Full-Time Faculty

Clement Akpang

Assistant Professor of Art History, Art History Program

Clement Akpang, Corcoran's Art History Program, holds a PhD in art and art theory/history from the University of Bedfordshire in Luton, U.K. Prior to coming to GW, he was a Junior Core Research Fellow for the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Central European University in Hungary.

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Catherine Anderson

Assistant Professor & Director of Graduate Studies, Interior Architecture

Catherine Anderson has worked at several architecture & interior design firms during her career and now dedicates her time to educating students on understanding architectural concepts. In 2013, Professor Anderson participated with some of the Interior Architecture Program's students in the United States Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon.

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Suse Anderson

Program Head & Graduate Advisor; Assistant Professor, Museum Studies

Suse Anderson, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Museum Studies at The George Washington University.
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Robert Baker

Associate Professor, Performance Director of Performance Studies Producer, Corcoran Events

Robert Baker has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Music for 25 years. A singer who performs with the Metropolitan Opera, the Washington National Opera, the National Symphony and with choral organizations across the country, he focuses on new music and new ways of thinking about and presenting the traditional repertoire. He teaches voice lessons and in the classroom. Read More  


Lisa Beley

Voice & Speech, Classical Acting Program

Lisa Ann Beley is head of Voice and Text at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. She obtained a BFA from the University of British Columbia and as an actor worked in theatre, film and television as well as established herself as one of Vancouver’s top voice-over talents.
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Douglas Boyce

Professor, Composition

Douglas Boyce writes chamber music that draws on Renaissance traditions and modernist aesthetics, building rich rhythmic structures that shift between order, fragmentation, elegance, and ferocity. Read More  


Mary Buckley

Associate Professor of Dance, Theatre & Dance Program, Director, EJS Women's Leadership Program

Mary Buckley is Associate Professor of Dance and Director of the EJS Women’s Leadership Program at George Washington University.

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Michele Carlson

Associate Professor

Michele Carlson is a multidisciplinary practitioner working across the fields of art, writing, publishing, and collective practice. Carlson is one of three founding members of the arts collective Related Tactics, which facilitates projects at the intersection of race, art, and culture.

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Marc Choi

Assistant Professor, Graphic Design Program

Marc Choi is a graphic designer and design educator based in Washington, DC. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at the George Washington University.

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Mary Coughlin

Associate Professor and Head of Museum Studies Online Certificate

Professor Coughlin has an interest in the conservation challenges of contemporary museum collections, particularly with respect to plastic. Before coming to GW full time, she worked for five years in the Objects Conservation Laboratory of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History where she conserved objects as diverse as FDR’s leg braces and Star War’s C-3PO and R2-D2. Read More  


Douglas Crawford

Assistant Professor and MA Advisor Interior Architecture, Interior Architecture

Douglas Crawford, AIA is an award winning architect whose professional work is focused on projects that are regionally relevant and site specific, while his academic interests relate to the intersection of digital methods within design pedagogy.

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Andrea Hunter Dietz

Assistant Professor & Director of Graduate Studies, Exhibition Design

Andrea Dietz is an architect, curator, and writer. Her creative and scholarly practice is focused on “architecture(s) of and on display” – or the translation and exhibition of the built environment. Andrea has worked in architecture research and exhibition design with Bestor Architecture, Chu + Gooding Architects, and independently. Read More  


Alexander Dumbadze

Associate Professor & Undergraduate Advisor, Art History

Alexander Dumbadze is Associate Professor of Art History. His essays and criticism have been published in a variety of national and international publications. He is also a co-founder and former president of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians. He teaches courses on contemporary art, theory, and historiography. Read More  


Matt Eich

Assistant Professor, Photojournalism Undergraduate Advisor, B.A. & B.F.A. in Photojournalism

Matt Eich is a photographic essayist working on long-form projects related to memory, family, community, and the American condition. Matt was an Artist-in-Residence at Light Work in 2013, and at a Robert Rauschenberg Residency in 2019.

