University of the Arts
Advancing Human Creativity
University of the Arts’ mission is simple: to advance human creativity. UArts believes creativity is the most essential skill for success in today’s society and has educated generations of groundbreaking artists, performers, designers and creative leaders for nearly 150 years.
After being granted university status in 1987, University of the Arts became the largest institution of its kind in the nation, offering programs in design, fine arts, media arts, crafts, music, dance, theater and writing. It now features 22 undergraduate arts majors, 12 graduate programs, and the nation’s first PhD program in Creativity.
Transferring from PAFA to University of the Arts
University of the Arts is ready to welcome you into our dynamic, creative community. Though this may be a difficult time for you, we are here to support you on your professional artistic path and want to make your transition as smooth as possible.
This special, automatic transfer opportunity is available to students enrolled at PAFA for one or both semesters of the 2023–2024 academic year who will be enrolling at UArts in an equivalent program for fall 2024.
University of the Arts’ Polyphone Festival of New and Emerging Musicals will present two new works April 18–21 and a 10th anniversary concert April 20 and 21.
The Ira Brind School of Theater Arts at UArts announced the lineup for the 10th annual Polyphone Festival of New and Emerging Musicals. The festival will present two fully staged in-progress musicals in repertory April 18 through 21, as well as two concert performances April 20 and 21.
The Polyphone Festival would not be possible without the generosity of Peter Haas and Doug Kreitzberg, as well as Suzanne Kreitzberg, whose memory the festival honors through its participants’ work.
The Doctor is Dead
Book, music, and lyrics by é boylan
Directed by é boylan and Rose Freeman
Music direction by Maya Kociba
A contemporary fantasy for queer imaginations, The Doctor is Dead follows a secret society of trans outcasts living underground. Using their unique abilities to investigate a mysterious empty coffin, our outcasts sing a song of leaving, of grief that becomes giving, of what begins in the end.
Sweetwater
Book and lyrics by Patricia Noonan
Music by Liz Filios and Sean Mahoney
Directed by Megan Nicole O’Brien
Music direction by Garrick Vaughan
As World War II shakes the nation, sisters Beth and Frankie journey to Sweetwater, Texas, where they join with women from across the country to fly for the U.S. Army Air Forces. Though they master 77 types of planes and become among the first to test the new B-29 bomber, these women know all too well they risk their lives every day without the benefit of military status.
When one of their own loses her life, Frankie, Beth, and the others must decide how to serve a country that needs their skills but refuses to fully acknowledge their sacrifice— and how to honor the sisters they have found in the process.
From the fringes of the history books, Sweetwater brings the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) centerstage in a story of duty, love, sisterhood, and the joys and costs that come with being pioneers.
Polyphone 10th Anniversary Concert
Directed by James Bruenger Arreguin
Music direction by Joey Rice
Revisit 10 years of Polyphone with a concert featuring songs and artists from past festivals, and celebrate the cutting-edge work developed at Polyphone that has pushed the form toward a limitless and exciting future. A full lineup of featured artists will be announced soon!
Polyphone alumni have received recognition for their work through countless awards, fellowships, nominations, and grants, including a Tony Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a Lucille Lortel Award, a Drama Desk Award, an Obie Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Richard Rodgers Award, a Fred Ebb Award, a Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award, and a LAMBDA Literary Award for Drama.
Schedule of Events
All events will take place at the Arts Bank Mainstage, 601 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147.
The Doctor is Dead public performances
April 18, 8 p.m.
April 20, 5 p.m.
April 21, 5 p.m.
Sweetwater public performances
April 19, 8 p.m.
April 20, 2 p.m.
April 21, 8 p.m.
10th Anniversary Concert public performances
April 20, 8 p.m.
April 21, 2 p.m.
Tickets will be available beginning Friday, April 1, at universityofthearts.ticketleap.com.
About the Polyphone Festival
Under the leadership of Artistic Director Maggie-Kate Coleman, Polyphone represents an institutional effort by University of the Arts to change how musicals are born and how young theater makers are trained. By putting student actors and creatives in collaboration with cutting-edge artists of new musicals and dedicating university resources to new works as they are being born, Polyphone has made a transformative impact on hundreds of young artists, audiences, and the field of new musicals as a whole.
The American Theatre Wing featured Polyphone in its Emmy-nominated series Working In Theatre in 2017.
For regular updates and creative content, follow Polyphone on Instagram at @polyphonefestival.
Musicals are currently in development and are not open for critical review at this time.
