Cornish College of the Arts Viewbook 17/18

VISUAL ARTS ART | DESIGN | FILM+MEDIA | INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE PERFORMING ARTS DANCE | MUSIC | PERFORMANCE PRODUCTION | THEATER SEATTLE, WA

The very founding of Cornish was an act of AUDACITY. This is a school invented by a woman who didn’t know her limits in a city that didn’t understand what it could become. Now, 101 years later, Seattle is world-renowned as a hotbed of creativity, and Cornish continues to lead

AUDA CITY

2017/2018

the avant-garde. We are moving the

arts in new and exciting directions. In 2017/18, a new cohort of aspiring artists will challenge themselves at one of the country’s great art colleges. They will create work that no one saw coming, work that will change us all—works of pure AUDACITY. Be part of that class.

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AUDACITY

Where we’ve been living for 101 years

2017/2018

6_AT A GLANCE & ACCREDITATION 12_THE CAMPUS 16_HUMANITIES & SCIENCES 18_VISUAL ARTS 20_WORK SPACES 24_FOUNDATIONS 28_ART 34_DESIGN 42_FILM+MEDIA 46_INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE 50_ALUMNI SUCCESSES : VISUAL ARTS 56_WHY AN ARTS COLLEGE? WHY A BFA? 57_CREATIVE CORRIDOR 60_PERFORMING ARTS 62_PERFORMANCE SPACES 64_DANCE 70_MUSIC 76_PERFORMANCE PRODUCTION 82_THEATER 90_ALUMNI SUCCESSES : PERFORMING ARTS 100_STUDENT LIFE AT CORNISH 102_DIVERSITY AT CORNISH 104_OFF-CAMPUS STUDY 106_VISIT & APPLY 108_FINANCIAL AID & SCHOLARSHIPS

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Cornish at a glance ESTABLISHED 1914 ACADEMIC OFFERINGS

Bachelor of Fine Arts: Art Dance Design Film+Media Interior Architecture Performance Production Theater Bachelor of Music ACCREDITATION

NASAD: National Association of Schools of Art and Design NWCCU: Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities TOTAL ENROLLMENT 720 (2015/16) AVERAGE CLASS SIZE 13 FACULTY STUDENT RATIO 1 : 7 STUDENT BODY 35 States, 18 Countries DIRECT COSTS, 2016/17

Tuition and Fees: $38,820 Room and Board: $9,610 to $11,700, depending upon room plus meal plan chosen

THE CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS THEATER AND PERFORMANCE PRODUCTION DEPARTMENTS PRESENT

EXTENSION PROGRAMS

Summer at Cornish Preparatory Dance COOPERATIVE PROGRAMS

AICAD (Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design): Mobility Program New York Studio Residency Program Kadenze Pilchuck Glass School Vermont College of Fine Arts

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Book by Luther Davis Music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest with additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston based on the novel by Vicki Baum

DIRECTED BY RICHARD GRAY CHOREOGRAPHY BY DANNUL DAILEY MUSIC DIRECTION BY DJ GOMMELS

April 8–10 at 8:00 p.m April 11 at 2:00 and 8:00 p.m.

CORNISH PLAYHOUSE AT SEATTLE CENTER Tickets: $17.00 General Admission, $7.00 Seniors, $5.00 Cornish Community

www.brownpapertickets.com 800.838.3006

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NO MATTER WHAT YOUR DREAM, our faculty

of working artists will help you grow and succeed. And with a campus full of performance and exhibition venues, you’ll quickly have opportunities to share your work with your peers and your future employers. At Cornish, there’s room for you to create in the heart of the city.

Cornish couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

CAPACITY

ELECTRICITY FOR MORE THAN 100 YEARS, Cornish artists have

been known for their willingness to embrace the latest technology. In 1935, Cornish pioneered radio broadcasting on the college level. Today our students are experimenting with latest holographic technology and helping to design electric cars. Together, the Cornish community embraces the future with experimentation and innovation in a city famous for fostering entrepreneurs.

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CORNISH GRADUATES STAY IN THE ARTS.

They are performing on Broadway, recording top-ten singles, creating films, going on tour, winning coveted prizes and commissions, and being seen in museum exhibitions. They’re also sought after by local nonprofits, businesses, and others to apply their creative intelligence to all kinds of work in this city.

Seattle has its own way of looking at things.

VELOCITY

TENACITY AFTER 100 YEARS, CORNISH IS STILL EVOLVING,

changing, and building on a storied legacy to ensure our students receive collaborative, holistic, and personalized arts education. Our students graduate ready to drive experimentation and risk-taking in a city that thrives on change.

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NO CARS NEEDED

TWELVE BUILDINGS AND ONE AMAZING CITY

Nellie’s Café, our full-service cafeteria with its own espresso bar, is located on the second floor of the Main Campus Center across the street from Cornish Commons.

Live, work, and play on campus. Cornish Commons, a state-of-the-art residence hall, is located in the center of our vibrant South Lake Union campus. Designed for you, Cornish Commons features plenty of space and special amenities that allow you to create and perform without ever stepping outside. Commuting students also use Cornish Commons as a launching pad to explore all that Cornish and Seattle has to offer.

★ SEATTLE

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A city where technology and the arts meet, and professional partnerships abound.

Within blocks of Cornish’s South Lake Union campus are some of the country’s most respected companies and organizations such as Amazon, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Starbucks. Big tech is flocking to Seattle to establish new offices, including such powerhouses as Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. Cornish students have opportunities throughout their time at college to make connections with these companies.

The city has more than 5 million square feet of cultural space including 55,000 theater seats and 300,000 square feet of art galleries. And that doesn’t include Seattle’s film and media industry, which creates documentaries, commercial still photography, web series, reality television, and travel programs here.

ith both a white-hot economic base and a beautiful natural setting, Seattle has become world famous for its work-hard and playhard attitude. It’s one of country’s fastest growing cities, full of people following their dreams and living their passions. The variety of jobs­—in an exciting and global setting—means a quarter-million people are employed just in the downtown area.

Cornish exists in the heart of Seattle neighborhoods where there’s always something to do. According to Americans for the Arts, Seattle has more arts-related businesses and organizations than any other metropolitan area in the United States. No matter what you like, you will be able to find it here. Like all the artists and performers who live and work in the city, Seattle will inspire you.

The Cornish Playhouse is located at the Seattle Center, also home to The Space Needle, Chihuly Garden & Glass, EMP Museum, KEXP radio station, several theater companies, and the year-round offices of the Seattle International Film Festival. Our students routinely work at the Center with our neighbors there. Overall, there are more than 300 nonprofit arts and arts-active organizations in Seattle, generating more than $207 million in revenues and supporting more than 30,000 jobs.

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B

ecoming an educated artist means more than just knowing how to make something or deciding on a particular performance style. Understand why your work matters—and gain the intellectual grounding necessary to negotiate your way in the world with communication skills, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities.

All students at Cornish participate in one of two first-year experience programs.

Each provides you with a rich, engaging learning community of peers and faculty to situate your reading, writing, and creative and critical thinking in the context of the arts. You explore the intersections between making, performing, and thinking about ideas across the liberal arts.

If you’re in the Visual Arts departments (Art, Design, Film+Media, Interior Architecture), learning in the Humanities and Sciences is integrated with Studio and Critical & Contextual studies in the Foundations program. Student-centered courses are designed around program themes and shared student learning outcomes. You have opportunities to develop relationships with faculty and peers in learning communities. In your first two years, you gain instruction and practice in writing for diverse purposes and audiences, read across diverse genres and styles of texts, and explore liberal arts ideas across three disciplinary domains: the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences. As you move into your third and fourth years, direct your learning with increasing independence, guided by your intellectual and imaginative curiosity to know and question, and connect your own practice with the rich histories of liberal arts.

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If you’re in the Performing Arts departments (Dance, Music, Performance Production, and Theater) you will participate in Integrated Studies, a first-year experience, where you explore ideas in a student-centered environment that integrates instruction and practice in reading, writing, and critical thinking with liberal arts content in diverse course themes. In the first year, you’ll write for diverse audiences and purposes, read a variety of texts in multiple genres and forms, and develop relationships with faculty and students in learning communities. Beyond the first year, students select additional coursework from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary themes and topics. All performing arts students are required to have at least six credits of college writing in their program, including expository writing and research writing or their equivalent.

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From individual and shared studio spaces to materials labs, Cornish offers artists and designers what they need to create new work and explore their craft.

VISUAL ARTS WORK SPACES

3D FABRICATION LAB The 3D Fabrication Resource Area helps students progress from sketchbook to actual object. Use our well-equipped lab to build your skills in woodworking, metal welding and fabrication, mold-making for cold casting, and ceramics. Whether you need handheld wood carving tools or a 3D printer, you’ll find it here.

DIGITAL AND ANALOG EQUIPMENT LIBRARY

“IN HIGH SCHOOL, all I wanted

to do was create art but I was

Interested in photography or filmmaking?

The digital and analog equipment library includes an array of cameras, tripods, lights, microphones, projectors, and digital displays that students can sign out.

DIGITAL LABS

the tears, what do I do? Instead of

Our digital computer labs will give you access to a range of creative software including Adobe Creative Cloud. In these labs, you will be able to take advantage of greater processing power to work on larger and more complex digital projects as well as having access to printers and plotters for digital output.

being upset, I was happy. I don’t

MATERIALS LAB

see life the same way I did back

With access to a wide variety of materials, students explore different ways of working across drawing and painting in the Materials Lab. The Lab is stocked with both acrylic and oil mediums, and is bright, spacious, and well ventilated. Drawing media include charcoal, pastels, oil bars, water-soluble crayons, charcoal and graphite powder, and inks, as well as fixatives and other finishing processes. Hand tools and an array of fasteners are on hand to facilitate the display of completed work

told ‘art is OK for a hobby but you need a real job.’ So I found a ‘real’ job. One I did not like. So, when I lost my job in 2010, after

then. I see it differently. My time at Cornish College of the Arts has taught me skills in Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, typography, layout, and color. I see the world differently because I embrace that I am an artist, an illustrator, a designer, and this is my time.

– Terri Hindmarsh, Design ’16

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VISUAL ARTS WORK SPACES

continued

PHOTOMEDIA LAB In the Photomedia Lab, you can explore black-and-white analog photography as well as digital photography. You will be able to work with digital image manipulation and large format printing and can venture into Super 8mm film processing.