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Janis Goodman

Professor, Art and Design, Studio Arts Program

Janis Goodman is a DC based visual artist. She has been the arts reviewer for the Washington PBS affiliate WETA TV, Around Town television program since 2003. Her work is in numerous American and international public collections.
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Carl Gudenius

Program Head, Theatre and Dance Professor, Undergraduate Advisor, Production Design

Carl Gudenius is the Program Head of Theatre & Dance. In addition to teaching scenic and lighting design at GW and directing its Graduate Production Design Program, Professor Gudenius is an active professional designer.
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Schillica Howard

Assistant Professor of Museum Studies, Museum Studies Program

Schillica Howard is an Assistant Professor of Museum Studies, bringing a fresh perspective and passion for collections management to the field. Before joining the faculty at GW, Schillica worked primarily with African American collections, museums, and cultural institutions as a curator, collections manager, and registrar focusing on preserving marginalized narratives. Read More  


Terry Ican

Interim Technical Director, Theatre & Dance Program

This is Terry's return to George Washington University Theatre, previously acting as the Production Manager. Terry Ican has 30+ years’ experience in theater and television scenery construction and technical management in the Washington, DC area. Read More  


Philip Jacks

Professor, Art History Director of Visiting Artists & Scholars Committee

Philip Jacks is a Professor in the Art History Program within the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. Most recently, Professor Jacks designed and oversaw construction of the new Seminar Room and Graduate Lounge on the first floor of Smith Hall of Art.
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Sigridur Johannesdottir

Associate Professor of Costume Design & Technology, Theatre & Dance Program

Sigridur is a costume designer who specializes and focuses her teaching on reproducing historical costumes based on research as well as dance costumes. She is the resident costume designer for Washington Stage Guild (DC), Ambassador Theatre (DC), and MetroStage in Alexandria VA.
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Scott Jones

Assistant Professor of Interior Architecture, Interior Architecture Program

Scott Jones is an Assistant Professor of Interior Architecture, and an active professional industrial designer with a focus on furniture, lighting, product and interior design. Scott combines playful curiosity with a research-driven, human-centered approach to inform his designs.
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Loren Kajikawa

Program Head & Associate Professor, History & Culture

Loren Kajikawa is an associate professor of music. His main area of research and teaching is American music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special attention to the dynamics of race and politics. Read More  


Jodi I. Kanter

Professor, Theatre

As a scholar, she has been trained to apply the theoretical lens of performance to everyday practices and so, while her methodology is consistent, the subjects of her work vary wildly—from, for example, end of life health care to contemporary dramatic literature to the American Presidency. Read More  


Dean Kessmann

Program Head, Studio Arts Professor, Photography

Professor Kessmann's photographs–alternately made with scanners, cameras, camera-less darkroom processes, and most recently, screenshots from computer monitors–comment on image-making technologies and contemporary consumer culture. Professor Kessmann teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
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Anna Jayne Kimmel

Assistant Professor, Dance

Anna Kimmel's work lies at the intersection of dance and legal studies, studying the relation between francophone histories and moments of public assembly.
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Aasawari Kulkarni

Assistant Professor, Undergraduate Advisor, Graphic Design Program

Aasawari Kulkarni is a designer, educator, and writer, originally from India. By employing tools of language, poetry, and empathy, her work explores the intersection of human behaviour and culture with design.
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Lisa Lipinski

Associate Professor of Art History, Art History Program

Lisa Lipinski's teaching and research interests include modern and contemporary art and theoretical approaches to the visual arts, Surrealism and the art of René Magritte, the body in modern and contemporary art, and Abraham Lincoln’s influence on America art and culture.

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Dr. Shana Mashego

Visiting Assistant Professor of African American Music

As an avid researcher, Dr. Mashego's work probes into the origin story of African Americans, as well as their contributions, struggles, triumphs, and disparities while living inside of the United States of America. Dr. Mashego’s research includes sharp focus upon the contributions of the African American musician while studying the ever evolving African American cultural narrative. Read More  


Kerry McAleer-Keeler

Associate Professor, Art and Design, Studio Arts Program

Ms. McAleer-Keeler currently serves on the Steering Committee of the College Book Art Association, working to advance and promote academic book arts education by encouraging its development and practice. Her studio is part of the Liberty Town Arts Workshop in Fredericksburg, VA.
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Melina Misri

Visiting Assistant Professor Interior Architecture; Undergraduate Advisor, Interior Architecture Program

Melina graduated from the Masters of Architecture program at the University of Oregon in Portland and from the Bachelor of Science in Architecture program at the University of Maryland in College Park.
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Eugene Montague