About Select Polyphone Artists & Staff
Maggie-Kate (MK) Coleman (she/her), artistic director, Polyphone Festival
MK Coleman is a lyricist, librettist, playwright, curator, educator, and cheerleader for new work. She is the recipient of the Jonathan Larson Grant and the 2023 Richard Rodgers Award for Marie in Tomorrowland, created with Erato A. Kremmyda and Sam Pinkleton. Her selected works include POP! with Anna K. Jacobs (world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre); the Gift of the Magi with Andrew Cooke and Jeffrey Hatcher (Arkansas Repertory Theatre), and We Will Not Be Silent (New York Musical Festival). Field Trip: Climate Cabaret (Superhero Clubhouse), The Way They Live (The Civilians at The Met), and Hotel Mediteranee (Wild Project), were all productions with Kremmyda.
Her work has been developed with support from MacDowell, the Orchard Project, Mercury Store, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, NAMT, Space on Ryder Farm, Ars Nova, Catwalk Institute, The American Music Theater Project, and The Civilians. MK earned her MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a BA from Ithaca College. She is a proud 2019 Polyphone Festival alum artist. Follow MK on Instagram: @maggiehyphenkate.
Joey Rice BM ’22 (Piano Performance) (he/him), music supervisor, Polyphone Festival
Joey is a music director, a collaborative pianist, and an educator based in New York. He has collaborated with and arranged for artists including Kristin Chenoweth, Jeff Richmond, Mary-Mitchel Campbell, Stephen Schwartz, the Colorado Symphony, and the Boston POPS. Joey is currently on the piano faculty at UArts; is a teaching artist in the theater schools at AMDA College and Conservatory of the Performing Arts and Pace University; and has served as music director and staff accompanist for Broadway Artists Alliance, Broadway Workshop, BroadwayEvolved, and Music Theatre Philly. A proud UArts and Polyphone 2021 alum, he is passionate about encouraging developing artists to collaborate on new works, as it enhances their ability to revisit existing material with a more expansive point of view.
é boylan (they/them), book, lyrics, and music / co-director, The Doctor is Dead
é is a New York City–based director, creator, and composer developing new work towards trans liberation. Their selected honors include: New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center Theater, 2022 Jonathan Larson Grant finalist, 2022 Relentless Award honorable mention, 2023 June Bingham New Playwright Commission finalist, 2019 Trans Lab Fellow, 2019–2020 Manhattan Theatre Club Directing Fellow, 2021 Johnny Mercer Foundation Songwriter, 2021 Prospect Theater Co. MT Lab, 2022 MTFxR Garage Artist, 2020–2022 Roundabout Theatre Co. Directors Group, and 2020–2023 Musical Theatre Factory's Makers Cohort. Visit é’s website: eboylan.com.
Patricia Noonan (she/her), book and lyrics, Sweetwater
Patricia is a writer, an actor, and an educator. Her work includes book and lyrics for the musicals Sweetwater (developed/presented at Goodspeed and the Philadelphia Women’s Theater Festival), Learning How to Drown (developed/presented at Goodspeed, Finger Lakes Musical Theater Festival, and Boston College), The Adventures of Ara (developed for Bridge Arts Ensemble), and the upcoming game/role-playing game Defenders of the Wild for Outlandish Games. As an actor, she has appeared at the Roundabout Theater Company, Lincoln Center, City Center, and theaters across the country. Patricia has also created roles in Maury Yeston’s Death Takes a Holiday (Sophia), Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice (Elizabeth Bennet), The Brontes (Charlotte), Signs of Life (Lorelei), Baby Case (Betty Gow), and Neurosis (Abby). She’s a proud teaching artist with Arts Ignite, People’s Light, and at schools throughout the Northeast. Visit Patricia’s website: patricianoonan.com.
Liz Filios (she/her), composer, Sweetwater
Liz is a Philadelphia-based actor, musician, and teaching artist. Her compositions include An Iliad (Lantern Theater Company), Twelfth Night O Lo Que Quieras (Delaware Shakespeare), The Winter’s Tale (Folger Theatre), and The Little Princess (Quintessence Theatre Group). Liz’s additional sound design and music direction credits include The Tempest (Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Round House Theatre); D-Pad (Theatre Exile); The Ice Princess, Hamlet, and Shakespeare In Love (Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival); and Dance Nation (Temple University). Liz is director of artist training at People's Light, an Independence Foundation Fellow, and a recipient of the F. Otto Haas Award. She holds a BFA in Musical Theater from University of Michigan. Visit Liz’s website: lizfilios.com.
