a coastal and marine ecologist and a faculty member in the Department of Biology at SMCM. Her work investigates variability in marine and estuarine food webs for various resource users so that these ecosystems may be conserved in perpetuity. Specifically, her research explores the impacts of disturbances (such as habitat loss, oil spills, and climate change) on marine and human communities using various ecological, statistical, and geospatial modeling techniques. Current projects include the development of spatially-explicit and time-dynamic food web model that will identify varying fisheries management strategies in response to hypoxia in the North Gulf of Mexico and a social-ecological synthesis project that will identify the driving factors of community response after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
CoLab Residency: May 21- June 3, 2015
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Dr. Josef Dormeister
SMCM Collaborator/Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Ivan Sterling

Dr. Josef Dormeister (left), Dr. Ivan Sterling (right)
CoLab Residency: August 17 – 23, 2014
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Megan Murtha
SMCM Collaborator/Faculty Sponsor: Cristin Cash
Artistically, Megan Murtha is interested in the manipulation of meaning that arises from the arrangement and rearrangement of objects, alongside performed poetic text, in works of Object Theater. This approach will be the focus of the workshop she plans to create with art history professor and Boyden Gallery Director, Cristin Cash, for the students of St. Mary’s College of Maryland. The project will begin with students choosing objects from campus collections, placing them in physical conversation, and then developing a creative piece of text in response to their arrangement. The creative text will be presented in tandem with the object scenes in the Boyden Gallery during the Spring 2015 semester, via audio recording of the performed text, live performance, or wall text. As Artist-in-Residence she looks forward to mentoring student work for the exhibition, as well as developing and rehearsing her own object theater piece, inspired by the available collection objects and to be performed by SMCM student actors at the exhibition opening.

Megan Murtha
Megan Murtha is a Brooklyn based playwright, director, producer, visual artist and prop maker. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College under the guidance of Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney and is soon to be a MacDowell Colony Fellow (Fall 2015). Her theater work has been performed at Classic Stage Company (Il Gradoni DiChiaia), The Bowery Poetry Club (excerpts from Stained Glasseds), Dixon Place (MISSING PERSON(S), Stained Glasseds, Fixity, The Somnambulist), Theater for the New City (A Scheme for Two), Fabriscope (Women of Saranac) and BAX (Beneath the Willow). She is currently working on an object play tentatively titled Bone Play, using cow bones—skull, left jaw, right femur, spine—found bleached by sun and drought in the Hill Country of Texas. This work will investigate the intersection of objects and language to produce meaning and identity for a cow who was pulled apart by an unforgiving landscape, a well-bred dog and the voices within. She currently teaches undergraduate writing at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn.
Cristin Cash joined the Art and Art History faculty of St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM) in the Fall 2005. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin with a dissertation that focused on the relationship between architectural style and changing perceptions of key spaces within the ancient Maya sacred landscape. Her current research and curatorial work focuses on the intersection of art and politics in the contemporary art of Mexico and Cuba. Her most recent exhibitions include First Person: Contemporary Cuban Art at the Layton Gallery, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and World Views: The Photographer as Visual Author at Boyden Gallery, SMCM. She teaches courses in the Art and Architecture of the Americas from ancient times to the present, World Architecture and Museum Studies. Dr. Cash became Director of Boyden Gallery and the Fine Art Collection at SMCM in 2012 where she oversees and performs all curatorial work, educational programs, collections management and general operations.
CoLab Residency: January 14-21, 2013
Ruth Lozner, artist
SMCM Sponsor: Michael S. Glaser, poet, professor emeritus
What began as an invitation from the University of Maryland’s College Park Art Gallery to create a show of collaborative works between strangers who were artists and poets, led, among other things, to a highly energized meeting of artist Ruth Lozner and poet Michael Glaser, whose work resonated with each other in inspiring and creative ways. Working together, Lozner and Glaser explored the notion of collaboration as a fusion of the arts in which they worked together to create a single whole rather than as, say, a reflection, commentary or extension of each other’s work.