PRINT ART LAB The Cornish Print Art Lab is comprised of several lab spaces prepared for both traditional and contemporary practices, including a darkroom, silkscreen facilities, a lithography press for aluminum plate lithography, and presses used for relief, monotype, and large intaglio printmaking.

An additional feature of the lab is a Sukifuni, a traditional Japanese papermaking vat, for creating delicate handmade paper.

BOOK ARTS LAB The Book Arts Lab contains five working antique letterpresses with a large catalog of both wood and lead type. Hand set type, prepare bindings with multiple signatures, and create professional quality handmade books.

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TUTORIALS AVAILABLE ANY TIME

Cornish offers interactive online video tutorial services like Lynda.com so students can develop their technology skills whenever and wherever they need.

“Lynda.com offers an online video tutorial library that is available around the clock. It covers many software titles and scripting languages, as well as design and web development programming languages. Content can be used by students in conjunction with Cornish classes. It can also be used independently in relation to an academic or personal creative project, or to develop one’s own digital literacy.”

– Hollis Near, Director of Library Services

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THE FIRST THING YOU RECEIVE as a visual artist at Cornish is a

bigger palette.

The Foundations Program—the freshman year for all Art, Design, Film+Media, and Interior Architecture students—is about working together with faculty and peers so that you have what you need to develop your creative voice.

We believe that opportunities open up when students who paint are exposed to design; when designers understand film; when filmmakers draw. It may not show up in your work immediately, but diversity in all its manifestations changes the realm of what’s possible.

In Foundations, you’ll study with a small cohort in shared studios. Our faculty, professional artists themselves, are adept at knowing when to give you structure and when to let your ideas roam. Your projects will be iterative and collaborative, a mix of making, research, reading, and writing. We’ll bring humanities and science into the picture as well.

WE’RE ALWAYS ENCOURAGING STUDENTS TO STEP OUTSIDE THEIR COMFORT ZONES. THERE ARE MULTIPLE PATHWAYS TO SUCCESS.

Your work will include both digital and analog processes. You’ll learn from the past and shape your own future.

Critically, you’ll experience all this in Seattle, an urban center surrounded by stunning natural resources, where pop culture and high culture join forces, where the theoretical and material together spark concepts unimagined. It’s no wonder our city is one of the most potent creative communities in the country.

Foundations is a program for taking things in: skills, content, concepts. At year’s end, you’ll choose to focus on Art, Design, Film+Media, or Interior Architecture.

And the edges will always be as porous as you want them to be.

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– Gala Bent, Interim Program Leader, Foundations

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F

rom its inception, Cornish College of the Arts has recognized the value of integration across the arts.

The Foundations curriculum now amplifies that opportunity, allowing visual artists to understand, explore, and develop a range of disciplinary and transdisciplinary skills.

Whether you plan to pursue Art, Design, Film+Media, or Interior Architecture, Foundations will give you the opportunity to strengthen your own unique vision while simultaneously exploring diverse approaches to research and creative

practice. A series of integrated modules allows for content from liberal arts courses to inform studio enquiry in compelling ways. A shared discourse deepens students’ understanding of the interconnectedness of multi-disciplinary study.

Foundations students revel in the freedom to experiment, and many discover pathways of creativity never imagined.

A cohort-based model, Foundations will allow you to work alongside peers and faculty both inside and outside your chosen discipline and form important professional connections that will sustain you for the next four years, and beyond.

MATERIALS AVAILABLE 24 HOURS A DAY

With collaboration being key to a successful Foundations year, both faculty and students use Canvas, a learning management system, to maximize their time outside of the classroom. Through Canvas, students track the assignments needed, find links to study, and take online tutorials for graphics or film software when it is most convenient for them.

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ART IS A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE at Cornish. You’ll join a cohort

of about a dozen peers. Together, you’ll participate in modules that address contemporary issues and ideas using a variety of visual mediums—painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, digital media and more. Each module is taught by a faculty team assembled to bring expertise, context, and perspective to a particular subject.

From your first year, your study takes place in resident studios.

Each cohort receives its own space, open morning till night, and together, you figure out how to make the best use of it.

Rather than students moving in and out of different classrooms throughout the day, faculty teams will often come to you and your cohort. By your third year, the faculty will be your mentors, facilitating your interests, helping you identify your path, and supporting you in your growth.

Meanwhile, being in Seattle means you’ll have access to an array of Cornish partners, from arts institutions like the Frye Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery to unconventional collaborators like the Institute for Systems Biology or Microsoft.

BEGIN WITH TEACHERS, STRETCH WITH MENTORS.

“It takes guts to be an artist.

To look society in the face and declare,

YOU’LL BE IN GOOD COMPANY. Alums like Heather Hart, Sarah

Bergmann, SuttonBerresCuller, Aleah Chapin, and scores of others are producing award-winning, groundbreaking work that sparks important questions about our communities and ourselves.

At Cornish, we know you’re an artist. We’re eager to help you become yourself.

– Dawn Gavin, Interim Chair of Visual Arts

‘We are not a luxury!’—that takes guts.”

– Michelle Domanowski, Art ’16

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PLASTICITY

A

rt is a new, innovative, fullyintegrated, module-based subject-led program at Cornish.

Say you’re engaged in a module that addresses print protest and social change.

In addition to learning to create using letterpress, woodblock, and other tools, you may study printmaking’s historical roots in protest; you might study the journal, or the monograph, dissemination, and text.

A Cornish education goes beyond attaining technical proficiency. Here, you’ll acquire the intellectual skills necessary to be successful in today’s art world.

Throughout your studies in art, you’ll have opportunities to exhibit your work.

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Cornish’s art faculty, professional artists themselves, empower your artistic choices and help you shape the practice that you want. Either specialize in a specific medium, such as painting, digital media or sculpture, or embrace a cross-disciplinary approach. The program enables and supports both throughout your time at Cornish.

“Words are the most direct mode of communication, however they can be taken out of context or misconstrued.

Soft Spoken (shown above) is an exploration of the relationship between text and form and how form relates to meaning.”

– Jeanette Jones, Art ’16

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I

n your junior year, opportunities exist to study abroad, to compete for participation in the AICAD’s New York Studio Residency Program (NYSRP), or to take part in the AICAD Mobility Program. The NYSRP is located in DUMBO Brooklyn, New York. Participating students receive individual studio spaces, weekly critique sessions, and a diverse seminar/ visiting artist program which includes a comprehensive introduction to the New York art world. The AICAD Mobility program allows you to attend another AICAD college in a city of your choice.

AICAD

The Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) is made up of 43 colleges in the United States and Canada, including Cornish College of the Arts. For more information, go to www.aicad.org.

VISITING ARTISTS AND GALLERIES

Through the year, visiting artists connect with our students, both in lecture series and in the studio. Travel to nearby galleries and exhibitions is easy from our downtown campus.

Cornish also maintains multiple galleries for the exhibition of student work as well as the work of visiting artists. Throughout your time here, you’ll have an opportunity to showcase your work while pursuing your degree.

I

n your senior year, you’ll have a body of work ready for your final exhibition.

The BFA exhibition serves as both a point of departure from the academic world and the commencement of your professional practice.

FOUR YEARS AS AN ARTIST AT CORNISH

YEAR 1:

Explore

YEAR 2:

Know and Understand

YEAR 3: Analyze,

OLIVER HERRING LEADS A TASK PARTY

Evaluate, Apply

YEAR 4: Synthesize

and Disseminate

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GOING TO CLASS IN OUR DESIGN PROGRAM feels different.

Literally. Rather than shuffling from classroom to classroom throughout the day, you—together with classmates in your year—own a single learning space for the whole year. Other programs at Cornish work the same way. We create environments that foster collaboration, cross-pollination, and flow.

In Design, you’ll be mentored by faculty from firms that have changed the industry. You’ll have access to specialists tapped for particular skills, like experimental typography or product packaging. You’ll also learn from the students around you.

Our curriculum is project-based. That means that everyone in your cohort is working to solve a common problem. You decide your approach. Say you’re working on a project to promote water conservation. You might design an app for neighborhoods to compete to see who can keep their faucets shut off. Or maybe you’ll produce an animated PSA. Of course, faculty will help you navigate particular challenges, but you’ll also be learning, in real time, from your classmates’ approaches. You’ll rapidly prototype, adjust, and refine.

WE WANT THE STUDENTS WHO WANT TO TAKE IT FURTHER.

“At Cornish, I learned to be the champion of my ideas, to let them

AND YOU’LL DO IT IN SEATTLE, a thriving innovation hub

surrounded by the natural beauty of the Cascade Mountains and Puget Sound, a city both entrepreneurial and artisan. Our Design alums work at Amazon, PopCap Games, and every major design firm in one of the most creative communities in the country.

They’ve launched clothing lines and award-winning games.

In Design, you’ll become an adaptive, flexible, improvisational creator. We’re thrilled to see what you do.

– Jeff Brice, Chair, Design

out of my head for others to see.”

– Samantha Brooks Shockley, Design ’13 page 34

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here are several pathways to a design degree at Cornish: narrative systems, type and image, or user experience (UX). Build your technical skills while pursuing your interests following your Foundations year.

Seattle’s businesses and non-profits give students valuable internship opportunities with industry leaders. Design also offers you the chance to participate in various juried exhibitions, introducing your work to professionals in Seattle’s flourishing design community.

NARRATIVE SYSTEMS AREAS OF STUDY INCLUDE: 2D ANIMATION 3D ANIMATION BRAND STORYTELLING GAME DESIGN GRAPHIC NOVELS MOTION GRAPHICS VIDEO

NARRATIVE SYSTEMS How do certain stories rise above the noise in today’s media environment?

Narrative systems explores the structures and concepts of compelling stories told through sequential images, text, and audio. Stories are told through a diverse range of traditional media of print as well as emerging new technologies. Animation, product branding, games, graphic novels, motion graphics, and video are vehicles for narratives of all kinds. Self-authored as well as client-driven stories are fusions of visual and audio aesthetics, narrative structure, and a range of evolving technologies expressed through print or screen. The proliferation of video over the Internet and the high demand for graphic stories make narrative systems an important tool for designers.

ANIMATION Pen-and-ink, stop-motion, key frame, digital 3D­–you’ll develop many animation skills in our small, focused classes.

Animation technology is constantly changing, and we stay on top of it, making sure our digital tools are absolutely current. But animation isn’t just tools and techniques. Visual storytelling, explorations in narrative, and collaboration with faculty and peers make animation at Cornish a well-rounded and complete experience in craft and content.