James Bruenger-Arreguin BFA ’21 (Directing, Playwriting, and Production) (he/him), director/co-curator, Polyphone 10th Anniversary Concert
Born in Los Cabos, Mexico, and raised in Denver, Colorado, James is a Latino director and practitioner working in Creative Development at Disney Theatrical Group. His directing credits include: Elf the Musical, (Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center) and Guadalupe in the Guest Room (2021–2022 Henry Awards for Outstanding Direction of a Play and Outstanding Production of a Play). He was a recent Van Lier Directing Fellow at Repertorio Español and was part of the 2022–2023 Directors Group at Roundabout Theatre Company. James’s other creative credits include director of Primero Sueño and La Extinción de los Dinosaurios (Repertorio Español); director of The Last Five Years, director/choreographer of Evita, and choreographer of Fly By Night (Southern Colorado Repertory Theatre); and Visiones del Cuerpo, POP: The Musical Exhibition, and director of Momentos (University of the Arts). James holds a BFA in Directing, Playwriting, and Production from UArts. Visit his website: directordeteatro.com.
Rose Freeman (zie/zir), co-director, The Doctor is Dead
Rose (zie/zir) is an award-winning stage director, teacher, writer, and producer of theater and opera. Zie has directed many plays, environmental events, burlesque acts, nationally touring hip hop concerts, and new musicals and operas. Rose managed monster truck rallies, ran a sailboat company, and occasionally acts, including touring with Teatro di Viti. Zie writes libretto for musicals and operas and co-founded Third Eye Theatre Ensemble. Rose has worked with Mercury Store, Wolf Trap Opera, Mannes School of Music, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and many other institutions. Zie is represented by Marvel Arts Management. Visit Rose’s website: Rosefreeman.org.
Megan Nicole O’Brien BFA ’05 (Applied Theater Arts) (she/her), director, Sweetwater
Megan is a five-time Barrymore Award nominee. For 17 years, she was co-founder and resident director of the award-winning 11th Hour Theatre Company. Some of her favorite directing credits include: the world premieres of Big Red Sun by John Jiler and Georgia Stitt, Field Hockey Hot! by Michael Ogborn, Blues in the Night and The Bomb-itty of Errors (Milwaukee Repertory); Little Shop of Horrors (11th Hour/Theatre Horizon), The Great American Trailer Park Musical and Reefer Madness (11th Hour/Montgomery Theater); Rent (11th Hour/Drexel University); The Adding Machine Musical and High Fidelity (UArts); Spring Awakening and Big Fish (Temple University); and See What I Wanna See, City of Angels, Bonnie & Clyde, Dogfight, Altar Boyz, Rooms, Avenue X, The Wild Party, The Secret Garden, The Bomb-itty of Errors and tick, tick...BOOM! (11th Hour Theatre Company). Megan is currently pursuing her MFA in Musical Theater Collaboration at Temple University. In addition to directing, she has been a teaching artist for 20 years, but her favorite job is being a mom to two awesome kids!
Maya Kociba (she/they), music director, The Doctor is Dead
Maya is originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, where she attended the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) and earned her Bachelor of Music in Music Education. While there, she was privileged enough to be able to work with musicians in the Cincinnati May Festival Chorus; perform at Cincinnati Music Hall with CCM’s Community Women’s Chorus; and travel to Kecskemét, Hungary, for a two-week intensive in music pedagogy at the Kodály Institute. In addition to music education endeavors, Maya was music director of Carousel in 2018. That same year, she toured with Austin Lamewona for the Ohio tour of his musical Octets: A New Musical, for which she was music director, contractor, and conductor. In 2022, Maya worked with Austin again as a transcriber, an engraver, and a composer for his musical The Underground. She joined him again as music director in 2023–2024, as the production team is prepping the show for its debut performance in August 2024. Maya has been a private piano teacher for over 10 years and has added voice and ukulele students to her studio. She now lives in southern New Jersey, where she is an elementary general music teacher in Cherry Hill Public Schools and sings in the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia.
Garrick Vaughan (he/him), music director, Sweetwater
Garrick is a classically trained tenor, actor, and music director from Philadelphia. He graduated with his degrees in Music Education and Vocal Performance from Temple University and has been active in the city’s classical music scene, performing with Opera North Inc. at the Opera America Conference in 2012. Garrick has also been a finalist in the 2014 PHL LIVE Center Stage Classical Competition and won in 2015. He has shared the stage singing with Kristin Chenoweth and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Garrick’s talents have been showcased across the country and internationally in the 2018 European tour of the musical Hair and the Original USA Gospel Singers. Garrick played Harpo in the 2018 Barrymore Award-winning production of The Color Purple. Most recently, he made his off-Broadway debut in the new musical When We Get There. You can find Garrick on all social media @GarrickVaughan. “Follow Me and #catchdreams.”
