Welcome New Faculty to the 2024/2025 Academic Year

New Full-Time Faculty: 
 
Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies

Ramírez-Soto is a film and media historian whose areas of research include transnational cinema and television, feminist film histories, and documentary. Ramírez-Soto is interested in looking at the interconnections of political violence, forced migration, and transnational modes of production, focusing on Latin America. Ramírez-Soto is currently working on a book tentatively titled Transnational Experimental Television: The Global South on European Screens, for which she received a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a François Chevalier Fellowship from the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study and Casa de Velázquez. Before joining our full-time faculty, Ramírez-Soto served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University and the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University.

Tory Bailey, Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, Theatre

Bailey served as executive director of the Theatre Development Fund for over 20 years. She is also renowned for her work on Triple Play, a project to increase audiences’ appetite for new and risky work, for a study of American playwrights that culminated in Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, and for her nearly 20-year association with Manhattan Theatre Club. She had served several terms on the Tony Awards Nominating Committee and received the Lucille Lortel Foundation Edith Oliver Service to Off Broadway Award in May 2023 as well as a Tony Honors in June 2023. Prior to joining our full-time faculty, Bailey served as an Adjunct Professor of Theatre for over 20 years.

Scott Whitehurst, Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, Theatre

As an actor, Whitehurst has extensive experience in Shakespeare and Classical Theatre. He has served as co-head of MFA Acting at The New School’s College of Performing Arts and has taught at other colleges, as well as at the NY Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, and Circle in the Square Theatre School. As a private teacher, Whitehurst runs The WhiteRobin Group with his wife, actor-singer Angela Robinson. Their clients work on and off-Broadway, in Regional Theatre, and in Film and Television. Prior to joining our full-time faculty, Whitehurst served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Theatre.

Elizabeth Kling, Lecturer in Discipline, Film

Kling is a NY/LA Editor and Producer working in the film and television industry. Most recently she was Executive Producer on the Netflix series Grand Army with Katie Cappiello and Joshua Donen. Currently Elizabeth is developing a series in London with Director Tricia Brock. Currently Kling is developing a series in London with Director Tricia Brock. Prior to joining our full-time faculty, Kling taught at the Sundance Lab in Park City, and served as an Adjunct Professor of Editing for many years. 

Term Appointments, 2024-2025:
 
Daphne Arthur, Assistant Professor, Visual Arts (2024-2025)

Arthur is an Afro-Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist. Her work combines painting, sculpture, and drawing with smoke, paint, and clay to compose realist and surrealist scenes that investigate individual and collective history, language, symbolism, and memory. She is the recipient of The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship, the Anne Critz fellowship, The Ald Held Fellowship at the American Academy of Rome, the Vermont Studio Center’s Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and The NYFA Queens Art Fund: New Work Grant. Arthur previously held an Adjunct Assistant Professor appointment in the Visual Arts Program.

Kenny Rivero, Assistant Professor, Visual Arts (2024-2025)

Rivero’s work, which spans paintings, collage, drawings, and sculpture, explores the complexity of identity through narrative images, language, and symbolism. Rivero’s work is represented in notable public collections including The Baltimore Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; El Museo del Barrio, New York. NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Collection of Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL. Rivero previously held an Adjunct Assistant Professor appointment in the Visual Arts Program.

Keri Bertino, Lecturer in Discipline, Writing (2024-2025)

Bertino is a fiction, nonfiction, and humor writer whose work has appeared in Joyland, Topic, BOMB, Electric Literature, The Millions, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere, and will be featured in the forthcoming anthology PARENT-SLASH-WRITER: Essays on parenting while writing. Bertino leads courses in writing pedagogy and fiction at the School of the Arts, and will serve as faculty advisor for Columbia Artists/Teachers in AY 24-25. An award-winning educator, Keri has taught creative and academic writing for over 20 years at Baruch College/CUNY and The Cooper Union, as well as in public and independent K-12 settings in Baltimore and New York City. Bertino was first appointed to our adjunct faculty in Spring 2017.

Lars Horn, Lecturer in Discipline, Writing (2024-2025)

Horn is a writer and translator working in literary and experimental nonfiction. Their first book, Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award. The recipient of the Tin House Without Borders Residency and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Writers Workshops, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Lars previously served as adjunct faculty during the 2023-24 academic year.

Hilary Leichter, Lecturer in Discipline, Writing (2024-2025)

Leichter is the author of the novels Terrace Story and Temporary, which was a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Leichter’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, The New York Times, Conjunctions and elsewhere. Her work in Harper’s Magazine won the 2021 National Magazine Award in Fiction. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was the summer 2022 Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig. Leichter first joined the adjunct faculty at SOA during the Spring 2020 semester.

Yasmine Seale, Lecturer in Discipline, Writing (2024-2025)

Seale’s work includes poetry, translation, criticism, and visual art. Among her books are The Annotated Arabian Nights, described by The New Yorker as “an electric new translation,” and Agitated Air, a collaboration with Robin Moger responding to the visionary poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi. She was a 2022-23 Fellow of the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and a 2023-24 Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her translation of The Ring of the Dove by Ibn Hazm, a treatise on the nature of love written in 11th-century Cordoba, is forthcoming from the Library of Arabic Literature. Seale previously held an Adjunct Assistant Professor appointment in the Writing Program.

Jane Crager, Early Career Fellow appointed at rank of Lecturer in the Discipline of Writing (2024-2025)

Crager earned her BA at Villanova University and her MFA at Columbia School of Arts. She served as Columbia University Life’s Events Council Lead for the 2023-2024 academic year and is actively engaged with Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning. She attended the New York State Summer Writers Institute in 2021 and 2022.

Celine Ipek, Early Career Fellow appointed at rank of Lecturer in the Discipline of Writing (2024-2025)

Ipek is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her fiction is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. She is the recipient of a De Alba Fellowship, and has also received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Adelia Khan, Early Career Fellow appointed at rank of Lecturer in the Discipline of Writing (2024-2025)

Khan is from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She received her BA at Wellesley College and recently completed an MFA in Nonfiction at Columbia University, where she was the online columns editor at the Columbia Journal.