Ruth Lozner
Ruth Lozner is currently an Associate Professor of Design at the University of Maryland, College Park. Previously, she held faculty positions at the Parsons School of Design and the University of the Arts, where she was Chair of the Illustration Department. She is currently teaching “Design Literacy: Decoding our Visual Culture” (College of Arts and Humanities), Advanced Graphic Design: Publications and Promotion” (College of Arts and Humanities) and “Design and the Creative Process” (Honors College). She maintains an active professional art and design practice. Her narrative assemblages and paintings have been exhibited in local and national galleries. Her illustration work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic Magazine.
Throughout her career, Ruth Lozner has lectured extensively at various venues including the College Art Association Conferences, American Institute of Graphic Artists’ Design Educators Conference, University and College Designers Association Conferences, Maryland Art Education Association Conference, UMD Innovation in Teaching Conferences on the importance of design thinking and innovation. She is co-chair of the UMD Academy of Excellence of Teaching and Learning, an organization that encourages and supports innovative pedagogical practices. . She has served on the National Board of the Graphic Artists Guild and is an active member of AIGA and National Art Education Association. Currently, she serves on the Education Committee for the Smithsonian National Design Museum, The Cooper-Hewitt, NYC.

Michael S. Glaser
Michael S. Glaser is a Professor Emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where he served as both a professor and an administrator for nearly 40 years. He is a recipient of the Homer Dodge Endowed Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Columbia Merit Award from the Poetry Committee of the Greater Washington, D.C. area for his service to poetry, and Loyola College’s Andrew White Medal for his dedication to the intellectual and scholarly life, and for his commitment to sustaining the poetic tradition in the State of Maryland. Glaser served as a Maryland State Arts Council poet-in-the-schools for over 25 years, has been active with the Maryland Humanities Council’s Speaker’s Bureau, and was recently appointed to serve on the Board of Directors of the Maryland Humanities Council. He served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from August, 2004 – 2009.
Glaser has edited three anthologies: The Cooke Book (1989), Weavings2000: The Maryland Millennial Anthology and Come Celebrate with Me, a memorial tribute to Lucille Clifton (2011). He has published seven collections of his own work, most recently Being a Father (2004), the chapbook, “Fire before the Hands” which won the Anabiosis Press, 2007 chapbook prize, “Remembering Eden” (2008) and “Disrupting Consensus” which won the 2008 Teacher’s Voice chapbook competition. Glaser served as co-editor of the Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA, 2012) and writes poetry reviews for The Friends Journal.
CoLab Residency: March 1 – 8, 2013
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Jamie Ratliff, art historian
SMCM faculty collaborator/sponsor: Cristin Cash, Department of Art and Art History, and Boyden Gallery Coordinator
Cristin Cash and Jamie Ratliff are developing an exhibition proposal focused on contemporary Mexican art and shifting definitions of “feminist art” in Latin America. To date, the literature on feminist art in Mexico focuses on a handful of artists working in the 1980s and early 1990s, predominantly addressing traditional feminine subjects of the body and domesticity. Their research focuses on female artists and feminist art historical discourse in Latin America from 1994 to the present. The exhibition will present artwork that addresses themes often characterized as “gender-neutral” in most exhibitions of contemporary Mexican art The intention is to investigate and reframe concepts such as urban space, post-nationalism/globalization, violence, etc. as feminist concerns for contemporary Mexican artists. The Artist House CoLab residency provides the opportunity to work together on exhibition concept development, object selection and content research.

Jamie Ratliff
Jamie Ratliff is a contemporary art historian whose research focuses specifically on the arts of Mexico and Latin America and gender studies. She recently completed her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Louisville, as well as graduate certificates in Women’s and Gender Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies. She holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from Georgetown College (Georgetown, Ky.) and an M.A. in Art History from Tufts University in Boston.
Her dissertation proposed a theoretical framework for contextualizing contemporary women’s art in Mexico within the monumental social, political, and economic changes that have characterized contemporary understandings of the nation since 1968. Her current research projects similarly analyze how contemporary feminist art critiques the legacy of conflating “womanhood” and “nationhood” that has plagued Mexican art and visual culture since the early modern period. She has previously taught art history courses at the University of Louisville, Indiana University Southeast, and Elizabethtown Community and Technical College. She is currently teaching a graduate seminar on Women and Art/Visual Culture in Latin America at the University of Kentucky in addition to online classes for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System.