MOTION GRAPHICS Our curriculum will encourage you to become an innovative thinker in the complex and thriving media environment.

Study motion design, film titling, motion effects, and 3D modeling. Develop indepth approaches to 2D and 3D video graphics and animation for gaming, web development, and interactive presentations. And prepare for a vibrant career in a growing, fast-paced industry.

GAME ART AND INDIE GAMING Delve into character development, world development, and game theory while collaborating with peers and experienced faculty. Work with artists across disciplines to reimagine the possibilities of game art.

Seattle is home to some of the best game companies in the world. Gaming is fast becoming part of our daily experience in all forms of media, and designers are leading the way.

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PUBLICITY

TYPE & IMAGE

At Cornish, you will become expert on the basic tools of type and image. The mastery of these essential elements can be used to communicate data, personal ideas, and client messages. Your personal aesthetics are expressed through packaging, posters, and digital publishing.

Typography, layout, and Illustration provide the foundation for working in a variety of media from traditional printing and media to the screens on our tablet devices and everything in-between.

TYPE & IMAGE AREAS OF STUDY INCLUDE: BRANDING GRAPHIC DESIGN

“We have learned to hold ourselves

ILLUSTRATION

accountable to a higher standard of

POSTER DESIGN

work than we ever thought possible.”

– Emiliesa Lorraine Horwitz, Design ’15

PRINTMAKING AND BOOK ARTS PRODUCT PACKAGING PUBLISHING TYPOGRAPHY

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USER EXPERIENCE

ILLUSTRATION Today’s illustrators work in game art, graphic storytelling, packaging, print, and dynamic media. At Cornish, you’ll have the opportunity to hone your craft and skills in digital and traditional media as you learn about narrative structures and work closely with professional illustrators.

Learn how the intersection of design and technology is the new frontier for innovative product development through the study of user experience design, social media, and design research.

Become immersed in the design of our digital world and learn to create dynamic user experiences for the Internet, mobile applications, wearables, immersive digital environments and the IoT (the Internet of things). Discover the expanding world of social media and how it is transforming visual culture and communication. Explore through research and product prototyping how designers can create products to meet consumer needs. Located right in the heart of Seattle’s ever-expanding high-tech community, Cornish offers students the opportunity to interface with cutting-edge design professionals through seminars, site visits, and internships.

COMICS /GRAPHIC NOVELS Learn sequential arts, narrative storytelling, and character development in courses taught by faculty with extensive work experience. Team up with fellow students who are passionate about design, illustration, and the graphic world.

PRINTMAKING & BOOK ARTS The traditional crafts of silk screen, etching, and woodblock printing are still very popular forms of design. The art of the poster offers you the opportunity to integrate type and image into a large format. Our letterpress room is a favorite hang out for making hand-made books and prints with hundreds of traditional metal typefaces to work with.

USER EXPERIENCE AREAS OF STUDY INCLUDE: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE INFORMATION VISUALIZATION INTERACTION DESIGN (WEB, MOBILE, APPS, PRODUCT) INTERFACES DATA VISUALIZATION USABILITY RESEARCH WEARABLES WEB DESIGN

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CORNISH’S BFA IN FILM+MEDIA, launched in 2015, recognized

the college’s decades-long incorporation of film across the disciplines. The actor Brendan Fraser for example, went on to star in blockbuster films and TV series; Colleen Atwood took her work in painting and made an important career as a costume designer in films from The Silence of the Lambs to Into the Woods.

With this new degree pathway you can pursue all aspects of filmmaking, from narrative film—including fiction and non-fiction—to experimental work. As in any discipline, the majority of your time is spent in making. You will have the opportunity create short films by yourself and to work with a larger crew, and graduate with a portfolio of work that showcases your range of talent.

WE HELP STUDENTS REALIZE THEMSELVES AS FILM ARTISTS. WE’RE NURTURING NEW VISIONS.

“I learned how to analyze, understand,

Courses include narrative production, sound acquisition, editing, writing for the screen, and the first-person essay film. At Cornish, filmmakers collaborate with actors, scenic designers, costume designers, and art directors.

REAL-WORLD OPPORTUNITIES are folded into the program,

moreover, including embedded internships in Seattle’s creative community and local film festivals, and even journeys abroad, to the South by Southwest Film Festival.

– Lyall Bush, Program Leader, Film+Media

and execute all the working parts that contribute to producing a great film, while receiving guidance and critique from faculty with real world experience.”

– Grace Reyer ’16 page 42

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ornish’s BFA in Film+Media launched in 2015, but Cornish students have been involved working on film and media projects for decades.

As with any Cornish degree, the majority of your time is spent in creation. You’ll make pieces individually as well as with a larger crew and graduate with a solid portfolio of work. Our integrated model mixes studio work, critical/historical studies, and humanities/sciences. Work from fall semester carries over to spring in a thoroughgoing investigation of film.

Classes include video, film, and sound arts. Explore filmmaking, editing, videography, cinematic lighting, sound design, narrative and non-narrative storytelling, documentary, and intermedia

using a variety of exhibition formats. At Cornish, filmmakers can collaborate with other departments, interacting with actors, musicians, scenic designers, costume designers, and art directors.

By senior year, rough cuts of current projects are a regular part of classes.

Screenings of student work are open to the community as part of the final Expo in May. Internships take full advantage of Seattle’s growing popularity with independent filmmakers and pioneers in new media.

Recently Cornish students presented their work at major film festivals such as the National Film Festival for Talented Youth (NFFTY) and journeyed to SXSW.

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INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE IS A UNIVERSE bounded by walls.

Which is to say, its domain is anything in a room: from the physical to the theoretical; from décor to process; from a designing objects to implementing LEED standards.

At Cornish, you’ll find a universe of possibilities. Our Interior Architecture program is a growing cohort of peers, faculty, and specialists eager to research and explore those opportunities to with you.

You will work alongside mentors in our Experience Studio to bring your ideas to life in 2D, in 3D, and in augmented and virtual environments. Classes are project-based, focused on real outcomes that integrate research and practical experience.

PLACEMAKERS, HYBRID THINKERS, PROBLEM SOLVERS, ENGAGED CITIZENS AND WORLD BUILDERS—THOSE ARE IA STUDENTS!

“Now I carry around a notebook filled with crisp, white paper so that when an idea comes into fruition, my mind has somewhere to record its dreams.”

– Carrie Gerstenberger, Interior Architecture ’17 page 46

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Though Interior Design, focused on lifestyle, is a study track that dates back to the 1950s at Cornish, Interior Architecture is now an expanded, independent department that adds new layers of inquiry-based study and practice. It looks to design thinking as a route for solving problems. Our instructors are leaders in the field as well as leaders in the community, including past presidents and board members from the American Society of Industrial Design (ASID), Industrial Design Society (IDS), and the International Interior Design Association (IIDA).

THE REGIONAL ASSETS of the Pacific Northwest provide an ideal

physical setting for your studies. Seattle, both cultural and design innovation hub, is attracting design talent from around the world as one of the nation’s fastest growing cities. The city itself is a research laboratory where ideas for the design of interiors and the built environment are being incubated, tested, implemented and adapted every day in new buildings and renovations.

We couldn’t be more excited to be expanding this program, in this place, at this time. Join us and help shape the spaces that shape our lives.

– Julie Myers, ASID, IIDA, IDEC, Program Leader, Interior Architecture CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

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WHAT IS

Interior Architecture?

BY CARRIE GERSTENBERGER ’17

The scope of interior architecture at Cornish truly is as broad as you can imagine. Designing interiors can include traveling internationally or working on local projects. In this industry there are no limits to what you can do. All it takes is passion, belief in yourself, and smart teachers to help you make connections as you build your abilities and experience.

Sustainability is the cornerstone of technology-driven environments. Cornish provides the learning environment that allows you to become analytic creators and transformers of space. Working with a thorough understanding of spatial and visual elements, you’ll apply your knowledge to commercial, residential, and public space design—always considering the culture, history, and environment of the place.

I find the program at Cornish unique because every teacher is actively working in the field. They are teaching us the artistry of the present. If you have a drive to change the built world around you, affecting people’s lives on a daily basis and the desire for continually learning, this program and this lifestyle is for you.

If you have a passion for creation of space, or are interested in how people interact with space, or simply enjoy decorum and materiality, this program will broaden your view of what the industry has to offer.

AREAS OF STUDY INCLUDE: ENVIRONMENTS INTERIOR DESIGN LIGHTING INNOVATION & CONSTRUCTION BIO-TECHNOLOGY ENERGY & MATERIALS

In the Interior Architecture program, we build skills which cultivate social and environmental awareness, promoting us to mold interiors through conscious and consistent decision making. Classes include object design, materiality, modelmaking, drafting, poster design, case-studies, presentation development, group-work, 3D programming, and much much more. The program is academic and challenges personal ambition, pushing to strengthen the student’s character, productivity, and ability. We are not simply interior decorators. We learn how to construct buildings from the inside out.

TRANSPORTATION DESIGN OBJECT DESIGN SUSTAINABILITY & WELL-BEING

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alumni success ART

Aleah Chapin ’09

Heather Hart ’98

A Northwest native, Aleah Chapin was the first American to win the prestigious BP

Heather Hart’s The Western Oracle: We Will Tear the Roof Off the Mother invited

Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London (2012). Her famed The Aunties Project focuses on presenting women with a realistic examination of their aging bodies.

According to Priscilla Frank of The Huffington Post: “To encounter a Chapin painting is to confront a human body stripped of shame, censorship, or stigma.” Her frank, feminist work has been exhibited internationally by the Flowers Gallery. Chapin received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 2009 and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2012.

Her recent exhibitions have included the 2016 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York and The Ingram Collection: Bodies in Woking, UK. Chapin recently won the Willard L. Metcalf Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among her other honors, she has been the recipient of the Posey Foundation Scholarship, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and a Postgraduate Fellowship from the New York Academy of Art. In 2016, one of Chapin’s portraits was featured in the Cascadia Art Museum’s exhibition about the influence of Cornish on the Northwest and national arts scene. Her studio is located in Seattle, Washington.

and stimulated Seattle viewers to climb on it, crawl under it, and interact with it. More importantly, her work encouraged people to interact with each other.

“I am interested in how we, as humans, relate to each other,” Hart recently told Brooklyn Magazine. “How we relate to space. Perception. Assumption. Tradition. Nostalgia.

Phenomenology. Semantics. And how these contribute to our forming our identity.” She also means her work to start a conversation, not end one. She is adamant that being biracial does not define either her or her work. “I don’t want to be boxed in,” said Hart.

