Our People

The daughter of a refugee father from China and an immigrant mother from Jamaica, whose own parents were immigrants from Hong Kong, Jennifer Ho is the director of the Center for the Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also holds an appointment as Professor in the Ethnic Studies department. She is the past president of the Association for Asian American Studies (2020-2022) and sits...

Diamond Darling (she/her) is the events and communications coordinator for the Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Diamond received her BS in Hospitality Management with a focus in the hotel and tourism industry in 2018. In 2020, her career path shifted to higher education, beginning at the University of Kentucky. While in Kentucky, Diamond worked as a communications and conference coordinator for a...

Mariana Pereira Vieira grew up in Brazil, Costa Rica and El Salvador. She received a BFA in Photography from Georgia Southern University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado Boulder. After several years dedicated to different arts non-profits in Colorado, she returned to work in higher education at CU Boulder. Mariana believes that art changes lives and is passionate about education. In 2022, she...

Nyssa Baca (she/her) is a new student at CU Boulder and is from Arvada, Colorado. She is studying Information Science with a minor in Media Studies, as well as a media analysis aficionado with a deep-rooted passion for crafting compelling digital content.

Brown studied history and literature at The American University and graduate studies in journalism at the University of Minnesota before becoming a journalist. He covered crime across New Mexico, politics in South Florida, the White House and Capitol Hill in Washington, and food, agriculture and sex across the Rocky Mountain West for a decade for The Denver Post. In 2008, he published a memoir with Random House. Since 2013, he...

Katie Daniels has been running her design and branding firm, McKenna Daniels Design , since 2008. She moved back to Boulder with her business and family in 2019 after a decade in Maryland. Prior to starting her own business, Katie enjoyed 16 years in Boulder working with Colorado design firms, including a long role as Design Director at Vermilion. Her firm specializes in creating strategic and beautiful design and branding...

Ami Dayan is an award winning Israeli/American playwright, director, and performer. He studied and worked professionally in Europe, Israel and extensively in the United States. He serves on the board of the Jaipur Literature Festival in Boulder, and is founder of The Interview Game Inc. , a Boulder based company with a mission of bridging the intergenerational gap, and bringing people closer with curated reciprocal interviews.

Gary Frank is a consultant with 36 years of experience. He is the former Manager of Organization Development at Storage Technology Corporation and a former member of the graduate faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder. His work focuses primarily on guiding clients through major organizational changes to operationalize strategy through structure and to create high performance work systems. Gary has consulted with organizations in a variety of industries including...

Kurt Gutjahr is the Executive Director of CAVU (Climate Advocates Voces Unidas). CAVU uses visual storytelling, stakeholder engagement, and a unique education program to support local solutions to the climate crisis. For fifteen years, Kurt was the Managing Director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center of the American West. Kurt has also served as adjunct faculty in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico and...

I was born and brought up in India, an idyllic childhood in many ways. I began to draw and paint at a very young age and as a self-taught artist I was deeply influenced by the diverse arts and crafts traditions of the culture I grew up in. There is so much beauty and color in India, both natural and crafted, that it was easy to begin to present it...

Rudy is the retired President of Columbia Communities Inc. and the retired President of Columbia Cable CO. He served nine years as Special Assistant to Mayor Kathy Whitmire in Houston. Rudy is a Boulder Art Council member, Past Chair of the Advisory Board of CU Boulder Art Museum, and Dean's Advisory Council School of A&S at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has served ten years on Board of Colorado...

Pedro Silva, YOUnify Director of Engagement, brings a wealth of cross-sector experience. A veteran of the United States Air Force, who served as both a Satellite Communications Technician and a Mandarin Chinese Language/Intelligence Analyst, he has cultivated the capacity to think missionally and practically--strategically and tactically--on a wide variety of concerns. In his post military career, Pedro worked as a corporate recruiter for 8 years serving dozens of for profit,...