Cristin Cash
Cristin Cash joined the Art and Art History faculty in 2005. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin with a dissertation that focused on the relationship between architectural style and changing perceptions of key spaces within the ancient Maya sacred landscape. Her current research focuses on the intersection of art and politics within visual representations of the built environments in Contemporary Latin American art. Dr. Cash teaches courses in the Art and Architecture of the Americas from ancient times to the present, World Architecture and Museum Studies.
CoLab Residency: November 26 – December 3, 2012
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Bryan Berger, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Lehigh University
SMCM faculty collaborator/sponsor: Craig Streu, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry
Bryan Berger and Craig Streu collaborate to investigate the role of a family of unique proteins in bacterial pathogenesis. Most recently, their work has begun to elucidate the role of these proteins in membrane binding in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is of particular interest given its propensity to form chronic opportunistic infections that are difficult to treat due to the formation of biofilms. The Artist House residency makes possible the co-authoring of a publication on this work for which data has been generated over the past two years. These findings hold substantial promise for a more broad understanding of the mechanisms underlying some types of bacterial pathogenesis. For example, Fusobacterium nucleatum (F. nucleatum), a prominent Gram-negative pathogen commonly found in dental plaque and the mucosa of the human gut is often associated with oral disease, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and cancer. Studies of the protein content in strains of this bacterium from patients with colorectal cancer show massive increases in the expression of these unique proteins. The Artist House residency will also facilitate generation of a new NSF or NIH proposal to further investigate the link between the proteins of interest in F. nucleatum and cancer.

Bryan Berger
Bryan Berger is an assistant professor in the department of chemical engineering and a core member of the bioengineering program at Lehigh University. He earned his B.Sc. in chemical engineering with high distinction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999, and spent the 1997-98 academic year as a DAAD academic exchange scholar at the Technical University of Garching, where he worked with Prof. Dr. M.E. Michel-Beyerle in the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry. Bryan received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware in 2005, where he worked in the laboratory of Abraham Lenhoff and Eric Kaler investigating mechanisms of surfactant-mediated protein crystallization. His work was chosen as a feature article in Protein Science, and was recognized by a Young Protein Scientist award at the Protein Society 2003 Annual Meeting. From 2006-2009, Bryan was an NIH post-doctoral fellow in the department of biochemistry & biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he worked in the laboratory of William DeGrado and Joel Bennett investigating mechanisms of transmembrane signal transduction. In 2010, Bryan joined the department of chemical engineering at Lehigh University as an assistant professor, and is a recipient of a 2012 NSF BRIGE award. His work focuses on membrane-protein interactions, with applications in investigating mechanisms of transmembrane signal transduction, host-pathogen interactions and development of membrane-based biomaterials. More information about the Berger lab: (www.lehigh.edu/berger), the department of chemical engineering: (www.che.lehigh.edu) and the program in bioengineering: (www.lehigh.edu/bioe).
Recent publications:
Su PS, Berger BW. Identifying Key Juxtamembrane Interactions in Cell Membranes Using AraTM. JBC (2012) 287: 31515-31526. PMID: 22822084
Craig Streu received his B.A. in Chemistry from Albion College in 2004 and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Following an NIH fellowship in hematology and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, he joined the faculty of St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2011, where he is currently Assistant Professor of Biochemistry. Professor Streu’s research interests straddle chemistry and biology and his research frequently borrows from biochemistry, molecular biology, biophysics, organic chemistry, and inorganic chemistry to answer questions of biological importance. His work has been featured in a variety of journals including a cover article in ChemBioChem and a publication in Biochemistry that was featured as an Editor’s Choice in Science. When not studying the sweet protein miraculin, the structure of RNA, developing transition metal catalyst systems for use in living cells, or drug candidates that target quinone reductase 2, he is investigating membrane-binding domains in microbes. Involvement of undergraduates in his scholarly work is a cornerstone of his research program and student coauthored publications are a top priority. Although a biochemist, Professor Streu has been known to dabble in photography. He is best known for his photography with a temperature-controlled confocal fluorescence microscope. Check out his research at:
https://www.smcm.edu/chemistry/Craig_Streus_Website/Craig_Streus_Website/Welcome.html
Recent publications:
Sasmal, P. K., Carregal-Romero, S., Han, A. A.**, Streu, C. N., Lin, Z., Namikawa, K., Elliott, S. L., Köster, R. W., Parak, W. J., Meggers, E. “Catalytic Azide Reduction in Biological Environments,” ChemBioChem, 2012, 13 (8), 1116-1120.
**SMCM student coauthor
CoLab Residency: November 7- 21, 2012
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Rachel Kranz, writer
SMCM faculty collaborator/sponsor: Robin Bates, writer
Rachel Kranz will be completing her second novel about a contemporary man’s search for the source of his family wealth in the antebellum south. (Her first novel, Leaps of Faith, was published by Farrar Straus.) Robin Bates will begin work on a book about Jane Austen. The collaboration between Robin and Rachel has been going on for 30 years. Rachel has played a key role in all of Robin’s major articles and in Robin’s recently released book How Beowulf Can Save America: An Epic Hero’s Guide to Defeating the Politics of Rage. Rachel is a gifted editor and writing coach who is skilled at helping people hone and develop their ideas. For his part, Robin has served as a reader and sounding board for Rachel’s novels.