Jan. 27–April 20, 2024
Reception: Friday, Feb. 2, 5–7:30
Philadelphia Art Alliance
251 S. 18th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
215-545-4302
uarts.edu/artalliance
Instagram: @philartalliance
Gallery hours
Tuesday: by appointment
Wednesday–Friday: 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
Saturday: 12 p.m.–5 p.m.
Philadelphia Art Alliance at UArts is proud to present (re)FOCUS: Mary Carlson, Karen Kilimnik, June Leaf, Ellen Lesperance, Helen O’Leary, Liliana Porter, and Ana Tiscornia, an important multi-generational group exhibit that features varied works that probe the human condition through singular images and handmade processes. No one style is represented here, but rather a panoply, with feminist and world political allusions, art historical references, wry appropriation, DIY bricolage, and craft sensibilities in a range of media. For Leaf, Lesperance, and O’Leary, this will be the first time they have been presented locally.
(re)FOCUS is an exciting and essential component of the important city-wide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts—a grassroots feminist project and one of the first large-scale surveys of the work of American women artists—which culminated in over 150 exhibitions, panels, lectures, workshops, and demonstrations.
Taken together, the personal historic mythologies and structures of these seven artists provide a compelling visual chronicle of the enormous strengths, diversity, politics, and subtle sensitivities of women working today.
(re)FOCUS was initiated and organized by Judith K. Brodsky, Diane Burko, and Marsha Moss. The exhibit at Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts was curated by Sid Sachs. A catalog for the entire city-wide project, Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts 1974–2004, with essays by Brodsky, Burko, Robert Cozzolino, Ruth Fine, Imani Roach, and Judith Stein, will be available.
About the Artists
Born in Wisconsin in 1951, Mary Carlson was educated at the School of Visual Arts.
Her early installations incorporated heraldic flags and natural history forms rendered in a variety of materials. Her more recent endeavors incorporate ceramic figures derived from Renaissance and medieval painting sources, such as those by Zubaran, Giotto, or Fra Angelico. Extracted from two-dimensional pictorial space, the intimate scale of her figurative sculptures and small grottoes are sensitively rendered in ethereal glazes, providing the observer with an uncanny psychological experience that is filled with an intense dynamic of residual yet tender content. Size in this case does not affect impact.
A Philadelphia native born in 1955, Karen Kilimnik first showed locally in 1986, only three blocks from the Art Alliance. Her witty and whimsical canvases are characterized by a hybrid sensibility blending romanticized versions of Old Masters, thrift shop Rococo, and fan magazines that create an enchanted fantasy world of glimmering delight and knowing innocence.
Her early work often utilized scattered images and theatrical environments that combined ornamental elements and glamorous props. These decorative concerns extend to today, through her use of spectacular glitter and faux gems adhered to the surfaces of her paintings. As one of the main artists responsible for the resurgence of figurative painting in the early 1990s, Kilimnik often developed semi-fictional characters or adopted pseudo-identities informed by fandom, collapsing fantasy and reality in on itself. By drawing on diverse sources, Kilimnik produced nuanced and playful pastiches of historical codes and symbols. Further, one can consider these charming masquerades as functional homages and adaptations of high and mass culture more than appropriations fueled by the theory of cultural exhaustion.
For over seven decades, June Leaf has created a visionary and carnivalesque realm of human experience via photographs; narrative drawings; paintings; and handmade, kinetic sculpture, all in active states of metamorphic flux. Often working simultaneously on paper, canvas, and metal, Leaf has invented an extensive personal canon of symbols and archetypes that may be comically funky or poignantly tragic, depending on the period in which the work was made.
Leaf was born in Chicago, studied at the Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), and became an influential source of Chicago Imagism. Along with Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, and others, Leaf became a model for the Monster Roster and, arguably, an early influence on Claes Oldenburg. She lived in Paris before moving in 1960 to New York, where she continues to live and work, along with spending summers in Nova Scotia.
Ellen Lesperance was born 1971 in Minneapolis. Her work often references the labor traditions and heritage of women fiberworkers in actual hand-knitted works and schematic paintings related to Bauhaus fabrics, Pattern and Decoration painting, and the body. As such, she revisits and empowers the legacies of generations of anonymous women who toiled in practices that were once neglected as culturally insignificant, but are vital to our culture. Her clay Tanagra figures also have a feminist bent that pay homage to Amazon warriors and contemporary feminist activists such as Yevgenia Isayeva, Pussy Riot, and Pipilotti Rist.
