Faculty Biographies
Isabelle Anderson studied classical dance and began her career in a classical ballet company. She has an Honors Bachelor degree in English Literature and Drama from Queensland University-Australia and is a qualified voice and speech teacher. She spent 20 years as an actress and director for theater film and television in Australia and France. Ms. Anderson taught acting at Columbia University, the Experimental Theater Wing (ETW) of New York University, and Barnard College. Currently she teaches mask/acting class at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington D.C., where she is a founding faculty member of the Academy of Classical Acting (ACA)—the M.F.A. program in classical acting headed by Michael Kahn and run by The Shakespeare Theater in conjunction with George Washington University. In 1992 she founded the company Performance Communication in New York City. As an executive coach she has taught communication and speaking skills to CEOs, senior executives, celebrity authors, teams of senior executives and potential leaders within companies. Since 1982 she has spent time in India, studying meditation and its relation to creativity and performance. She has created large- scale productions based on classical epic Indian tales of Mahabharata and Ramayana. Ms. Anderson now lives in Marriottsville with her husband and family.
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Linda Andre is Interpretation Manager in the Division of Education & Interpretation at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Since 1983 she has helped teachers introduce students to the BMA’s permanent collections and special exhibitions. She has organized teacher workshops on a wide variety of topics and has written many original teacher packets, gallery guides, and hands-on activities that teachers use in the museum galleries and in their classrooms. Ms. Andre strongly supports interdisciplinary learning and has demonstrated ways to use art museum objects to teach important concepts in math, science, English, foreign language, and history. Since 1996, Ms. Andre has served on the Fine Arts Education Advisory Panel of the Maryland State Department of Education and has made sure that all BMA tours and teaching materials support the state standards for the visual arts. Ms. Andre is the author of the BMA’s gallery guide, “Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Matisse in the Cone Collection,” as well as numerous labels in the museum galleries. She has also written several issues of “Smithsonian in Your Classroom,” including “What is Currency?: Lessons from Historic Africa.” Ms. Andre is a graduate of Smith College and earned an M.A.T. degree from the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University. She holds the Sylvia Friedberg Nachlas Endowed Chair for Museum Education at the BMA.
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Tierno S. Bah was a faculty member in linguistics and African languages at the Polytechnical Institute G.A. Nasser (now the University of Conakry) from 1972-1982. A former director of the University Library (1980-1982), Fulbright-Hayes Senior African Scholar (1982-1983), Rockefeller Foundation African Dissertation Fellow (1988), and a Ph.D. (A.B.D.) from The University of Texas at Austin (1988), T. S. Bah has pursued an interdisciplinary career in anthropological-linguistics and digital technology. He is a pioneer member of the Internet Society, a TCP/IP-Linux-OS X Server network administrator, and the publisher of the webAfriqa© Portal, which includes the webGuinee© and the CBIM websites. A native Pular speaker and reader, he writes in French and in English about sociocultural issues and digital information topics.
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Karen Bernstein has been performing and teaching in the Washington, D.C., area for the past 30 years. She has performed as a principal dancer with the CityDance Ensemble, Karen & Alvin, Maryland Dance Theater, Jan Van Dyke and Dancers, Perlo/Bloom & Co., and CODA. As Associate Director of CityDance Ensemble from 2001-2005, she was an integral part in the company’s recognition as the “preeminent” dance company and dance education organization in the area. Currently she is working as Development Assistant for BlackRock Center for the Arts, as an Art Consultant for the Arts Education Initiative for the D.C. Collaborative, and a Dance Consultant for three local dance companies. Some of her teaching experience includes the University of Maryland, Georgetown University (also acting as Artistic Director of Georgetown Dance Theater), Dance Place, and hundreds of elementary, middle, and high schools and universities. In 2002, she taught a week of intensive dance workshops in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 2006, she traveled to India to teach workshops at the world renowned Darpana Academy of Performing Arts. Since 1995, Ms. Bernstein has worked as an experienced arts educator in Arts Integration for the Maryland State Arts Council, Maryland Artist Teacher Institute, D.C. Collaborative, Anne Arundel Artist Teacher Seminar, Young Audiences of Maryland, and University of Maryland’s Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies. She has been awarded numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Prince George’s Arts Council, and the Arts Council of Montgomery County.
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Arthur Coe and Lakita Stukes are co-founders of the Cowrie Shells African Drum & Dance Ensemble. They perform with the KanKouran West African Dance Company, an organization that has for over twenty years provided school programs, special interest programs, and cultural exchange programs, all aimed at promoting the understanding of West African heritage and culture.