Rachel Kranz
Rachel Kranz is a novelist, playwright, journalist, and free-lance writer whose work includes the novel Leaps of Faith (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2000), a comic epic about love, art, politics, and race in New York City; and the play Playing Alexina, based on the true story of a racial identity trial in antebellum Louisiana. She is currently working on Entanglement, a novel in which a white psychic living in contemporary New York has visions of slavery and has to figure out what that has to do with him.

Robin Bates
Robin Bates is a Professor of English who has taught at St. Mary’s College of Maryland since 1981. He has twice travelled to Slovenia on Fulbright scholarships and has published numerous articles on film. He posts a daily article on his blog Better Living through Beowulf: How Great Literature Can Change Your Life, and he is author of a recent book How Beowulf Can Save America: An Epic Hero’s Guide to Defeating the Politics of Rage.
CoLab Residency: October 22 – 28, 2012
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Peter Ramos, writer and poet
SMCM faculty collaborator/sponsor: Sue Johnson, Department of Art & Art History
Peter and Sue first met when they were fellows at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2009. They soon realized that their artistic/aesthetic interests overlapped and complemented each other. Their plans for collaboration will address the theme of Future Shock: Unsettling Aesthetics from the Atomic Age. What does it mean to revisit an anachronistic New Frontier whose promises were all but completely unfulfilled? Their collaborative work intends to explore the impact of unrealized and/or unrealistic past and present American socio-political-economic aspirations on contemporary artistic and poetic trends. How do the atomic age, the middle-class postwar boom, the space race, and popular consumerism all continue to affect the visual and linguistic landscape of the United States? Their work also explores the productive failures of these movements—especially where they were most optimistic and therefore currently in greatest decline. Their work therefore focuses on what might also be termed the postwar suburban American Gothic—how bygone paradigms of futurity continue to impact contemporary American culture.

Peter Ramos
Peter Ramos’ poems have appeared or will appear in the following journals: Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Fugue, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, The Chattahoochee Review, Mississippi Review (online), Slipstream, Meridian, elimae and others. Nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, Peter is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), and two chapbooks: Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003). He has written critical articles on such writers as Kate Chopin (in College Literature), William Faulkner and Toni Morrison (in The Faulkner Journal), Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda and Langston Hughes (in The CEA Critic), James Wright and César Vallejo (in Mandorla), and contemporary and modern Latin American poetry (in Pleiades and Poetry Daily). In the summers of 2009, 2010, and 2012, Peter was invited to the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA) as a fellow resident. In 2007, Peter received the Saltonstall Fellowship for the Arts Award and was invited to the colony (in Ithaca, NY) as the poet in residence for a month. His reading venues include the University of Texas (El Paso), Goucher College, Springfield College, the Palabara Pura Series (Chicago), Fall for the Book Festival (Fairfax, VA), the 2008 North Eastern Modern Language Association (NEMLA) conference reception, as well as various off-site readings at the 2008, 2009, and 2012 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conferences in New York and Chicago. Peter holds graduate degrees from George Mason University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Reviews of his work can be found at the following sites:
http://versemag.blogspot.com/2009/07/new-review-of-baude-ramos-ross.html
http://buffalonews.typepad.com/artsbeat/2008/11/on-peter-ramoss.html
http://latinostudies.nd.edu/lpr/reviews.php?issue=1&review=6
An associate professor of English at Buffalo State College, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature as well creative writing.