Associate Professor, Musicianship & Theory Undergraduate Advisor, Music

Eugene Montague joined the faculty at the George Washington University in the fall of 2009, having previously taught for several years at the University of Central Florida. Professor Montague's research focuses on many of the ways in which music interacts with movement, including music and dance, theories of performance, and links between musical experience and human consciousness.
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Maria del Carmen Montoya

Associate Professor Sculpture and Spatial Practices, M.F.A. in Fine Arts and Social Practice, Studio Arts Program

Maria del Carmen Montoya operates in the contested ground between art and social activism. Her primary medium is the communal process of making meaning. As an artist, she seeks ways to catalyze this natural social phenomenon with situations that insist on the power of human-scale intervention in the presumed inevitability of everyday life.
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Mika Natif

Associate Professor of Art History; Director of Graduate Studies

Mika Natif is an Islamic Art Historian who focuses on trans-cultural artistic connections between Muslim societies and Europe, diversity and religious tolerance in Islamic art, and the role of women as patrons, artists, and subject matter in the pre-modern Persianate spheres.
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Bibiana Obler

Associate Professor of Art History; Transfer and Study Abroad Art History Program

Professor Obler's research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary art and craft from the late nineteenth century to the present, with emphases on twentieth-century avant-gardes, theories of gender and cross-cultural representation, photography, applied arts, and intellectual history.
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Lauren Onkey

Director, Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, Professor, History and Culture, Music Program

Lauren Onkey is the director of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University. Dr. Onkey, a longtime educator, scholar, producer and museum professional, leads the school’s combination of programs across its diverse fields of art and study, in the context of the school's tradition of community engagement. Read More  


Turker Ozdogan

Professor, Ceramics, Studio Arts Program

As a professional artist, Turker Ozdogan has achieved national and international recognition through a variety of research grants and awards, juried expositions, and solo exhibitions.

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Kevin Patton

Assistant Professor, Director of Graduate Studies & Undergraduate Advisor, Interaction Design

Kevin Patton is a designer, musician, and creative technologist whose projects often include novel approaches to physical and computational interaction in expressive contexts. His research interests include expressive technological systems, automation and agency, visualization, musical thinking, and human centered design.
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Siobhan Rigg

Program Head, Design; Associate Professor, New Media Studio Arts Program

Siobhan Rigg is Associate Professor of Studio Arts and currently also serves as Program Head of Design. Rigg is a multidisciplinary artist, teacher, and writer whose creative and research interests center on social and environmental micro-histories.

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Lilien F. Robinson

Professor, Art History

A specialist in nineteenth-century European art, Professor Robinson’s primary research focus since 2003 has been on Serbian painting. Her most recent research includes a comparative study of Serbian and French history painting in “History Painting: Its Transformative Implications,” (in press) and a long term book project on nineteenth-century Serbian painting.
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Laura Schiavo

Deputy Director, Corcoran; Associate Professor & Graduate Advisor, Museum Studies; Faculty Advisor Museum Studies Program

Before joining the Museum Studies faculty in 2009, Professor Schiavo worked in museums in the DC area, including the City Museum, Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, and the National Building Museum, where she curated Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s.
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James Sham

Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor, Art

James Sham is an inter-disciplinary artist whose research includes themes of translation, performance, social practice and innovation. Sham’s work involves multiple areas of focus from goldfish pigment extraction, to Artificial Intelligence, and even using eye-tracking technology to study Interpretation in deaf culture.

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Erin A. Speck

Assistant Professor, Interior Architecture Program

Professor Speck's areas of expertise include AutoCAD, Revit, research methods, lighting, preservation, and building technology. She teaches courses on computer technologies, lighting, construction methods and materials, while going beyond the classroom to expose students to many real-world experiences and resources.
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Heather Stebbins

Assistant Professor, Electronic & Computer Music

Heather Stebbins is a composer, technologist, synthesist, and educator based in Washington, DC, where she is Assistant Professor of Electronic and Computer Music at George Washington University.Read More  


Susan Sterner

Associate Professor, Art and Design Director of Graduate Studies, New Media Photojournalism

Susan Sterner started her career as a photojournalist freelancing with national and international publications while based in New Orleans, La. She worked for the Associated Press as a staff photographer, based in Mississippi and California. With the AP she covered domestic issues such as immigration, child labor and families in poverty as well as U.S. border issues and social change in Haiti. Read More  


