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Miller Endowment Visitors

George A. Miller Visiting Professors and Scholars are women and men of outstanding achievement in academic or public life who join our campus to participate in scholarly, professional or creative programs. These visitors might teach a special course, participate in ongoing or self-initiated research activities, interact informally with students and faculty, or take part in interdisciplinary seminars. Residencies may be for as long as a semester or an entire academic year; however, in view of the crowded schedules of many visitors, they are often arranged for shorter periods.                                     

GAM Visiting Professors & Scholars Program Deadlines and Application form

George A. Miller Visiting Artist

Ilya Demutsky is an award-winning composer, performer and conductor. His works include compositions for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, piano, voice, as well as electronic and film music. His commissions/productions extend to Chicago, San Francisco, Sidney, Paris, TelAviv and beyond. Ilya currently resides in France, to distance himself from Putin's regime and remain connected to international collaborators and institutions. He is the author of 4 full length ballets: A Hero of Our Time, Optimistic Tragedy, Nureyev and Anna Karenina.

Demutsky’s music for the full-length ballet A Hero of Our Time at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow won him Russia's most coveted theatrical award, the Golden Mask, for Best Composer in Musical Theatre, and the production was named Best Ballet Production of 2015/2016. In January 2017, San Francisco Ballet opened its new season with the world premiere of his ballet Optimistic Tragedy, and the same year ended with the highly anticipated opening of the full-length ballet Nureyev at the Bolshoi in December 2017. Nureyev won four Prix Benois 2018 awards, including best composer's work in ballet.

In 2019, the Joffrey Ballet and The Australian Ballet commissioned a new full-length orchestral score from Ilya Demutsky for an entirely new "story ballet" based on Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the first full-length commission in the Joffrey's history. It is touring U.S. again this year, with performances in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco to sold out houses. For his score to Kirill Serebrennikov's film The Student, Demutsky was named European Composer of 2016 by the European Film Academy. The full-length ballet The Seagull, commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre (premiered in July 2021), recently won the Golden Mask and BraVo Awards for Best Ballet.

Among Demutsky’s recent works is music for the world opening of the full-length oratorio project The Last Day of an Eternal City, a choral polyphonic experiment combining Latin, Italian, and Russian texts. One of Putin’s most powerful opponents served as fodder for the character of a political prisoner in a story set during the Roman Empire--a satirically allusive piece both entertaining and politically charged. Commissioned by the Moscow State Chamber Choir, the production opened against pandemic uncertainties to a sold-out audience on November 11, 2021, in Moscow’s largest and newest concert hall, Zaryad’e.

Demutsky composed the music for the world opening of the play The Patriarchs and the Matriarchs, the only play written by the revered Israeli writer Meir Shalev, opened at Gesher Theatre in Tel Aviv in June 2023, directed by Amit Epstein. Demutsky has a long successful history of collaboration with UIUC, where his work was workshopped and premiered in 2017 and 2023, in collaboration with LyricTheatre @ Illinois and Theatre students.

WEBSITE

George A. Miller Visiting Artist

Information about the residency (including public events) HERE

Suman Mukhopadhyay is a prominent director of theater and cinema, a writer of plays and stories, and a performer based in Kolkata, India. Since 2005, he has directed 9 feature films, of which Chaturanga (4 Parts, 2009) and Herbert (2008) have been recipients of multiple national and international awards. His films have been screened throughout Europe, Asia, and North America; his most recent film Nazarband (Captive, 2020) premiered at Busan International Film Festival. Prior to his filmmaking career, Mukhopadhyay has been a leading figure in in the Bengali stage scene. A recipient of the highest state and national awards from the Indian Drama Academy and West Bengal Theatre Academy, he has directed and performed in adaptations of Chekov, Brecht, and Max Frisch, Klaus Mann’s texts, in addition to plays based on Bengali and Hindi texts. He has been an engaged scholar and teacher of theater as well, and has taught and workshopped in various American universities, including University of California (Berkeley) and University of Toledo in Ohio.

