Andrea Bilkey
Associate Dean Bilkey has been invited to co-present a hands-on double session titled “Rendering Light” at the annual USITT conference in Baltimore, February 28 - March 5.

Abigail Bugh
Abigail earned her 200-hour yoga teacher certification, completed 18 hours of Theatrical Intimacy Education training, and has been performing Aerial Silks with an Aerial Arts studio in town.  

Dorothy Chansky
Professor Dorothy Chansky received a fellowship from the Penn State Humanities Institute to spend the 2021-2022 academic year on their campus as a guest scholar.  Her project is to complete a book about representations of dementia on the American stage of the past century.  The book is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. Her article "Joint Owners in Spain: Alice Brown Takes on Social Insecurity," will be published in Modern Drama late in the spring (2022).  Professor Chansky will present a paper at the Sixth International Conference on American Drama and Theater, this year to be held in Madrid in June.  Both article and paper are drawn from the book project.

Mark Charney
Mark Charney's play, The Balloon Handler Makes Good, was chosen to be a part of the Warner International Play Festival 10th year anniversary season which celebrates the best of the last decade with fully produced versions of each play, October 15-17, 2021 in Warner, Connecticut.

Mark Charney was hired by Bee Holder Productions to serve as a story consultant for a potential series, Curio, based on the novels by Heather Graham, and penned by best-selling author Jon Land.

Mark Charney has been named Interim President of the Board of Directors of Spectrum Theatre Ensemble.

Mark Charney & Cory Norman
Mark Charney and Cory Norman were commissioned to write a play about Jack Kevorkian from Bee Holder Productions, the company that produced the film You Don't Know Jack and the documentary, Kevorkian. It is currently being considered for a production in London by director James Kerr. A reading will be held in London of the play in April, with a longer development workshop early this summer.

Ali Duffy
Associate Professor of Dance Ali Duffy was awarded the William D. Kerns Award for Performing Arts and a Texas Tech University Outstanding Researcher Award. Over the past year she has published her research in Research in Dance Education, The Journal of Dance Medicine and Science, the Journal of Dance Education, and the American Journal of Arts Management. Her new book, Careers in Dance, was named a finalist for the Susan B. Stinson Book Award for Dance Education. She produced three new virtual concerts with Flatlands Dance Theatre in response to pandemic-related theatre closures and lockdown. Dr. Duffy also recently co-founded a new organization, the International Alliance for Parents in Dance, whose mission is to serve and connect parents and caregivers working in dance professions around the world.

Rachel Hirshorn-Johnston
Rachel Hirshorn-Johnston is a recent recipient of an NEA grant for her collaborative work on "Remember This: A Participatory Performance Experience", which examines the effects of "liveness" in the performance space on dementia-related audience stigma. Her on-going research into STEAM initiatives was presented over the summer at VASTA, and she has two new publications - PAVA's InFormant (author), and the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (contributor) - making their way to print. She continues to contract remotely as a vocal coach. 

Casey Joiner
Casey's presented “Are You….?: Lesbian Representation in Musical Theatre post- 1960” was accepted to the Musical Theatre Educator's Alliance national conference in New York City, where she will present on January 4. 
She also directed the junior MT class in a scene from “Waitress,” which has been accepted as a national finalist at the National Opera Association Musical Theatre Scenes Competition, where she will also be presenting research on casting non-binary opera singers in classical opera with Dr. Shayna Tayloe. They'll travel to St. Augustine Florida on January 5 to compete and present.
She has also been asked to participate in a panel for ATHE's summer conference in Detroit this July 2022- The panel will be talking about queerness and gender subversion in early twentieth century stage works (her contribution concerns our work on Spring Awakening,) and she is excited to work with researchers from across the US on that. 

Jesse Jou
Jesse Jou will have a busy spring 2022 conducting creative activity and research, including directing the educational tour of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night for The Acting Company, a nationally and internationally recognized theatre; the premiere of C. Julian Jimenez' Bruise & Thorn with Pipeline Theatre in NYC; and Leah Nanako Winkler's Two Mile Hollow with Intiman Theatre in Seattle.

Yvonne Racz Key
Yvonne Racz Key attended the 23rd Annual CORPS de Ballet International Conference in July 2021.

She began her certification process for Functional Awareness Movement Educator Certification (FA®ME)/ She was accepted as a School of American Ballet Visiting Fellow for 2021-2022. 

Racz is choreographing an entirely new production of Ballet Lubbock's Nutcracker which will premiere at the Buddy Hilly Hall. Ballet Lubbock will be presenting Dallas Black Dance at Buddy Holly Hall in February 2022.

Yvonne is continuing her certification in Functional Awareness Movement Educator Certification (FA®ME) through Towson University.

Yvonne will attend the 2nd session as a School of American Ballet Visiting Fellow, Diversity and Inclusion at New York City Ballet in March 2022. 

Racz choreographed an entirely new production of Ballet Lubbock's Nutcracker which premiered at the Buddy Holly Hall presenting all-new sets and scenery custom designed by renowned artist, Peter Horne.

Under her direction, Ballet Lubbock is hosting Dallas Black Dance Theater at Buddy Holly Hall February 5, 2022. 

Yvonne's research project, "Dewd Drop, Gender Casting in Classical Story Ballets" was accepted for presentation at the CORPS de Ballet International Conference in Richmond, VA in June 2022.

Paul N. Reinsch
Paul N. Reinsch's chapter “Foreign and Familiar: Kedi and the Musicality of Istanbul” recently appeared in the edited collection Kedi: A Docalogue. In the Spring he chaired a panel at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference and offered a presentation titled “Laughing to Learn: The Precedents for Video Arts' Use of ‘Humorous Negative Examples' in Audio-Visual Education.” He was also co-presenter in October at the Association for Business Communication conference. That presentation, “The Video Arts Briefcase Booklets, or How Do Students Learn from Video and Text?,” continues his address of audio-visual pedagogy and business training. Additionally, he has a book review forthcoming in The Journal of Popular Film & Television.

Seth Warren-Crow
Seth Warren-Crow received a Scholarship Catalyst Program grant from Texas Tech University. The grant will help fund an interdisciplinary and immersive sound installation that will involve programming an array of DC motors and speakers to activate the components of a distributed drum set. The project is a collaboration with Davin Huston, an associate professor of practice at Purdue University (School of Engineering Technology and Department of Theatre) and Jonathan Lee, an MFA graduate student of Sound Design at Texas Tech.