“My work is about more than that, it’s not didactic.”

After graduating from Cornish, Hart got her MFA from Rutgers University and today works out of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York.

CORNISH STUDENTS HAVE GONE ON TO: ATTEND GRADUATE SCHOOL Virginia Commonwealth University, California Institute of the

Photo: Aleah Chapin, second from left with her family at the Cascadia opening

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Arts, New York Academy of Fine Arts, Glasgow School of Art, Pratt Institute, Cranbrook Institute of Art, Carnegie Mellon, among others.

COLLABORATE WITH Degenerate Art Ensemble, Saint Genet, Pendleton House WIN AWARDS FROM National Portrait Gallery BP Portrait Award, Smithsonian Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

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alumni success DESIGN

Victor Melendez ’06 For 2015’s Anniversary Blend, Starbucks senior designer Victor Melendez was

given the task of re-imagining the packaging for the company’s classic blend. One of several Cornish design grads working at Starbucks Corporate Headquarters, Melendez knew that the company’s siren had to be at its center of the design. “Although the design for our seasonal coffee packaging changes each year, we had used the same central illustration for the siren for more than 10 years,” he said. “I knew that I would redraw the siren this year to give it a new life.”

Like everything at Starbucks, the initial design discussion centered on the flavor of the coffee, not the look of the package. “Whenever we kick off a new design for our coffee packaging, we have a tasting and talk about what makes each coffee special,” Melendez said. Once Melendez came back to his desk from the initial meeting, he started sketching. He began with small, blank squares. In each thumbnail, he tried new type treatments, styles for the art. Just quick, rough representations. After the rough stage was done, he started to do more detailed sketches. He began exploring the arc of her tails, the movement of her hair.

“The hair to me is fluidity – a water-coffee metaphor. I wanted it to be flowy, with intricate curves,” Melendez said. “You get a sense of smoke, of vapor. Even though she’s underwater, it still feels a bit celestial.”

Melendez then scanned the layers, adjusted each component digitally and added in the text. The finished design features the siren with a coy expression beneath her golden crown, a branch from a coffee tree in her left hand. In a nod to the past Anniversary Blend bag designs, this siren is also holding a cup of coffee – only in Melendez’s version the cup is gently floating above her open palm.

Story and photos reproduced with permission of Linda Thomas, Starbucks Newsroom director and editor-in-chief of Digital News.

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Justin Kane Elder ’02

Justin Kane Elder presented his work all over Seattle, picking up small design jobs as he went along from clients attracted to his irreverent style and wit. All this led him at last to a partnership with Seattle artists Patrick “Duffy” De Armas and Brennan Coyle in a firm named Electric Coffin. The partners in EC describe it as “makers of fine art objects and conceptual innovations and adaptations.” Elder and EC have made themselves one of the go-to design firms for big projects in Seattle and the Northwest. Working out of their garage-like shop in Ballard and combining fine art, graphics, interior design, and general craziness, the firm constructs interactive pieces that provoke thought and facilitate discussion. At home with projects as small as the top surface of a skateboard and as large as an entire building, Electric Coffin has broken through to that most rarified height of design, where clients simply turn them loose on a project.

CORNISH STUDENTS HAVE GONE ON TO: ATTEND GRADUATE SCHOOL NYU Tisch School of the Arts, School of Visual Arts, Rhode

Island School of Design WORK FOR COMPANIES Adobe, Amazon, American Red Cross, Anthropologie, Bill

& Melinda Gates Foundation, Burgess Design Inc., Callison Architecture, City Arts Magazine, Committed Comics, Creature, Design Commission, Digital Kitchen, EMP Museum, Fantagraphics, Fischer Communications, Fred Hutchinson Research, Gensler Architecture, Hornall Anderson, Hum Creative, HyperShow, Interplay, Killer Infographics, Modern Dog Design, Neverstop, Northwest Film Forum, Seahawks, Sounders FC, Starbucks, Seattle Metropolitan Magazine, Seattle Parks and Recreation, Seattle Weekly, Silver Fox Productions, Titan360, University of Washington Press, Wizards of the Coast CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

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alumni success FILM+MEDIA

alumni success INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE

The short documentary on a Seattle

public housing project, Even the Walls, screened at the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), the largest film festival in North America. Three members of the film’s seven-person team were Cornish graduates: director of photography Canh Nguyen ’12, sound engineer Adam McCollom ’96, and composer Carlos Esparza ’07. The documentary was awarded audience favorite in its category. (top) Even The Walls photo by Canh Nguyen. (left) Even The Walls’ Carlos Esparza ‘07, Saman Maydani, Canh Nguyen ‘12, Sarah Kuck and Warren Etheredge. Courtesy of Seattle International Film Festival

A culinary-themed video

photographed and edited by Reva Keller ’13, Wall of Fire, won a 2015 James Beard Foundation Award for “Visual and Technical Excellence.”

Alexa Williams ’16 Just before her senior year at Cornish, Alexa Williams won the prestigious Donguia

Cornish dance student JuJu Kusanagi ’16 and her sister Lisa Kusanagi won the 2015 Audience Choice Award at the 40 North Dance Film Festival.

Theater alumnus and playwright

Joshua Conkel ’03 adapted his one-act Curmudgeons into a short film directed

by Danny DeVito in 2016. The Daily Beast praised the movie, noting the importance of its theme of gay marriage. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won for Best Narrative Short, and was shown as part of the 2016 Seattle International Film Festival. page 54

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Scholarship for designers interested in interior architecture. Williams, who attended high school at Blanche McDonald in Vancouver, British Columbia, chose Cornish for a variety of reasons.

“In the fall of 2011, I started looking at interior design programs in the Northwest,” she says. “When I came across Cornish, my mother and aunt, who are designers, were impressed with the structure of the program and the faculty. I just knew that the school would be a great fit. The first time that I visited the campus, I was so inspired and excited to have the chance to be involved in such a creative and talented environment.”

CORNISH STUDENTS HAVE GONE ON TO: WORK FOR COMPANIES Gensler Architecture, Interior Architects (IA), LMN Architecture,

NBBJ Architects, Olson Kundig Architects, Weber Thompson Architects, among others.

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WHY AN ARTS COLLEGE?

A

s you pore over college catalogs like the one you’re holding now, you’ll realize you have many options. As a student looking towards a career in the arts, you can choose to study your art—fine art, design, dance, music, theater—at a large university, a small college, a liberal arts college, or an arts college. All are accredited institutions and all offer a full college degree.

Yet an arts college is distinct. Our singular mission is to develop the next generation of artists. Our entire focus is on this goal.

At an arts college you study and make art from day one—you don’t wait until your junior year to seriously pursue your art like at many other schools. At an arts college,

WHY A BFA? BFA

BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS is considered a professional degree.

THE CREATIVE CORRIDOR is a comprehensive offering of college electives that address a range of transdisciplinary options, skill-based learning, research-led teaching, critical making, collaboration, and publicly engaged practice and scholarship in the arts.

your classmates and faculty not only share your passion, they support and validate your commitment each and every day.

The best arts colleges devote about three quarters of your coursework to your art form. This is about 25 percent more than at a regular college or university. The balance of your course work is in the humanities and sciences that help develop your writing and critical thinking skills and broaden your knowledge about the world around you. And the more you know about the world outside of your art, the better artist you will become. Like all the best arts colleges, Cornish recognizes the essential role general education has to play in your education.

LIBERAL ARTS COURSES 25% LIBERAL ARTS COURSES 50–65%

THE CREATIVE CORRIDOR invites us to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and connect to community in responsive and meaningful ways. Sparking lateral connections inspire students to connect concepts and theories to real-world practice.

As we develop this new program, we challenge ourselves as a learning community, to stretch our thinking, be bold with our vision, curious in our inquiry and daring about the ways in which we design learning and deliver student-centered instruction in the visual and performing arts. Engagement is at the heart of the CREATIVE CORRIDOR. It is our portal, connecting us to our community and diverse publics in ways that align to the broader mission of Cornish.

ARTIST-CITIZEN ENTREPRENEUR-LEADER CREATIVE PRACTITIONER CRITICAL MAKER HUMANIST INNOVATOR

STUDIO COURSES 75%

BA

BACHELOR OF ARTS is considered an academic degree.

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STUDIO COURSES 35–50%

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At Cornish, the boundaries between disciplines blur as students come together in class and outside of class. page 58

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PERFORMANCE SPACES

THE MARLEEN AND KENNY ALHADEFF STUDIO THEATER is a flexible black box space that hosts smaller productions such as our Original Works readings, Shakespeare at the Center, and annual Clown Show.

Because the Cornish Playhouse and the Alhadeff Studio are professional theater venues on the Seattle Center campus, students working backstage can earn hours toward their membership in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).

CORNISH PLAYHOUSE AT SEATTLE CENTER Originally built for the 1962 World’s Fair, the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center is one of the most famous venues in the city, having served as a home for two Tony Award-winning Seattle companies, Seattle Repertory Theatre and Intiman Theatre.

Today, the theater provides performance space for Cornish student productions and college-produced events as well as more than 40 nonprofit organizations annually.

Cornish College of the Arts provides performance space at the Seattle Center, on Capitol Hill, and in the South Lake Union neighborhood. From black box to Seattle icon, performing at Cornish is performing in the heart of the city.

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The Cornish Playhouse’s 434-seat Main Auditorium is used for dance performances, theater productions, film screenings, concerts, and more. The space is fully equipped and popular with Seattle audiences who have been attending performances there for more than 50 years. Under Cornish’s stewardship, both the main theater and the Marleen and Kenny Alhadeff Studio Theater have undergone extensive upgrades.

PONCHO CONCERT HALL The PONCHO Concert Hall is located within the historic landmark Kerry Hall in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. This intimate, historic venue of 200 seats has presented the work of local, national, and internationally-based composers, choreographers, playwrights, and musicians since the 1920s. Every year, hundreds of events occur here including the Cornish Presents series, Earshot Jazz, dance department productions, music student recitals, faculty and alumni concerts, Scores of Sound music festival, artist residencies, and master classes.

RAISBECK PERFORMANCE HALL The Ned & Kayla Skinner Theater at Raisbeck Performance Hall is the main performance venue at Cornish’s South Lake Union campus. Built more than 100 years ago as a Sons and Daughters of Norway lodge, Raisbeck hosts a variety of community events during the summer, including the Seattle International Dance Festival and the Black Box Film Festival. It also made a cameo appearance in the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

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AT CORNISH, YOU’LL LEARN FROM THE BEST teachers and

the best dancers. That’s because they’re one and the same— our faculty are professionals in both arenas. They bring their immediate knowledge and accumulated experience from the stage directly to you in the classroom.