Trudy has been a long time resident of Boulder county since 1981, except for a short time spent in Denver. Her career in Physical Therapy included many roles-clinician, administrator, professor, researcher and entrepreneur. Her last endeavor was HealthLInks Clinic, a rehabilitation clinic for individuals with a cancer diagnosis. Currently she serves on the Colorado Chautauqua Board and chairs their Community Connection Committee. Previous volunteer/board experience includes CU Art Museum, Jaipur...

Professor Andrews specializes in the social and environmental history of the American West. Professor Andrews teaches a wide range of courses in environmental history and the history of the United States West, and is passionate about educating current and future history teachers. Some of the courses he offers include "The U.S. Since 1865," "Colorado History," "The American West in the 19th Century," and "Special Topics in American History." Professor Andrews...

Matthew Dockendorf is Associate Director of Bands and Instructor of Music at the University of Colorado Boulder where he conducts the Symphonic Band, directs the “Golden Buffalo” Marching Band, and teaches courses in music education and conducting. Prior to his appointment at CU Boulder, Dockendorf studied at Michigan State University where he wrote drill and arranged music for the Spartan Marching Band and Spartan Brass. He served as conductor of...

Cheryl works on ethnic and American literatures, sound studies, and Marxism. Her essays have appeared in American Literature, American Quarterly, and Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans. She is the author of Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 (Illinois, 2012). Her current research is on sound technology, social movements, and race in the 20th and 21st centuries. Areas of...

Carla Jones’ research analyzes the cultural politics of appearance in urban Indonesia, with particular focus on femininity, domesticity, aesthetics and Islam.

Marina Kassianidou’s current practice combines painting, drawing, collage, installation, site-specific work, and writing. She experiments with everyday surfaces and spaces, looking for marks that respond to the features of each surface/space.

Élika Ortega's work focuses on digital literature, book studies and reading practices, post-humanism and cultural hybridity. She's currently writing Binding Media: Print-Digital Literature 1980s-2010s, a monograph investigating print-digital works of literature all along the American continent. Élika was the Program Committee co-chair for Digital Humanities 2018 . She is also part of the Committee on Information Technology and TC Digital Humanities both at MLA. You can find more about Élika’s...

Beth Osnes PhD, is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is an associate of the Environmental Studies faculty. I am a theatre and performance studies artist/scholar who is active in applied performance and creative climate communication. I engage in performance to co-author and actualize an equitable, survivable, and thrive-able future for all life and the ecosystems upon which all life relies. This applied approach...

Associate Professor Phaedra C. Pezzullo’s research focuses on the mobilization of resistance to toxic pollution, the communication of resilience in what she calls “the late age of fossil fuels,” and the advocacy of environmental and social justice. With interdisciplinary training in the humanities and the sciences, she engages ethnographic participant observation fieldwork, qualitative interviews, popular texts across media, news archives, government documents and contemporary critical theoretical perspectives. An award-winning teacher...

Jeremy Reger came to the voice department after holding the position of director of keyboard studies and collaborative arts at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. The international performer and educator says although the natural beauty of the region was a big draw, in the end it was the passion of the students and faculty at the College of Music that led him here. “There’s something special going on here,” says...

Education Ph.D., University of Washington - History, 2008 M.A., University of Vermont - History B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz - English & History, 1997 Research Interests Transnational political movements, radicalism, Asian American history Seema Sohi is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her book, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford University Press, 2014) examines the radical anticolonial politics...

Julia Staffel (Ph.D., University of Southern California, 2013) joined the department in Fall 2018. Prior to coming to Boulder, she worked at Washington University in St. Louis and the Australian National University. Professor Staffel specializes in epistemology, with a focus on formal epistemology. She also has research and teaching interests in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, logic, and metaethics. Her work focuses, among other things, on...

Academic Passion: Engaging with the intrinsic curiosity and drive of students, to help assist them in their pathway into the professional world, while learning and growing along with them. Ross Taylor is an assistant professor of journalism. Previously, he was a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His professional recognitions include National Photographer of the Year, Northern Photographer of the Year, New England Photographer of...