Creative Campus

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Creative Campus at The University of Alabama is pleased to announce the 2011-2012 Faculty Affiliates.  Creative Campus is an ever changing and expanding organization that continually seeks new ways to partner with campus and community.  Several campus partnerships have developed into exciting Creative Campus projects in the past.  A concerted effort to formalize some of these relationships has resulted in the creation of four faculty affiliate positions for each academic semester.  This fall Creative Campus will work with New College Instructor Jennifer Caputo, Telecommunications and Film Instructor Nick Corrao, Honors College Instructor of Latin and Fine Arts Allen Jones, and Creative Writing Director and English Professor Michael Martone.  Several projects are already underway with each of these faculty affiliates including direct curricular connections with the faculty member’s courses, new endeavors like a collaborative production of an arts television program, and conversations about completely new projects unfolding in real time.  Faculty members interested in affiliating with Creative Campus in the future should contact Creative Campus.  For more information email creativecampus@ua.edu, call 205-348-7884, or visit www.creativecampus.ua.edu.

Jennifer Caputo is an ethnomusicologist, percussionist, and Instructor at the University of Alabama in New College and the School of Music. As a graduate student at Wesleyan University, her dissertation research focused on the tammurriata, a folk music and dance style from the region of Campania, Italy that features a large Italian tambourine (the tammorra) as its primary instrument. Ms. Caputo received her M.A. in Music (ethnomusicology) from Tufts University and her Bachelor of Music degree from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College CUNY, where she majored in percussion performance and music education.

Jennifer’s additional research areas include music and dance from Ghana, community engagement through the arts, and activism/advocacy through music. She directs the UA African Drumming Ensemble that performs traditional music from the Ewe and Ga ethnic groups of Ghana. She also teaches Creativity and Music and Activism courses in New College as well as Music and World Cultures in the School of Music. In 2009 Jennifer began working with the Tuscaloosa Magnet School through a partnership with University of Alabama and has continued to facilitate independent teaching opportunities for UA students at the Magnet School in areas such as world drumming, dance, creative writing, and organic gardening/sustainability.

Jennifer has performed with several percussion and world music ensembles including Percussion People, Ethos Percussion Group, Wesleyan Javanese Gamelan, Boston Village Gamelan, I Giullari di Piazza, and the Rhythm Monsters - a New Jersey based West African drumming ensemble. In the contemporary music scene Ms. Caputo performed solo works and ensemble pieces by Bill Dixon, Anthony Braxton, Guillermo Gregorio, Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, and Andrew Raffo Dewar. Jennifer was a featured performer in the Birmingham Experiments concert series and a guest performer with Gino Robair at the Birmingham Improvisor Festival. Recent improvisation collaborations included a multimedia performance presented by Creative Campus called “Beginning, Begin Again,” and performances at the Alabama Art Kitchen in Tuscaloosa and the Robinwood Concert House in Toledo with percussionist Rob Wallace.

Nick Corrao is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, who focuses on character driven stories.  Nick has also worked as an editor on television shows such as "Paula's Home Cooking," and as an assistant editor for such directors as Robert Altman, M. Night Shyamalan, Edward Burns, and Peter Bogdanovich.  He received his BA in Film from Bard College, and his MFA in Documentary Filmmaking from Wake Forest University. Corrao is currently an Instructor in the Telecommunication and Film department and is teaching introduction to media production, advanced television production and advanced post production.

Allen Jones teaches Latin 101 and UH 210 - The Arts of Tuscaloosa. She received a BS in Interdisciplinary Humanities and an MA in Education at The University of Alabama. In The Arts of Tuscaloosa, students explore the arts of both “town and gown” through attending a wide range of arts events, writing essay responses to the events, attending presentations by guest artists, meeting in small discussion groups, and creating a final project.

In addition to teaching the Arts of Tuscaloosa, Ms. Jones is in her tenth year of teaching a similar exploratory arts course, on the road with The Alabama at Oxford (England) program. The Arts of Oxford course uses the methodology of "the city as text," where selected readings of Oxford’s history, literature, and art come alive as students explore the sights and sounds of the places where the readings took place.

Michael Martone's most recent books are Four for a Quarter, Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover, Racing in Place:  Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories. Michael Martone, a memoir in contributor’s notes, Unconventions, Writing on Writing, and Rules of Thumb, edited with Susan Neville, were all published recently. He is also the author of The Blue Guide to Indiana, published by FC2. The University of Georgia Press published his book of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction, in 2000. With Robin Hemley, he edited Extreme Fiction.  With Lex Williford, he edited The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. 

Martone is the author of five other books of short fiction including Seeing Eye, Pensées:  The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List, Safety Patrol, and Alive and Dead in Indiana.  He has edited two collections of essays about the Midwest:  A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest and Townships:  Pieces of the Midwest.  His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Story, Antaeus, North American Review, Benzene, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Third Coast, Shenandoah, Bomb, and other magazines.

Martone was born and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He attended Butler University and graduated from Indiana University.  He holds the MA from The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University.

Martone has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation.  His stories have won awards in the Italian Americana fiction contest, the Florida Review Short Story Contest, the Story magazine Short, Short Story Contest, the Margaret Jones Fiction Prize of Black Ice Magazine, and the first World's Best Short, Short Story Contest.  His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies.

Michael Martone is currently a Professor at the University of Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996.  He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988.  He has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University. 

Under the auspices of UA's Office of Academic Affairs Creative Campus is a collaborative system connecting students, faculty, and community to nurture innovative thinkers who turn ideas into action.  Creative Campus seeks to serve as a hub of collaboration and creative activity at The University of Alabama.  At the heart of Creative Campus is the undergraduate and graduate intern program.  For more information on Creative Campus visit www.creativecampus.ua.edu.

The University of Alabama, a student-centered research university, is experiencing significant growth in both enrollment and academic quality. This growth, which is positively impacting the campus and the state's economy, is in keeping with UA's vision to be the university of Choice for the best and brightest students. UA, the state's flagship university, is an academic community united in its commitment to enhancing the quality of life for all Alabamians.

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Source: Alexis Clark, coordinator of Creative Campus, 205/348-7884, alexis.clark@ua.edu