The dance program is close knit by its very nature. You’ll be spending 20 hours per week in daily technique classes with your peers as well as collaborating on creative projects, performances, and academics. You’ll choose from electives in pointe, partnering, men’s technique, hip-hop, jazz, martial arts, and an array of other dance genres.

Your dance learning is not just confined to the studio. We’ll introduce you to new disciplines, like dance intermedia and filmmaking, taught by the award-winning choreographer, Corrie Befort. Because we take pride in healthy dancers, we’ll train you in dance wellness. And you’ll learn the business of dance, so you’re as confident in the back office as you are in the spotlight.

CORNISH HAS LONG BEEN ASSOCIATED with groundbreaking

WE’RE FOCUSED NOT JUST ON YOUR PHYSICAL AND TECHNICAL TRAINING, BUT THE WHOLE OF YOUR CREATIVE BEING.

“We walk out of Cornish with the gift of life experience from our teachers, armed with the courage to rise to any challenge, to jump in with both feet, and to accept change as it comes.”

dancers and choreographers like Merce Cunningham, Ann Reinking, and Twyla Tharp. Today, Seattle has one of the most active and innovative dance scenes in the country—in part because Cornish Dance alumni stay and create exciting new opportunities.

Choreographer Kate Wallich—one of Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch” in 2015—founded the acclaimed company, the YC. Matt Drews, whose work incorporates elements of yoga, cofounded Pendleton House, a collective that has collaborated with dancers, musicians, sculptors, and multimedia artists. Award-winning alumna Amy O’Neal has performed, choreographed, and taught across the globe and still calls Seattle home.

Join us. The steps you take here will carry you over a lifetime.

– Victoria Watts, Chair, Dance

– Jolene Winner-Ziemer, Dance ’12 page 64

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E

xperience the excitement and energy of people who love to dance as much as you. With an equal emphasis on performance and choreography, Cornish dancers leave the college ready to step into professional companies or start their own.

A challenging curriculum and supportive faculty help you discover your unique artistic path. Visiting artists from Seattle’s impressive professional dance community and international touring companies contribute to your education through master classes and residencies.

With equal emphasis on wellness and entrepreneurship, Cornish dance courses are focused on educating healthy dancers who have the self-confidence, professional skills, and physical knowledge required for a sustainable career in dance. Our alumni pursue careers in every aspect of the dance field.

PERFORMANCE AND TECHNIQUE Intensive ballet and modern dance courses form the core of your technique curriculum, supplemented by training in many additional dance styles. We teach you to make the most of your physical potential by emphasizing anatomically sound technique and injury prevention.

Performance opportunities include professionally choreographed productions presented by the Cornish Dance Theater, our student ensemble.

CHOREOGRAPHY

Throughout your time at Cornish, you will perform new works by professional choreographers as well as renowned masterpieces. While developing your unique choreographic voice, you’ll have the opportunity to collaborate on creative interdepartmental productions and explore collaborative processes.

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Coursework in choreography and improvisation develops your knowledge of craft as you explore your creative voice. Professional faculty will mentor you as you create new work for studentchoreographed productions. You will use digital technology to explore your choreographic ideas in the medium of dance-on-film, and will collaborate with artists from other disciplines in crossdisciplinary works.

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TEACHING Your Cornish education, which includes a Pilates Matwork Teaching Certificate, prepares you to teach and pursue dance-related careers beyond the stage. Courses in teaching methods, community arts, stage production, and dance business practices (website design, concert production, and grant writing) give you the entrepreneurial tools to create your own professional opportunities and pursue social activism through the arts.

SYNCHRONICITY “All of us have had our own journeys, our own collections of small moments and lessons that, added together, make up the indelible experiences of our time at Cornish.”

– Christine Janet Dickson, Dance ’15

SIDRA BELL LEADS A MASTER CLASS FOR CORNISH SENIORS

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IT’S ALL ABOUT BEING PLUGGED IN. When you join Cornish’s

Music department, you’re also joining one of the most incredible music and art scenes in the country.

Seattle’s a city that changes the world, in music as in tech and business. Quincy Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Sub Pop, Macklemore—all of that music is in the air. So is the legacy of the most influential composer of the last 100 years, Cornish composer John Cage. And, most importantly, so is the music of recent Cornish alums like Catherine Harris-White from TheeSatisfaction, Eyvind Kang, and Mary Lambert. The Cornish music department is a laboratory for creativity, innovation, and experimentation—regardless of genre. More than a conservatory, it’s a laboratory of new ideas.

At Cornish, you’ll be mentored by professors who are themselves working musicians, eager to share their connections and resources with you. We don’t wait to unleash you into the world after graduation. We help enmesh you in a thriving music city as soon as you get here.

OUR PROGRAM REVOLVES around collaboration and improvisation.

CREATE MUSIC NO ONE’S EVER HEARD BEFORE

“All I’ve ever dreamed of was to use my art, my music, my voice to shine light on issues that are important to me.”

– Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/ activist Mary Lambert, ’11 page 70

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You’ll have opportunities to team up with, for instance, Film+Media students or Dance Department instructors, and together you’ll generate not just new work, but new ways of working together. You will be tracking, editing, and mixing your own compositions and you’ll have access to renowned studios such as Bad Animals, Jack Straw Productions, and London Bridge. We have relationships with preeminent organizations such as Seattle Symphony and Seattle Opera, as well as genre-busting multimedia performance groups like the Degenerate Art Ensemble (co-founded and led by Cornish Music alum Joshua Kohl).

That’s what being plugged in is ultimately about: building those skills and experiences that carry you forward—no matter what stage you’re playing on.

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hether you major in performance ( jazz or classical, vocal or instrumental) or composition, you’ll quickly be making something new through composing, improvising, and learning entrepreneurship skills at Cornish.

AUTHENTICITY “Our role is to inquire upon the deepest questions of our existence, to stir people’s sense of wonder and beauty, to get them to think outside of their existing worldview, and to give them a fuller reason for being alive.”

– Michael Lee Moore, Music ’12

JAZZ Our jazz program is one of the most respected programs for creative, improvised music in the country. We have a strong focus on ensemble work and generative music-making. The program offers a dozen different ensembles in a variety of traditions from bebop to blues, fusion to free jazz, from improvisation with dancers to the vocal jazz ensemble. You will work one-on-one with accomplished faculty who are themselves working artists and active members of the Seattle music community. page 72

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INSTRUMENTAL AND VOCAL PERFORMANCE Our Bachelor of Music curriculum in instrumental performance emphasizes contemporary chamber music and solo performance. Highly personalized training and individualized student attention is the hallmark of our intimate, intensive program. All performers are also enabled and encouraged to explore their own creativity through composition and improvisation. Classes are small and your performance opportunities will be numerous from chamber music and solo work to large ensembles. In the vocal arts program, you will be exploring your passion for classical singing, opera, jazz, or popular song. Our emphasis on new work means that you will have the opportunity to create and perform music that is fresh and forward-looking.

MASTERCLASS WITH JOHN SHERBA OF KRONOS QUARTET

COMPOSITION Our composition program is the heart and soul of our music department. We provide composers with a rigorous course of study in the foundational skills of theory, music notation, conducting, arranging, and orchestration while allowing students to explore their own passions and to realize their own creative dreams. There are no arbitrary limits placed on your creativity, and we encourage our composers to be experimental and innovative. Our composition practicums allow student composers to gain valuable experience composing for film, symphony orchestra, chamber music, jazz ensemble, musical theater, or dance.

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JOVINO SANTOS NETO LEADS THE LATIN ENSEMBLE

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ON THE LIVE STAGE, the actors and dancers are only part of the

transformation that takes place. Costumes, scenery, lighting, and sound—these are the elements of transformation that bring the audience to a medieval castle, an Asian jungle, an apartment in Harlem, or someplace that exists solely in our minds.

When you enter Performance Production at Cornish, you’re joining an independent program, not an offshoot of another department. Whether you want to be a stage manager, technician or designer, you’ll have one-on-one experiences with both full-time faculty and adjunct professors—who themselves are working artists in Seattle’s theater community. In fact, it’s not uncommon for one of them to say, “Come with me” to a production in progress. Students have opportunities to observe and sometimes assist.

WE TAILOR YOUR TRAINING to your goals, immersing you in all

OUR CLASSES RUN ON CURIOSITY AND EXPLORATION. WE’RE BUILDING SOMETHING NEW IN EVERY SENSE.

“And, most importantly, I found my passion.

I found the one thing in this world I was meant to do. The thing that energizes me, that forces me to keep a notebook next to my bed so I can write down the ideas that come all night instead of sleep.”

– Kendra Lee, Performance Production ’15 page 76

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tools of the stage trade, from the traditional to the technical.

The program is by nature collaborative, and you’ll begin work immediately in building and staffing a number of main stage productions co-produced with the Theater and Dance departments each year. Paired with classes in history and the liberal arts, students emerge well rounded and prepared for successful careers.

Seattle itself is a city rich with live stages. The faculty, students, and alumni of Performance Production are fully woven into the fabric of Seattle’s theater scene, from ACT Theatre to Strawberry Theater Workshop to Seattle Children’s Theatre. We create relationships for students through internships with Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre Festival, Seattle Opera, and numerous other companies.

This is hands-on production. It’s where you create and manipulate stage magic. In Performance Production, you make the drama real.

– Denise Martel, Chair, Performance Production CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

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ELASTICITY

I

n Performance Production, designers, technicians, and artisans create and manipulate the environment that surrounds the actors, dancers, and musicians on the live stage. Work beside award-winning professionals as you prepare for a career in taking ideas from notes on a napkin to a fully realized production. Graduates from this department work in all fields of production design and in all types of performing arts and visual arts.

Design costumes, scenery, lighting, and sound for shows. Stage management and technical production courses lead directly to working on crews, building and running real shows for theater, dance, and music.

“Watching us all grow and see the people we’ve become since that first day, I cannot feel more enthusiasm or pride in the whole of my body to see what we do in the world.”

Besides having multiple performance venues on campus and with a host of theaters nearby looking for interns, Cornish has a complete professional-level scene shop near the Seattle Center where students work alongside our talented staff learning best practices in scenery and prop construction and scene painting. The costume shop likewise provides a busy workspace for realized productions and for learning costume construction skills.