Irish-born Helen O’Leary’s mysterious ramshackle assemblages are cobbled-together amalgams of support and subsistence. Reconfiguring armatures from found wood, O’Leary’s works are stuccoed over with handmade paints scavenged from specific locales that reveal their transcendental histories like minimalist arte povera icons. Blurring the boundaries between object and image and construction and restoration, they refashion studio castoffs into elegiac stoic abstractions bearing echoes of a poignant past. Her constructions repair the wounds of entropy and are hopeful and conciliatory.
Liliana Porter was born in Argentina in 1941. She studied in Mexico City and Buenos Aires before moving in 1964 to New York City, where she co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo. Ten years later in Italy, she co-founded the Studio Camnitzer, an artist’s residence studio near Lucca. She also taught at the Porter-Wiener Studio, the Printmaking Workshop, State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase, SUNY at Old Westbury, and Queens College. Beyond printmaking, Porter has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, video, theater, and public art. Her innovations often employ drawn abstract lines with concrete imagery.
In installations, Porter often uses toys or decorative figurines, the interactions among which insinuate dark foibles of power. The photographs shown at the Art Alliance, for example, use ceramic avatars as surrogates to explore the human condition. Do not be misled by her borderline kitsch—in those documents, she elegantly balances chaos with the need for order.
Ana Tiscornia was born in Uruguay in 1951. Influenced by an uncle who was an architect, Tiscornia studied architecture in Montevideo. During repressive military dictatorships, she discovered an engraving school, the officially sanctioned meetings of which allowed her to discuss political ideas and develop her style.
In 1986, Tiscornia won prizes at the 2nd Biennial in Havana and the 34th Municipal Salon in Montevideo, and earned a scholarship to study at the Académie de Paris. Emigrating from Uruguay to New York City in 1991, she built on her growing sense of Latin identity and explored her complicated familiarities with dictatorships and emigration while questioning humankind’s place in the urban environment.
After turning to curating and teaching in 1996, she is now professor emeritus at SUNY College at Old Westbury and currently lives in New York. Her recent constructions reference deconstructed architectural ruins, and by implication, political upheavals in her native country. They are installed on walls and are stark and timely evocations of pandemonium and repair, disaster, and despair. Though informed by personal experiences, these works unfortunately now seem broadly prescient to the tragic images we see daily from the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
Tiscornia and Porter have collaborated extensively in videos and public installations including Untitled with Sky, a permanent installation at the MTA Scarborough Metro North Rail Station, New York. Their joint exhibitions include works at Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York, New York; Galería del Paseo, Manantiales, Uruguay; Galería Beatriz Gil, Caracas, Venezuela; Galería del Paseo, Manantiales, Uruguay; Galería Casas Riegner, Bogotá, Colombia; Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse, New York; and Georgia State University, Atlanta.
Meet UArts
BFA '18
BFA ’22
Laurie Wagman Recording Studios
These state-of-the-art facilities are dedicated to exploring all facets of music production including composition, sound design, digital and analog recording, mixing and mastering.
University Centers
UArts is reimagining the arts university experience. In addition to the distinct opportunity to study outside your major and in Philadelphia’s vibrant cultural center, we’re breaking new ground for creative exploration, expression and learning, year after year.
Rentals at UArts
Host your next event in the heart of Center City on Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts. Discover our unique venues and facilities and treat your guests to a one-of-a-kind experience.
UArtist
#UArtist is a celebration of the boundless creativity of the UArts community. Students, faculty, staff and alumni are welcome to share their work with us via Instagram by including #uartist.
Calendar of Events
See upcoming events in UArts galleries, performance spaces and around campus in Philadelphia.
Equal Opportunities and Nondiscrimination at UArts
In order to create the conditions necessary for human creativity to flourish, University of the Arts is committed to fostering individual and artistic integrity and inclusion by promoting and respecting self-expression, a wide range of ideas, and diversity in all of its forms. UArts does not discriminate on the basis of age, color, disability, gender identity, marital status, national or ethnic origin, political affiliation, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, veteran status, and family medical or genetic information, in any of its programs, activities or employment and admission practices.
Questions and complaints pertaining to UArts’ commitment to its nondiscrimination policies and its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility initiatives can be directed to the director for Title IX, equity and compliance at 215-717-6362 or titleix@uarts.edu.