John Traub

Assistant Professor, Production Management & Technology

John is currently the Assistant Professor of Production Management & Technology at the George Washington University, where he teaches numerous classes in Production Design and serves as the Technical Director for the Corcoran Theatre & Dance Program. He also works as a subject matter expert in Arts Management, Production Design and fabrication for a large variety of clients throughout the East Coast. Read More  


Stephanie Travis

Program Head, Interior Architecture; Associate Professor, Interior Architecture Program

Stephanie Travis is the Program Head of Interior Architecture. She received her Master of Architecture with distinction and Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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Max van Balgooy

Assistant Professor & Graduate Advisor, Museum Studies

Max A. van Balgooy is a national leader in historical interpretation and community engagement, with extensive experience in developing solutions in collaboration with diverse audiences, including volunteers, staff, trustees, residents, scholars, design professionals, business leaders, and elected officials.
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Allyson Vieira

Assistant Professor & Coordinator, Foundations; Undergraduate Advisor BA & BFA in Fine Arts, Dual BA in Art History & Fine Arts

Professor Vieira has exhibited extensively both internationally and in the U.S., including institutional projects at Kunsthalle Basel, CH, Swiss Institute, NY, Storm King Art Center, NY, PinchukArtCentre, UA, Non-Objectif Sud, FR, Frieze Projects, NY, The Public Art Fund, NY, The Highline, NY, and SculptureCenter, NY, as well as recent solo gallery exhibitions at Daniel Faria, Toronto, CA, Company, NY, Klaus von Nichtssagend, NY, Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo, BR, The Breeder, Athens, GR, and Laurel Gitlen, NY.
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Nadia V. Volchansky

Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Advisor, Interior Architecture

Nadia Volchansky is a creative leader with experience in pedagogy, strategy and activism. She is a published researcher, an established designer, and a strategic problem solver, and is recognized for her resiliency, a high level of commitment and a drive for innovation.
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Barbara von Barghahn

Program Head of Art History, Professor of Art History, Art History Program

Professor von Barghahn is Professor and Program Head of Art History. She teaches Northern Renaissance and Baroque art, Spanish and Portuguese art, colonial art of Latin America and Brazil. In 2011, Professor von Barghahn was the curatorial advisor to the National Gallery of Art exhibition, The Invention of Glory: Afonso V and the Pastrana Tapestries, which traveled to museums in Dallas and San Diego. Read More  


John Wetenhall

Director, The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum; Associate Professor, Museum Studies

A museum director for over two decades, John Wetenhall served for nine years as Executive Director of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, leading a $150 million capital and endowment transformation.
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Tanya Wetenhall

Assistant Professor, Design History

Tanya Wetenhall teaches costume and textiles as material and visual culture. With a focus on object-based teaching and learning, her courses encompass fashion and costume history, fashion in art, world dress practices and the cultural histories of the theatre and ballet design. Read More  


Alec Wild

Director, Acting, Text, Classical Acting Program

Alec Wild was Founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning Folio Theatre in Chicago, and Founder/Producing Director of the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Minnesota.
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Sidney Monroe Williams

Assistant Professor of Theatre, Theatre & Dance Program

Sidney Monroe Williams (they/them) is a community-based theatre artist whose work is situated at the intersections of race, gender and class. Through creative strategies, Sidney facilitates art-making and conversations with communities to spark dialogue, raise visibility and celebrate marginalized bodies.
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Maida Withers

Professor & Undergraduate Advisor, Dance

Known for her daring in movement and innovation as a choreographer, Maida has created a significant body of work for Maida Withers Dance Construction Company.
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Caroline Woolard

William Wilson Corcoran Visiting Professor of Community Engagement (2023-2024), Social Practice

Caroline Woolard's work has been commissioned by and exhibited in major national and international museums including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and Creative Time. Woolard’s work has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS. She was the 2018–20 inaugural Walentas Fellow at Moore College of Art and Design and the inaugural 2019–20 Artist in Residence for INDEX at the Rose Museum, and a 2020-2021 Fellow at the Center for Cultural Innovation. Read More  


Ning Yu

Assistant Professor, Performance Director, Chamber Ensembles

Praised for her "taut and impassioned performance" by the New York Times, pianist Ning Yu performs with vigor and dedication for traditional and avant-garde repertoire of the 20th and 21st century on stages across the United States, Europe and Asia.
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