– Gabrielle Ray Strong, Performance Production ’13

At our main venue, the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center, you’ll work beside IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) stagehands. You’ll also have the opportunity for a professional internship in a Seattle theater or any number of professional theaters throughout the US and abroad.

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STAGE MANAGEMENT COSTUME DESIGN Learn the history, traditions, and wellestablished techniques of costume design and costume craft and then take what you learn to our labs with industrial machines, high-end sergers, and a commercial dye vat. Start out on crews, then serve as crew head and assistant to designers on production teams, as you work your way up to being a costume designer for a play, musical, or dance performance.

LIGHTING DESIGN Become proficient in the nuanced art of theatrical lighting, using lighting cues to establish movement, passage of time, motivation of characters, and a range of emotional states. Begin your study of the lighting arts with electrical theory, the variety of lighting instruments used in live performance and progress into drafting, color theory of light, and the collaborative process. Progress in your training through assignments such as master electrician, light board operator, and assistant lighting designer to lighting designer for a departmental production.

Connecting the actors with the director, designers, and technicians, the stage manager is the central hub of communication for the theater team. Our stage management program prepares you to be a confident and distinctive member of the performance production industry.

In your third and fourth year, you’ll serve as a primary stage manager on a Cornish production, having progressed through assignments such as assistant stage manager and assignments in other areas of production design.

TECHNICAL DIRECTION Develop skills in drafting, labor and budget projection, carpentry, welding, props construction, rigging, and electrics while you take courses in theater graphics and production design. Learn to analyze a designer’s ideas and create practical working drawings for the shop to realize on stage. Work your way up on production crews, serving as master carpenter and assistant technical director, to technical director of a realized production.

SCENE DESIGN From drafting and rendering to model making, carpentry, and scene painting, explore all facets of scenic design while studies in theater history enhance your work. As your skill grows, so will your assigned projects until you find yourself serving as the scenic designer on a fully realized production in your final years at Cornish.

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THE CREATIVE OPPORTUNITIES open to theater students

are greater today than at any time in history. Stage, film, television are joined by web-based, immersive, and site-specific performance. You can reinvent the classics, tap dance in a musical, and take your solo show to Australia or China.

Find those opportunities at Cornish, where you can play Romeo or Juliet—or you can be the first to perform in a new one-act written by a classmate. You can record an animation voiceover for a Design student, or collaborate with Film colleagues on a web series intended to play on mobile phones.

IN OUR DYNAMIC SEATTLE CAMPUS you’ll find classrooms and

performance spaces like historic Raisbeck Hall and the 400-seat Cornish Playhouse that we fill with stirring contemporary plays and musicals, improvisation, classical drama, neo-burlesque, solo performance, clowning, and anything else we can dream up.

Together, we’ll explore the art and craft of storytelling as well as the empathy and imagination that give it resonance and power.

EXPLORE MULTIPLE POSSIBILITIES, AND BECOME THE ARTIST YOU WANT TO BE.

“We are on the brink of an even larger artistic explosion in this city. The best part is that not only will we be part of it, but we will be the ones setting up the dynamite and pushing that damn button.”

– Jonathan Crimeni, Theater ’13 page 82

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Our faculty of practicing artists can guide you to develop a healthy practice and your own unique creative process. Engaged with Seattle’s vibrant theater community, you’ll deepen the selfknowledge that fosters creative risk-taking. You can walk into rehearsal and confidently access your skill set so that you can say “Yes, AND…” to any situation.

Our alumni act, sing, write, and direct on virtually every stage in Seattle, and all over the world. Recent grads are performing on Broadway, starring on television, starting new ensembles, leading theaters, dazzling cabaret audiences, making spectacular performance art at international festivals, attending prestigious MFA programs, and taking their communications and storytelling skills into executive positions at Google and Apple.

What stories are you going to tell?

– Richard E.T. White, Chair, Theater CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

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MOTION CAPTURED:

Being a Super Hero

A

t Cornish you will take what you learn in class into a variety of productions from your first year to your last. Between September and May, the Theater Department offers more than 40 different events, including musicals, ensemble-generated works, classical plays, and exciting new works from groundbreaking contemporary playwrights. You’ll have performance opportunities here almost every month of your school year.

With a faculty full of working professionals, Cornish students make connections while still at school to step into productions throughout Seattle and across the country.

NICHOLE ELISE ’08 works as a voice talent and movement

specialist for video games, green-screen productions, commercials, and more. For many of these jobs, she’s been filmed on infrared cameras so animators can base their work upon her motions.

What is it like suiting up for a “motion capture” role?

Imagine you’re a super hero fighting off every bad guy you come across and winning! Motion capture work is probably the most fun I’ve ever had on a set. Putting on that suit just makes you “feel cool” and pretending to be so many things and different characters is pretty much like being a kid again... only this time getting paid for it!

Through internships and other professional opportunities, students have played roles and worked on the staffs of professional theaters while still completing their degrees.

Following foundational studies in core disciplines like acting, physical technique and dance, voice and speech, improvisation and ensemble creation, and theater history and dramaturgy, you can choose specific concentrations tailored to your goals.

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How about being a “voice talent” for various projects?

The play within the sound booth and exploration with the voice is equally enjoyable.

What other type of performances have you done in this field?

I’ve also been in a few low-budget green-screen productions where I performed minor stunts and choreographed unarmed fight sequences. Also I booked a national commercial for Toyota in 2013.

Why did earning a BFA in Theater help with your career?

Training at Cornish not only enhanced and further developed my skills as an animated performer, but also prepped me for the business side of these arts. It is important to know how to use and control your instruments (body and voice) operating as an artist and to have a business mindset that coincides with creativity. I was fortunate to have studied under some of the finest professors during my four years at Cornish. I feel fortunate that I’m using my hardearned degree in a world I didn’t really know much about, but have since become excitingly immersed in!

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FEROCITY

“Each one of us is brave, creative, unique, capable and, let’s not forget, fierce.”

– Haley Marie Alaji, Theater ’16

ACTING Following a successful audition at the end of the sophomore year, you will engage in intensive study of classical theater texts, exploring material from the Greeks to Shakespeare to Chekhov. You will learn the technical skills necessary to bring heightened and poetic language to life on stage, while imbuing your character portrayals with a sense of dramatic truth.

Acting students also have the opportunity to do at least one on-camera project each semester.

In the senior year, Acting students delve deeper into subtext, ambiguity, and mystery through the work of Beckett, Pinter, and a wide range of contemporary playwrights. You will also explore how to launch your career, while developing useful skills such as stage combat, audition techniques, dialects, voiceover, and on-camera audition techniques.

Options for the senior thesis project may include self-producing a one-act play or performing as an acting intern in a local professional theater.

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ORIGINAL WORKS Original Works is designed for artists whose goals include directing, playwriting, generating original performance pieces, or being part of a generative ensemble or the artistic staff of a theater. You explore a wide variety of generative methods, including playwriting, directing, personal clown, and other physical/improvisational approaches, as well as self-producing and dramaturgy.

The junior year culminates in our O!Fest, a festival of short plays written, directed, and performed by Original Works students, as well as The Clown Show, which showcases your comic creations after a year of studying personal clown.

Your senior thesis project will be a generative piece, either written by you or created by an ensemble under your creative supervision, which reflects your particular aesthetic vision.

“The minute I stepped foot on the Googleplex campus, I felt like I was back at Cornish. You could feel the innovation taking place.”

– Christopher Dodge, Theater ’11, partner education and program manager at Google

MUSICAL THEATER This curricular emphasis is designed for artists whose goals include performing in musical theater. As with all our instruction, we want to facilitate your development as performers with range. Musical Theater students take the core acting-based skills classes and extend their skill sets with classes in singing, dance, and musical theater. There is a three-semester sequence in the freshman and sophomore years that introduces the fundamentals of singing and dance as well as the study of music theory, including the basics of ear training, sight reading and singing, group singing, and rhythm and harmony.

This sequence culminates in a musical capstone as part of the sophomore ensemble project. There is also room in the sophomore year for private singing lessons.

Starting in your junior year, you participate in classes in dance styles, musical theater performance and audition techniques, and perform in productions of both original and established musical theater works, including a cabaret at the end of the fall of the senior year. Your senior thesis project will demonstrate acquisition of a range of musical theater skills.

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BEN VEREEN LEADS A MASTER CLASS FOR CORNISH SENIORS

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alumni success DANCE

Amy O’Neal ’99

Kate Wallich ’10

Amy O’Neal is an independent dancer, performer, producer, and teacher whose work encompasses a dynamic investigation of contemporary performance practices and Hip Hop and Street Dance culture. Her work has been presented by On the Boards, PICA TBA Festival, Joyce Soho/NYC, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, and the Northwest Film Forum, among many others. Amy has received financial support from the Creative Capital, National Dance Project, Mid-Atlantic Arts, National Endowment for the Arts and the James W. Ray Project Venture Artist Trust, and is a two-time Artist Trust Fellowship awardee. She has taught and performed throughout the US, Japan, Italy, and Mexico and has choreographed for stage, commercials, rock shows, galleries, dance films, and music videos. She has been an artist-in-residence at Bates Dance Festival, Headlands Center for the Arts, the US/Japan Choreographer’s Exchange, and Velocity Dance Center, and been a guest artist at Mills College. She has worked extensively with musician/comedian and former Cornish music student Reggie Watts on stage and screen since 2002. Her dance writing has been published in Dance magazine, City Arts magazine, and ArtDish Forum.

