Miller Endowment Visitors Archive

Andrei Kureichik is a prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, director and publicist from Minsk, Belarus, currently living in exile. Read more.

CAS/MillerComm2022 event here

At the height of his compositional career, John Harbison has recently published a series of essays on Bach, whose music he has worked with as a conductor in Boston for many years. During his residency here he will be able to contribute to our community both as composer and scholar. As well as giving a public lecture about the literary influences on his symphonic work, he will work closely with our student performers, composers, and musicologists. The UI Symphony Orchestra is one of our largest ensembles on campus; working with Mr. Harbison and Professor Gunn will be a fantastic opportunity for our students. Additionally, we have been able to schedule other concerts featuring his work: on October 20, the Illinois Modern Ensemble and faculty guests will perform a concert of Harbison’s chamber music. This will be a “composer portrait” festival with two big concerts, masterclasses, lessons, and the public lecture.

Harbison MillerComm event

Donald Byrd has been the Artistic Director of Spectrum Dance Theater since December 2002. Formerly, he was Artistic Director of Donald Byrd/The Group, a critically acclaimed contemporary dance company, founded in Los Angeles and later based in New York, that toured both nationally and internationally. His career has been long and complex, and his choreographic and theatrical interests are broad. The New York Times describes him as “a choreographer with multiple personalities … an unabashed eclectic.” He is a Tony-nominated (The Color Purple) and Bessie Award-winning (The Minstrel Show) choreographer.

Mr. Byrd has frequently been referred to as a ‘citizen artist,’ a descriptive that perfectly aligns with an important component of Spectrum Dance Theater’s mission and Mr. Byrd’s personal beliefs – “dance as an art form and as a social/ civic instrument.”

Byrd MillerComm presentation

Artist, writer and teacher, Ricardo Basbaum investigates art as an intermediary device and a platform for the integration of sensorial experiences, sociability and language. Since the late 1980s, he has created a specific vocabulary to his work, applying it in a particular way for every new project. This vocabulary often manifests itself as drawings, installations, videos and urban interventions. Basbaum is the author of an installation that belongs to the Tate Modern Collection in London and took part of exhibitions inside important institutions, such as: Documenta XII in Kassel, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, the São Paulo’s Biennial, the Secession in Vienna, among others. He also was a resident artist at the Audain Gallery in Vancouver and has held individual projects at the Galician Center for Contemporary Art (Santiago de Compostela) and at The Showroom (London).

Basbaum residency's project is entitled Contamination: An Extended Space for Sustaining Encounters through Art. For more information, please visit http://on-contamination.com/.

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Inaugural talk: March 11, 2021, 4:00pm CST. Flyer

Seitu Jones is a Saint Paul (MN) based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construct of race and the desire to restore our Beloved communities through food, conversation and beauty. His practice aspires to create environmental and public artwork that honors and inspires communities. Seitu Jones Studio engages, advises and produces work that advances food and environmental justice through the arts and public sphere.

Events scheduled during Mr. Jones' residency:

FALL 2020

Kitchen Conversation October 13

Kitchen Conversation October 15

Town Hall: Food for Justice | Food for Thought October 26

SPRING 2021 April 14, MillerComm presentation

Margaret Wertheim is a writer, artist and curator whose work brings together art, math and science as evidenced in her Crochet Coral Reef, a worldwide project created through hyperbolic crochet. In this lecture Margaret will introduce the UIUC community to her work with the Institute for Figuring, a collaborative Los Angeles based practice she runs with her twin sister Christine Wertheim. Highlighting the “aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics,” the sisters design art & science exhibits for galleries and museums around the world. Their Crochet Coral Reef is a global participatory endeavor that sits at the intersection of craft, geometry, community-art and environmentalism. The work has been seen by more than two million people and exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the Smithsonian, and many other places. Margaret will discuss the interplay of art, science, and art as social practice within the Crochet Reef project, while also promoting UIUC’s very own locally made Urbana-Champaign Satellite Reef, opening at the Siebel Center for Design in spring 2021.

Margaret Wertheim’s work focuses on relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. A two-fold perspective animates her thinking: on the one hand science can be seen as a set of conceptual enchantments that delight our minds and senses; on the other hand science is a socially embedded activity intersecting with philosophy, culture and politics. Wertheim aims to illuminate both dimensions of science and mathematics through her books, articles, lectures, workshops, and art, which has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally.

Listen to Wertheim's September 23, 2021 MillerComm presentation here

The Crochet Coral Reef website.

Linguistics and Literature Section of the Department of Humanities

Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru

March 1-April 25, 2019

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Independent photojournalist

8-week residency, Spring 2019

Department of Journalism

Link to MillerComm presentation

Yu-Chen Wang (Guzheng, Chinese zither) and Han-Jui Chen (double bass)

October 28-November 3, 2018

School of Music

Independent artist

October 6-9, 2018

Presentations in the Improvisers Exchange initiative

Multi-media artist

Multiple residencies between September 2018 and September 2019, culminating in the 13-hour participatory installation, One Boy's Day, part of Krannert Center for the Performing Arts' 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Artist Amanda Browder worked with parents, students and community in a large-scale fabric installation at Stratton Elementary School.

Vanderbilt University

Spring 2017

Department of Mathematics

Mount Mercy University

3-week residency, Fall 2016

School of Art+Design

Link to MillerComm presentation

Argentine National Research Council

5-week residency, Spring 2016

Department of Geology

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

April 15-May 31, 2016

Department of Geology

International Artist Collective

February 21-18, 2016

Krannert Art Museum

Ping Chong and Company

January 4-30, 2016

Department of Dance

Link to MillerComm presentation

Ohio State University

Spring 2016 residency

Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Link to MillerComm presentation

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

October 12-21, 2015

Department of Physics

Jose Marti National Library of Cuba

October 10-17, 2015

Graduate College of Library and Information Science

Link to MillerComm presentation

Movement Director, Choreographer and Director, former Head of Movement, Royal Shakespeare Company

April 6-May 3, 2015

Department of Theatre

Composer, percussionist

January 25-31, 2015

Robert E. Brown Center for World Music

Link to MillerComm presentation

Composer

November 4-13, 2014

School of Music

Composer

December 2-7, 2013

School of Music

Scholar, Musician and Author, The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

October 30-November 2, 2013

University of Illinois Press

Link to MillerComm presentation

Ben Gurion University

2-week residency in October 2013

Department of Physics

University of the Western Cape, South Africa

September 16-26, 2013

Department of History

Musical legend

September 12-22, 2013

Residency, School of Music

Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

Spring 2013

Department of History

University of Cambridge

Fall 2012

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Writer, translator and president, Clásicas y Modernas

Spring 2012

Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

Choreographer, Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People

February 5-15, 2012

Department of Dance

Independent artist, scholar, filmmaker and founder, Kinodance Company

March 12-19, 2011

Department of Dance

University of Texas at Austin

February 2011

Department of History

Link to MillerComm presentation