Full-Time Faculty
Suse Anderson
Suse Anderson, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Museum Studies at The George Washington University. Prior to joining GW, Anderson was Director of Audience Experience at The Baltimore Museum of Art, where she was responsible for creating a seamless and positive experience of the BMA for visitors to the museum and across its digital platforms. Read More
Catherine Anderson
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. Read More
Robert Baker
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
Douglas Boyce
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
Mary Buckley is Associate Professor of Dance and Director of the EJS Women’s Leadership Program at George Washington University. Read More
Dana Tai Soon Burgess
Dana Tai Soon Burgess is a leading American choreographer and cultural figure. He is the Smithsonian’s choreographer in residence. Burgess has been referred to as “not only a Washington Prize, but a national dance treasure” (Washington Post Pulitzer Prize dance critic Sarah Kaufman).Read More
Michele Carlson
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. Read More
Mary Coughlin
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
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. Read More
Aruna D’Souza
Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world.Read More
Andrea Hunter Dietz
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
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
Janis Goodman
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.Read More
Carl Gudenius
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.Read More
Philip Jacks
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.Read More
Sigridur Johannesdottir
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.Read More
Scott Jones
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.Read More
Loren Kajikawa
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 Kanter
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
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.Read More
Aasawari Kulkarni
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.Read More
Lisa Lipinski
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. Read More
Kerry McAleer-Keeler
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.Read More
Melina Misri
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. Read More
Eugene Montague
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.Read More
Maria del Carmen Montoya
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.Read More
Mika Natif
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.Read More
Bibiana Obler
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.Read More
Lauren Onkey
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
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. Read More
Kevin Patton
Kevin Patton is an artist and speculative designer whose primary mode of making is through creating interactive systems. He is active in the fields of multimedia theatre, experimental music, collaborative design, and interactive art. Kevin is also a frequent collaborator in installation, network art, and performance art projects.Read More
Siobhan Rigg
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. Read More
Lilien F. Robinson
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.Read More
Laura Schiavo
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.Read More
James Sham
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. Read More
Erin Speck
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.Read More
Heather Stebbins
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
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
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
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.Read More
Max van Balgooy
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.Read More
Allyson Vieira
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.Read More
Nadia Volchansky
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.Read More
Barbara von Barghahn
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
Tanya Wetenhall
A specialist in dress history, Professor Wetenhall’s teaching encompasses fashion and costume history, world dress practices, ballet design history, material culture and the decorative arts. Her research explores the manifestation of national identity in design and the aesthetic and cultural intersections of Russia, France, and Great Britain in the late modern period. Read More
John Wetenhall
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.Read More
Sidney Monroe Williams
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. Read More
Maida Withers
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, over 150 dances of breadth and vision, involving a process of experimentation and collaboration. She has been creating visionary collaborations with global partners for more than 50 years. Read More
