JustArts sat down with Associate Director of the Office of the Arts Ingrid Schorr who was eager to discuss several arts faculty members who will be joining the Brandeis community this semester. "My aim is to get them involved," Schorr told JustArts. "They're all collaborators and they all are interdisciplinary."
Starting this year, Elizabeth Bradfield will serve as the Jacob Ziskind Visiting Poet-in-Residence and will also teach "ENG 109a: Directed Writing: Poetry." She is the author of two poetry collections, Interpretive Work (2008) and Approaching Ice (2010), and also has two more books coming out within the next year, along with several pieces that have been published in anthologies and journals. Bradfield's work has received widespread recognition, having won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry for her poetry in Interpretive Work and also receiving fellowships from many places, including Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program. In 2005, Bradfield founded Broadsided, a collaborative online press that brings literary work from journals into the streets to be shared with the public and posted around the world.
Taking leave from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Deb Todd Wheeler will spend the year working within the Fine Arts department and teaching "FA 4A: Three-Dimensional Design I" and "FA 110A: Senior Studio." Brandeis has also commissioned Wheeler to create large-scale public artwork on campus. Wheeler's gallery exhibits have consisted of work ranging from an installation of live ants to interactive power-generating pieces.
According to Schorr, Wheeler is truly passionate about sculpture: "She's really interested in using spaces that she thinks are inert and putting artwork in them, like spaces on the staircases between the railings. That's what excites her."

Lori Cole is the inaugural Charlotte Zysman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. Having earned her bachelor's degree from Brown University and both her master's and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University, Cole is no stranger to academia.
Her work at NYU included research on the artistic interaction between Europe and Latin America. She studied questionnaires about art in these locations in order to find out more detail about this transatlantic exchange. In addition to teaching, she is also a translator, and has written art criticism for artforum and the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas. Her class, "FA 160A: Global Surrealisms" will demonstrate her expertise in the art movement of surrealism and is only being offered this semester.
Soyeon Lucia Kim comes to us primarily as an artist. She was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in Korea, Myanmar and the United States. She has had several exhibitions in New York and was most recently awarded the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize from the Yale University School of Art in 2007.
She will be teaching "FA 3a: Introduction to Drawing I," "FA 3b: Introduction to Drawing II," "FA 107a: Beginning Painting" and "FA 107b: Beginning Painting II." She earned her B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and her M.F.A. from Yale University. A statement from Kim on the Museum of Modern Art in New York's website reads: "It is the errors in communication that I find particularly interesting, and exploring the gap between the physical and the literal is at the crux of my work. ... Between that transitional gap lies the site of comedy and tragedy, function and dysfunction."
Schorr has enjoyed meeting with several of the new professors, but has yet to have a chance to speak with each personally.
One of the best parts for Schorr about getting to know these four artists (along with Cameron Anderson, about whom you can read in the interview column on the opposite page) is "see[ing] the campus through a newcomer's eyes," she said.
"I gave Deb [Todd Wheeler] a tour of campus. We walked up the hill past Usdan and she just stops in her tracks and goes, 'they didn't tell me there was a castle here.'"