Mukhopadhyay’s stage career began in 1990 with his direction of and performance in Janani (Mother) and an adaptation of Chekov’s “A Clerk’s Death.” His sheer spread of plays represent the work of an awe-inspiring range of authors: from Sudraka (classical Sanskrit dramatist) to Shakespeare, from Rabindranath Tagore to Ibsen and Chekov, and from Debesh Roy to Max Frisch, the list is too long to enumerate. In between directing and performing in plays in Kolkata/Calcutta and Delhi, he has trained and collaborated with actors and directors in Germany, Italy, and the US. In 2006, he directed “Man of the Heart” as an off-off-Broadway show at Kraine Theater. In the year of his debut as a filmmaker, he was the artist in residence at University of California, Berkeley, as a theater director, which shows his versatility and commitment to both art forms. His most recent engagement with both art forms was in 2022, as a Fulbright-Nehru scholar at Columbia University, awarded for academic and professional excellence.

Suman Mukhopadhyay has carved a space for himself in the crowded field of Indian filmmaking (India is the top film producing nation with an annual output of over 2,000 films) with his thoughtful choice of content and his near-flawless execution. For his first film in 2005, Suman Mukhopadhyay chose to adapt Herbert, a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya, whose writings have only recently been inducted into the postcolonial literary canon. Mukhopadhyay returned to Bhattacharya’s writings for his 3rd and 4th film as well, which shows his sincere dedication to bold content. He has directed two films based on two of Tagore’s popular novels, Chaturanga (2008) and Shesher Kabita (The Concluding Poem, 2012), which had been considered among the most unfilmable. Chaturanga received the Grand Prix at the Sarajevo film festival, and prizes at Vancouver, Philadelphia, and New Jersey Asian film festival as well. Apart from his directorial career in cinema and the theater, Suman Mukhopadhyay has been an active and influential figure in the Indian cultural sphere. He has served in the Academic Council of the National School of Drama (New Delhi), as a member of the Expert Committee of Performing Arts at Government of India’s Ministry of Culture, a Board of Trustee Member of the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art. He was India’s cultural representative to Prague Quadrennial in 2003. He is a frequent contributor to literary and cultural columns in prominent Bengali newspapers.

George A. Miller Visiting Scholar

CNRS Researcher and Head of the Géochimie des Enveloppes Externes Team, Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris

GAM Visiting Artist

Biography

https://patriziapolese.com/

George A. Miller Visiting Artist

https://www.mikiorihara.com/

Miki Orihara is best known for her work as a principal dancer in the Martha Graham Dance Company, which she joined in 1987 and earned a New York Dance & Performance (Bessie) Award for Sustained Achievement in 2010. She has performed on Broadway and with Elisa Monte, Martha Clarke, SITI Company, PierGroupDance, Lotuslotus. Her solo concert series, Resonance has been enthusiastically received by audiences and critics around the world. Resonance traces the lineage of some of today’s most imaginative dance makers through earlier innovators like Martha Clarke and Lar Luvobitch and back to the masterworks of Martha Graham and José Limón. In Resonance II, Orihara premiered Shirabyoshi, a Japanese dancer, as part of a CUNY Dance Initiative 2016-17 residency at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (LPAC). She premiered Resonance III in May 2019 at LPAC, focusing on works of American and Japanese modern dance pioneers. This production received Japan Foundation’s Tour Grant 2018/2019.

In 2019, in addition to her own concert series, she started to work in Berlin with DanceOn Project. Orihara has presented her choreography in New York, Amsterdam and Tokyo/Nagoya. She is a sought after teacher and coach, working with the Kirov Ballet, Nakamura/Shuto Project (Japan), Japan’s New National Theater Ballet School, The Ailey School, New York University, The Hartt School, L’été de la Danse (Paris), Henny Jurien Studio (Amsterdam) and is Dance Director for Mishmash*Miki Orihara. Orihara was featured in the Inaugural performance of “Peace is...” at the United Nations as a part of the Permanent Mission of Japan in April 2017. Orihara is the Dance Director for Martha Graham Dance Technique Level 1 DVD, documenting Graham technique with Dance Spotlight and Martha Graham Centre.

MillerComm information here