Ezra Dickinson ’07 Ezra Dickinson is a choreographer, performer,

street artist, painter, ceramicist, animator, and photographer. His choreography and movement installations have been presented at On the Boards, TEDX Rainer, Seattle International Film Festival, ACT Theater, Henry Art Gallery, 911 Media Arts Center, Zocalo Mexico City, Spectrum Dance Theater, and more. Velocityʼs Made In Seattle program commissioned and produced Dickensonʼs critically acclaimed site-specific performance/activism work Mother for you I made this, aimed at activating a conversation about the failed mental health care system in America through memories of Dickinson’s childhood caring for his schizophrenic mother. Co-artistic director of The Offshore Project and Actually Really, he also is a member of The New Mystics, HYPERNOVA, The Murphy Lachow Company, and The Maureen Whiting Company. page 90

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In 2015, Dance magazine named Kate Wallich one of the

“25 to Watch” on the international scene. They lauded the Seattlebased performer and choreographer as an artist who “unapologetically pushes forward.” Wallich’s work has been presented nationally and internationally. In her commissioned dance-meetstechnology piece, Industrial Ballet, Wallich worked from an idea suggested by Case van Rij, a senior staff engineer with EMC Isilon, to create a work of synchronized movement that was called “electric” by The Seattle Times. She choreographs, performs, and films mostly in collaboration with her company, The YC. CORNISH STUDENTS HAVE GONE ON TO: PERFORM WITH Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, Trisha

Brown Dance Company, Victor Quijada/RUBBERBANDance, Sidra Bell Dance, Ballet Nouveau, Seattle Dance Project, Chicago Crash Dance, Pat Graney Company, Scott/ Powell Performance, KT Niehoff/LINGO, Korhan Basaran and Artists, Whim W’him, zoe/ juniper, Murphy/Lachow Company, Mark Haim, locust, Maureen Whiting Company, WolfBird Dance Company, Cirque du Soleil, El Teatro Danza Contemporanea de El Salvador, Banana Peel Dance, Scorpius Dance Theatre, Ashani Dances, tEEth, Reggie Watts, Massive Monkees, Vox Mo, Saint Genet, Pendleton House, Spectrum Dance Theater, Tahni Holt, and many others.

START DANCE/PERFORMANCE COMPANIES Kate Wallich & The YC, Salt Horse, Amy O/ locust, Catherine Cabeen/Hyphen, d-9, Rebollar Dance, Entropy, The New Animals, Coriolis, The Offshore Project, Maya Soto/Soto Style, Blind Tiger Society, Alana O’ Rogers Dance Company, HYPERNOVA Contemporary Dance Company, Conundrum Theatre Company, Inc., The Three Yells, to name a few.

ATTEND GRADUATE SCHOOL The Ohio State University, California Institute of the Arts, SUNY Purchase, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Mills College, University of Washington.

WIN GRANTS AND AWARDS FROM James W. Ray Project Venture Award, Artist Trust Fellowship, Creative Capital, National Dance Project, National Performance Network, Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture, Artist Trust GAP, Washington State Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, SCUBA National Touring Network.

PERFORM THEIR ORIGINAL WORKS AT On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art/T:BA Festival, Northwest Film Forum, Chop Shop, BOOST Dance Festival, Ten Tiny Dances, JOYCE SOHO (NYC), Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, Off Center Festival, Seattle International Dance Festival, Bumbershoot Festival, Myrna Loy Center/ Helena, ODC/San Francisco, American Dance Institute, Dance Place, Ten Tiny Dances, St. Mark’s Church, Highways Performance Space, Kyoto Art Center, Henry Art Gallery, and many others.

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alumni success MUSIC

Mary Lambert ’11

Catherine Harris-White ’08 Grammy Award nominee Mary Lambert

moved audiences and brought notice to important issues during her national tour for her Capitol Records debut album, Heart On My Sleeve. She also received national attention for her performance in “Same Love” with Seattle artists Macklemore and Ryan Lewis honored at the 2014 Grammy Awards. In 2015, she was honored by the Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for her song “Secrets” about her experiences with childhood trauma and bipolar disorder. “All I’ve ever dreamed of was to use my art, my music, my voice to shine light on issues that are important to me,” said Lambert.

Griffin Boyd ’14 Since graduating, Griffin Boyd has worked

consistently as a producer, sound editor, recording engineer, composer, and performer. He recently was asked to collaborate with world-renowned kinetic sculptor and sound artist, Trimpin, on a commission from the Seattle Symphony for a new piece: Above, Below, and In Between. The work featured a piano that can be played and conducted without being touched, suspended chimes, a wandering soprano, and strategically placed Symphony musicians. Boyd composed all music played by the orchestra, and he designed the digital systems by which the conductor would interact with the mechanical instruments, using the motionsensing device Kinect.

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Catherine Harris-White is a singer/songwriter/

producer/actress based in Seattle, Washington, where she started appearing in local theaters by the age of 14. After graduating with a bachelor’s in music from Cornish in 2008, she traveled the world performing as SassyBlack in Barcelona, Los Angeles, London, New York, Shanghai, Sydney, and more. In 2011, she successfully signed to Sub Pop records with her group THEESatisfaction. She also independently released her EP Personal Sunlight and her debut solo album No More Lame Dates.

Her involvement with The Recording Academy Pacific Northwest Chapter includes performing at GRAMMY Pro® futureNOW at the EMP in 2016. Her articles on the changing nature of the music industry have appeared in the Seattle Weekly and Stacked magazine. Harris-White also has been a featured panelist at City of Music Career Day, an educational program developed by the Seattle Music Commission and produced in partnership with One Reel, Office of Film + Music, Office of Arts & Culture, EMP Museum, and The Vera Project to give young adults direct access to music industry professionals through networking, experiential learning, engaging workshops, and performances. In 2016, Harris-White combined her acting and music interests with a role in the new HBO show Vinyl.

CORNISH STUDENTS HAVE GONE ON TO: ATTEND GRADUATE SCHOOL New York University, Royal Academy of Music, Northwestern

University, Stanford University, The Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, Yale University, University of Missouri Kansas City, California Institute of the Arts SIGN WITH RECORD LABELS Sub Pop, Capitol, Navona, Grammavision, hatOLOGY, Origin COLLABORATE WITH Macklemore & Lewis, Bill Frisell, Bjork, Beck, Laurie Anderson, Brandi Carlile, Allen Stone, Carla Bley WIN AWARDS Fulbright Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, The Stranger Genius Awards CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

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alumni success PERFORMANCE PRODUCTION

Shelby Choo ’16

Sarah Nietfeld ’11

Shelby Choo was selected to participate in the

2016 United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) Gateway Program, which is part of the USITT Diversity Initiative committed to expanding diversity within the performing arts by focusing on mentorships for designers, technicians, and managers.

As part of the USITT Gateway Program, Shelby attended USITT’s 56th Annual Conference & Stage Expo in March 2016. Shelby was one of a dozen students from across the country selected to participate, and she received a year-long USITT membership, travel to the conference, and hotel accommodations. One of the mentors Shelby met through this program has connected her with an opportunity to assist and intern with a technical director working in Seoul, Korea. Shelby relocated to Seoul right after graduation and will expand her network and experiences in scenery automation, digital drafting, and event production.

Sarah Nietfeld was accepted into the Yale School

of Drama MFA Design program in 2015. Directly after graduation, she traveled in the UK and Ireland, and took an internship in Edinburgh. In the United States, she held a summer position at Colonial Williamsburg, worked in a textile studio here in Seattle, and was a dresser on the preBroadway run of Side Show at La Jolla Playhouse, working with quick changes, wigs, and SFX masks.

Kat Stromberger ’12 Kat Stromberger works at Pacific Studios, which designs and builds installations for such places as The Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) in Seattle and the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta.

David Brack ’12 David Brack works for Touch Worldwide as a designer of

CORNISH STUDENTS HAVE GONE ON TO:

3-D experiences. He has worked on projects for Starbucks and Ubisoft’s E3 Media Briefing. While at Cornish, “I felt that I had a lot of freedom to direct my own path,” he said. “There were so many people available and they were generous enough to help inform my own vision.”

ATTEND GRADUATE SCHOOL Yale School of Drama, NYU Tisch School of the Arts,

Photo by Sam Veatch.

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University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Goldsmith’s College, London, SUNY Purchase, San Francisco State University, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Webster University, Goldsmith’s College, London WORK WITH COMPANIES Lincoln Center Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Seattle Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, ACT San Francisco, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, Ambassador Theatre Group, Arena Theatre, Cirque du Soleil, Microsoft WIN AWARDS FROM Rising Star in Scenic Design, USITT/LDI CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

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alumni success THEATER

Don Darryl Rivera ’06 Growing up in Seattle, Don Darryl Rivera danced

with Kultura, a Filipino folk dance group, and kaSAma, a hip-hop dance group. Performing at Bishop Blanchet High School sparked his interest in acting as a career.

Following his graduation from Cornish, he appeared at The Guthrie Theater, The 5th Avenue Theatre, Seattle Children’s Theatre, The Children’s Theatre Company, and The Shakespeare Theatre Company, among others.

Currently, Rivera is performing on Broadway as Iago in Disney’s Aladdin, a role he first performed during the stage musical’s initial run at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle. In 2011, he wrote the book for the world premiere musical Harold and the Purple Crayon along with Auston James (music) and Rob Burgess (lyrics). Following that critically acclaimed work­—in which he also starred—he collaborated as a co-composer with Rob Burgess and co-book writer with Linda Hartzell for the world premiere musical based on the books by Eric Hill, Adventures With Spot.

Ramiz Monsef ’02 Ramiz Monsef, from a fourth-generation Cornish

family, is in his sixth season as a company member of the Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

There, he was the co-creator of The Unfortunates, a hit musical which premiered there in 2013 and reprised at ACT’s Strand Theatre in San Francisco. Monsef has appeared at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Studio Theatre, ACT Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre, and Yale Repertory Theatre, among others. His OffBroadway credits include Eurydice at Second Stage, Betrayed at Culture Project, and All That I Will Ever Be at New York Theatre Workshop.

He has guested on Law & Order and Comedy Central.

Jasmine Jean Sim ’15 In her first year after graduation, Jasmine Jean Sim

was selected to be a member of the core company at ACT Theatre in Seattle. A transfer to Cornish, Sim originally hailed from California, where she appeared in the Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival and the LA Women’s Shakespeare Company. She credits her time at Cornish as giving her the opportunity to explore more areas of theater, including directing, stage combat, and choreography. In Seattle, she has appeared at Washington Ensemble Theatre, Intiman Theatre, and Seattle Musical Theatre. She is also a founding member of Studio 18 Productions.

CORNISH STUDENTS HAVE GONE ON TO: PERFORM PROFESSIONALLY on Broadway, at New York Public Theater, Stratford Festival

(Canada), Ensemble Studio Theatre, Signature Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Goodman Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Guthrie Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre Festival, ACT Theatre, 5th Avenue Musical Theatre, Village Theatre, Seattle Children’s Theatre, The Actors Gang (Los Angeles), the Vienna Kammerspiele, and the Soho Theatre (London) CREATE AND DIRECT ORIGINAL WORKS AT Seattle Children’s Theatre, Humana Festival, Steppenwolf Theatre, Indiana Repertory Theatre, The Bushwick Starr, Luminato Festival (Canada), Target Margin Theater, Theatre Seven of Chicago, Washington Ensemble Theatre, Donaufestival (Austria) ATTEND GRADUATE SCHOOL Yale School of Drama, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Harvard/ American Repertory Theatre, London’s Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, University of Illinois, Northwestern University, University of Washington, Arizona State University, the Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre, Brooklyn College, Naropa University CREATE AND PERFORM ON TELEVISION, FILM, VIDEO GRAMES, AND ONLINE SERIES Showtime’s Dexter, Blue Bloods (CBS), Saturday Night Live,

The X Factor, Leverage, The Glee Project, The History Channel’s Texas Rising, The Mummy (1999) and sequels, The Onion’s Film Standard, Grand Theft Auto IV (game), and the awardwinning web series Capitol Hill, among others.