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Edward A. DeCarbo was the Director of Education for the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian. Trained as an anthropologist, his work focuses on art in everyday life and aesthetics in Africa. His original research, the basis for his Ph.D. from Indiana University, was in northern Ghana. Since then, he has been an administrator and teacher in colleges and universities throughout North America. Prior to returning to New York, he directed the education efforts of the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian. He currently teaches art history and non-western cultural studies at the University of Maryland. His most recent work examines the role of the artist in African societies, both traditional and contemporary; the voice of the arts; human expression in social contexts; and what art tells us about each other.
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Karen S. Gallagher is Senior Associate for Communications and Partnership Development at the Arts Education Partnership (AEP). Prior to her work at AEP, she was Director of Development and Communications at the Maryland Humanities Council, and Senior Project Officer at Annenberg Media for over ten years, where she oversaw funding and managed the planning, creation, and outreach of educational materials, and online courses in video, print, and web for pre-K-12 and college-level teachers in the arts, reading, math, language arts, social studies, science, education theory, and foreign languages. In particular, she collaborated with AEP and other arts organizations on the development of the Annenberg Media series, “Connecting with the Arts,” which profiles three of the schools featured in Third Space: When Learning Matters, written by Richard J. Deasy and Lauren M. Stevenson. She has a B.F.A. in Museum Studies/Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University and a M.A.T. in Teaching, Museum Administration, and Education from George Washington University.
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Julie Geschwind is a full-time graduate student in the Masters in History of Decorative Arts Program through the Smithsonian Associates/Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design/Parsons School of Design. Her focus is on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century textile design. She is particularly interested in the influence of ethnographic textiles on contemporary textile design of Europe and the United States. She has a Masters degree in Industrial/Organisational Psychology and was an adjunct faculty member at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and worked in the field of employee counseling and training and development. Prior to entering the graduate program, she was a handweaver and owner of her own handweaving business for fifteen years, selling and exhibiting work in high end crafts shows and galleries. She currently has a curatorial internship for the summer at the National Museum of African Art.
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Erin L. Haney is a Research Associate with the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian. She specializes in West African photography, focusing on the history of early African photographers as well as modern and contemporary photographers and artists from Africa and its diasporas. She is also interested in ideas of representation, media and genre, and African technologies. Currently she is preparing a traveling exhibition on the larger history of African photography, as well as preparing two book manuscripts on the subject. She did her doctoral work at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
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Joseph C. Miller is the T. Cary Johnson, Jr., Professor of History at the University of Virginia and served from 1990 to 1995 as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His doctoral research compared the historical oral traditions in one region of Angola with written Portuguese colonial records for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eventuating in a monograph, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (1976), and numerous shorter studies. He placed the eighteenth-century history of Angola in its broader Atlantic (Brazilian and Portuguese) context in Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830. This study won the 1989 Melville J. Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association, for the best work in English in any field of African Studies. His current project, supported in 2004-05 by a Guggenheim Fellowship, is a world history of slavery.
Miller co-edited the Journal of African History from 1990 through 1996, served as history editor of the Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (4 vols.), co-edited the Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery (2 vols.), and is currently co-editing the New Encyclopedia of Africa (5 vols.).
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Alhaji Papa Susso, master kora player, traditional musician, oral historian, and director of Koriya Musa Center for Research in Oral Tradition, was born in the village of Sotuma Sere in the Upper River Division of The Republic of Gambia, West Africa. Papa Susso hails from a long line of Griots (traditional oral historians). His father taught him to play the kora, a 21-stringed harp-lute unique to the western-most part of Africa, when he was five years old. The kora was invented by the “Susso” family of the Mandinka tribe of the great Manding Empire.
In 1974, Susso resigned from a life of civil service in Africa to form his own cultural organization, The Manding Music and Dance Limited. The objectives of this organization include: a.) conducting research and carrying out studies on the history, traditions and ethnomusicology of Manding; b.) carrying on the business and assisting the performing artists in the presentation of music and folklore of Manding; and, c.) reviving, exposing, and promoting a better understanding and appreciation of the music culture of the Manding.
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Sydney Walker (Institute Facilitator) is Associate Professor of Art Education at The Ohio State University. Professor Walker is the author of Artmaking as Meaningmaking and has published in such journals as Studies in Art Education, the Journal of Art Education, and NAEA publications. She has co-authored a website on the work of international artist Sandy Skoglund for The Getty Center of Education in the Arts. She lectures and gives workshops at art centers, museums, and universities, locally and nationally. At the national level, Walker serves as a curriculum consultant for the Transforming Education Through the Arts Challenge project (TETAC), sponsored by the Annenburg Challenge and The Getty Center for Education in the Arts. She has also worked as curriculum consultant with the Virginia Beach City Schools since 1997 and recently for the Nebraska Art Council in Omaha. She served as the facilitator for Crossing Borders/Breaking Boundaries in 2000.