Sue Johnson
Sue Johnson is a professor art of in the Art & Art History Department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where she teaches courses in painting, drawing, printmaking, book arts and courses that link art with science and environmental studies, and museum studies. Born in San Francisco, CA and later growing up in New Jersey, she earned a BFA in Studio Arts from Syracuse University and an MFA in Painting from Columbia University, and studied painting in London, England and Florence, Italy with Syracuse University. Johnson’s creative work is grounded in the genre of the still life and vanitas, and explores the role of artist-naturalists and the history of collections and collectors as she often works collaboratively with museums, libraries and private collections to develop site-specific exhibition projects. Since 1995, she has created work under the rubric of The Alternate Encyclopedia, which serves as a conceptual umbrella for a diverse series of projects that focus on the works of literary figures such as Lewis Carroll and Marianne Moore, New World exploration, and the intersection of art, science and popular culture.
Johnson’s work has been the subject of over thirty one-person exhibitions at venues that include the Tweed Museum of Art, Jan Cicero Gallery, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Pitt Rivers Museum, Midwest Museum of American Art, Swarthmore College, Anderson Gallery/VCU, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, and University of Richmond Museums. Grants include awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts/Mid Atlantic Foundation Fellowship, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and four Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council. Selected residency fellowships include the Arts/Industry Program, John Michael Kohler Art Center, Mac Dowell Colony, Millay Colony, Art Omi International Artist Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, City of Salzburg/Salzburg Kunstlerhaus Residency Fellowship, Jentel Foundation, CAMAC/Centre D’Art Marnay Art Centre, American Philosophical Society/Andre Michaux Library Research Fellowship, and American Antiquarian Society research fellowship. In 2010-11 Johnson served as Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies in Oxford, England, and was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Reviews of her work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Art Examiner, and Art Papers. Her work is in numerous public collections including MOMA/Franklin Furnace Archive, Yale University Libraries, U.S. Embassy Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Smithsonian American Art Museum Libraries, Prudential Life Insurance, Bristol-Myers/Squibb, Tweed Museum of Art, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum of Art, Maier Museum of Art, Bucknell University, Francis J. Greenburger Foundation, and many others.
CoLab Residency – Sept 10-17, 2012
Visiting Collaborative Fellow: Ellie Baker, interdisciplinary
SMCM faculty collaborator/sponsor: Susan Goldstine, Department of Mathematics
Ellie Baker and Susan Goldstine are writing a book on applying mathematical principles to the design of bead crochet bracelets. Crafting Conundrums: Puzzles and Patterns for the Bead Crochet Artist will include the mathematical theory behind a new approach to bead crochet design and a large selection of patterns illustrating the theory. The Artist House residency gives the authors an opportunity to revise the book chapters and review which bead crochet patterns to include. Some of the material in Crafting Conundrumsexpands on Goldstine and Baker’s prior publications, “Building a better bracelet: wallpaper patterns in bead crochet” in the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, and “Bead Crochet Bracelets: What Would Escher Do?” in the 2012 Conference Proceedings of Bridges: Mathematics, Music, Architecture, Art, Culture.

Ellie Baker
Ellie Baker holds a B.F.A. in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University. She has worked as a high school fine arts teacher, a software engineer, and a computer science researcher. Her employment history includes stints at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a major contributor to the development of the Internet, and at Thinking Machines Corporation, an early pioneer in massively parallel computing. Baker’s research interests typically lean toward the visual. Most recently she has become passionate about mathematical connections in pattern design for the craft of bead crochet and is working on a book on this topic with mathematics professor Susan Goldstine. Baker’s prior work included studying facial image database search strategies and development of the “Drawing Evolver,” an interactive simulated evolution system (mentioned in Stuart Mealing’s book “Computers and Art”) for creating drawings of faces and other subjects. Baker’s collaboration with Susan Goldstine and Sophie Sommer has produced artwork exhibited in the juried shows of mathematical art at the national Joint Mathematics Meetings (2010 and 2012) and at the upcoming Bridges 2012 international mathematics and art interdisciplinary conference. Baker currently lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. For more info about Ellie Baker http://www.ellie-baker.com

Susan Goldstine
Susan Goldstine received her A.B. in Mathematics and French from Amherst College in 1993 and her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1998. She joined the faculty of St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2004, where she is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics. While her original research specialty is number theory and algebraic dynamics, Professor Goldstine has become increasingly focused on the intersection of mathematics and the arts. She has constructed numerous tactile and visual mathematical models employing such diverse media as yarn, fabric, thread, beads, paper, steel wire, copper tubes, pinecones, and pottery, though not all at once. Her own artwork, as well as joint artwork with Alison Frane, Ellie Baker, and Sophie Sommer, has been presented in papers in Math Horizons and the Journal of Mathematics and the Artsand displayed in the juried art exhibition at the national Joint Mathematics Meetings. Professor Goldstine is also an avid cook, and while she usually pursues non-mathematical cookery, she hopes one day to reproduce the interlocking Escher swan cookies she made for a lark as an undergraduate. In the SMCM Mathematics and Computer science department, she strives to maintain her reputation for having the office with the most toys. More info about Professor Goldstine.