WIN AWARDS Emmy Award, Grammy Award, Helen Hayes Award, Gregory Award, The Stranger Genius Award, RuPaul’s Drag Race Winner page 96

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Taking Risks

Seattle is the techie, artsy, green, bohemian city of my dreams.

by Leah Erickson Webster ’16

I took a big risk moving across the country to attend Cornish College of the Arts.

Luckily, it was everything I wanted in a college and more. Seattle is the techie, artsy, green, bohemian city of my dreams.

The adventurer in me can wander through the beautiful Pacific Northwest wilderness on many hiking trails and waterfronts that offer unrivaled birdwatching and sightseeing. It felt like home after only a few months, studying new things like yoga and mindfulness with my first year physical technique teacher. Without all the support Cornish gave me, I’m sure my transition into college would have been much more difficult.

I have made lifelong friends, professional partners, mentors, and mentees. Some of the most meaningful connections have been those I made not at Cornish, but because of Cornish. I studied abroad in London, where I saw plays at the National Theatre, saw Dali at the Tate, and walked along the Thames with my classmates. I found a mentor in John Wilson, head of our dramaturgy department, who later invited me as his T.A. (teaching assistant) to attend the 2015 convention for the National Associations of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America.

One of the best things I did at Cornish was take advantage of their student services.

My dyslexia was a big issue in high school, but Cornish accommodated my needs with a plan that included counseling at the Writing Center and extra instruction.

My financial aid actually increased each year, which is unlike the strategy of many schools which taper out aid as the students get older. I also worked for the last three years on campus, both in the Cornish Admissions department as a receptionist and as a content creator for the Communications department.

Laundry? Cooking? Buses? Going to the doctor? Moving? Not to mention the intensive classes, rehearsals, performances, and homework. It was a lot to handle. But there were people to help me thrive here. page 98

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At Cornish, I found myself drawn away from performance classes and falling in love with the behind-the-scenes work. I auditioned for Cornish’s Original Works program and began studying playwriting, directing, and dramaturgy (the practice of dramatic research, criticism and analysis).

The program perfectly merged my academic and artistic interests

My last summer at Cornish I worked as a research assistant to media specialist Mark Bocek, helping research articles for the college’s magazine. Going through University of Washington archives and the New York City Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, I learned so much about Cornish’s long and fascinating history of avant-garde art making and innovative pedagogy. Being able to count myself as one among such heroes as Martha Graham, John Cage, Bonnie Bird, Mary Lambert, and so many more who have worked and learned at Cornish is something I will be proud of my whole life.

As a senior, I am as unsure of my future as I was as a rising senior in high school.

Graduate school is on the horizon, but I’m not sure how far away. One thing I know is that I will have to go back to England to investigate Cornish’s partnership with the renowned Dartington Hall. The history of Cornish is something I’m not done investigating yet. As the Chair of Theater likes to say: “Cornish is for life.” Thanks to Cornish, I can look forward to an exciting life in the arts.

At Cornish, I found myself drawn away from performance classes and falling in love with the behind-the-scenes work.

LATINO PLAYWRIGHT OCTAVIO SOLIS TEACHES A MASTER CLASS TO THEATER JUNIOR PLAYWRIGHTS.

Leah Webster ’16 graduated with a BFA in Theater at Cornish College of the Arts.

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L

ife at Cornish is about making friends, exploring Seattle, finding out where your art will take you, and more than a few late night pizzas. It’s about living on campus in a high-rise residence hall. It’s about having your work seen and getting to see the work created by your peers. It’s about sharing interests and being inspired.

“We’re creating a network, a community, that we can lean on for the rest of our career as artists.

At Cornish, you’ll find plenty of peers with the same interests. We may not have a football team or cheerleaders, but our Student Interest Groups are devoted to everything from a capella singing to tabletop adventuring. SIGs provide opportunities outside the classroom for Cornish students to participate in educational, intellectual, interdisciplinary, and cultural events. We encourage students at Cornish to join or form their own SIGs to share mutual interests.

Student Interest Groups (sample list) n BELTER’S ANONYMOUS n COMPWORKS n CORNISH CURATORS (ART SHOWS) n CORNISH SOCCER CLUB n CORNISH STUDENT LEADERSHIP

COUNCIL

n FRESH PRESS (STUDENT NEWSPAPER) n FEMINISM AT CORNISH n INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE GROUP

We are the community that I had

n MAKING STUFF INSTEAD OF BREAKING STUFF (ZINE)

hoped to be part of.”

n MIND, BODY, NATURE

– Katherine Wheeler, Design ’15

n PHOTOGRAPHY SOCIETY n TABLETOP ADVENTURER’S GUILD n TONIC RHYTHM n UNDERSTANDING MULTICULTURAL

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Stand up and be Cornish!

MULTIPLICITY

STATEMENT OF DIFFERENCE AND INCLUSION Cornish College of the Arts is enriched by a diverse population of students, bringing their unique personalities and voices to their art forms. Placed in the vibrant city of Seattle, artists thrive among the wide variety of people and broad spectrum of creative thought that surrounds us. The college supports and engages the many cultural, personal, and spiritual facets of our community.

Cornish commits to demonstrating respect for individual expression and integrity; to promoting the equality of opportunity and rights of all persons within the community and to actively encouraging and maintaining the representation and inclusion of diverse cultures and backgrounds within the student body, faculty, staff and curriculum.

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We believe that diversity refers to a number of human qualities and characteristics. National origin, race, gender, age, socioeconomic background, religion, sexual orientation, and disabilities are characteristics that combine in unique ways, forming the multiple identities we all hold. Those diverse characteristics contribute positively to the environment of Cornish and to an education that accurately reflects and contributes to the complex interplay of art, culture, and society.

We hold ourselves responsible to fulfill the mission of Cornish by preparing students “to contribute to society as artists, citizens, and innovators,� and believe that the mission is best served by actively cultivating a positive environment in which to explore and express the diverse perspectives of a pluralistic society.

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C

ornish College of the Arts believes that international understanding can enhance a student’s development as an artist and as a citizen of the world. To that end, the College supports study abroad and is pleased to provide the opportunity for its students to enrich their Cornish degree programs with a meaningful international experience. Cornish works with consortium partners to provide access to dozens of study-abroad semester programs all over the world. Cornish’s agreements with Arcadia University and the Institute for Study Abroad at Butler University allow students to choose from a wide variety of programs that will allow them to earn credit towards their degree programs at Cornish while broadening their worldviews through international study.

Recently, Cornish students have studied visual and performing arts abroad at: Accademia dell’Arte Arezzo, Italy Burren College of Art Ballyvaughan, Ireland Glasgow School of Art Glasgow, Scotland NYU Berlin Berlin, Germany Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Glasgow, Scotland SACI Florence, Italy Temple University Japan Campus, Minato, Japan Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance London, England University of Tasmania Hobart/Launceston, Australia Victorian College of the Arts Melbourne, Australia

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Visit and apply Admission to Cornish is selective. We look for students who live for their art form and are interested in developing their creative, intellectual, and technical skills.

Personal contact is an important aspect of our admission process. We recommend that, if possible, you visit our campus and talk with Admission. Your visit will enable you to ask questions about Cornish, as well as provide you with useful insights about the audition and review process.

The more we are able to learn about you and your artistic vision and ambition, the better we are able to provide you with the information you need to make the right educational choice for your future.

APPLICATION TIMELINE Early Action Deadline: December 1 $20 application fee if you apply on or before December 1

“And now we are here, and you may be thinking to yourself, what’s next? Whatever path you choose, you have to know that you did something so extraordinary that it will forever be a defining moment for you.”

– Samantha Myriah Beatrice Willis, Music ’14

Priority Deadline: February 15 $40 application fee if you apply on or before February 1 Rolling Admission through August 1 $60 application fee if you apply after February 1 Once you have completed the application, an audition or portfolio review will take place as part of the application process, which will contribute to the admission decision. More information and the dates for the auditions and portfolio reviews can be found online at: www.cornish.edu/admission, by calling 1.800.726.ARTS, or by emailing admission@cornish.edu.

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Financial aid & scholarships All admitted students are automatically considered for a Cornish scholarship.

Scholarship amounts vary and are based on a comprehensive review of each applicant, including demonstrated academic success, creative success, and input from teachers, counselors, and community members. We will work to help you find a financial strategy to realize your long-term goals at Cornish College of the Arts. All students are urged to file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) to ensure maximum consideration for financial aid and scholarships.

Many options for assistance are available at Cornish: merit-based and needbased Cornish scholarships, federal and state grants, work-study, federal loans for parents and students, and private educational loans for students.

“Cornish is more than a diploma.

Cornish is overcoming challenges with creative and critical thinking.”

– Sara Marie Weisenbach, Design ’14

PHOTOGRAPHERS

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CHRIS BENNION

MARCIANA ROMERO

MARK BOCEK

MICHELLE SMITH-LEWIS

COLLEEN DISHY

PRESTON WADLEY

JOSEPH LAMBERT

WINIFRED WESTERGARD

CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

Financial aid and scholarships are available to all who apply and qualify but some funds are distributed on a first-come -first-served basis. Therefore, you should complete the FAFSA as soon as possible after submitting your application for admission. File the FAFSA online as early as possible beginning October 1 but before February 15 using Cornish School Code 012315.

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2017/2018

AUDA CITY We have been inspiring artistic and academic excellence for more than 100 years. Our holistic approach to education promotes experimentation, discovery, and innovation, giving artists the creative intelligence they need to thrive in their disciplines and beyond.

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1000 Lenora Street Seattle WA 98121

EMAIL

admission@cornish.edu

PHONE 800.726.ARTS

206.726.5016 FAX

206.720.1011

WEB

www.cornish.edu/admission

SOCIAL www.cornish.edu/facebook

twitter.com/cornishcollege instagram.com/cornishcollegeofthearts