CIRCA Catalyst is an ongoing series promoting conversations around transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research that fuses the performing and visual arts with other fields of inquiry and scholarship. A catered lunch, with vegetarian options, will be provided by CIRCA (the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts).

Catalyst Program:
Towson University Professor Jan Baum is the Executive Director of 3D Maryland, a statewide leadership initiative to advance engagement with 3D digital tools. Her talk will focus on innovation with regard to rapid technologies such as 3D printing which have application across disciplines as well as the 3D Maryland initiative.

UMBC Associate Professor Eric Dyer creates films and installation art from a mix of animation, sculpture, and cinema. He will focus on recent projects and experiments that use digital fabrication to bring computer generated motion imagery into the ‘real’ world.

Presenter Bios:
Jan Baum is an innovator and evangelist for making the world a better place whether through technology, design, education, or business. An early adopter and passionate technologist she is always trying new things. As the Executive Director of 3D Maryland she is leading Maryland’s rapid tech ecosystem coordinating expertise and resources to build high-level engagement throughout Maryland across industries. As an educator with 20-years of experience Baum has developed leading edge curriculum from social design to digital fabrication, and traditional, digital, and hybrid and academic programs. She created Object Lab, a state-of-the-art rapid technology and digital fabrication at Towson University, and was a finalist for Smart CEO Leader in Technology award in 2012. Her own work has been exhibited and published internationally and is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Baum presents and publishes regularly.

Eric Dyer is an artist, filmmaker, experimental animator, and educator. His award-winning films have screened internationally at numerous festivals, including the Chicago International Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, South by Southwest, and the Ottawa, Annecy, Melbourne, and London International Animation Festivals. His work has also been exhibited at the Exploratorium, the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art, Ars Electronica, and the Cairo and Venice Biennales.

He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in filmmaking for travel to Denmark in 2005, and was a New Frontier Artist at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. As a member of the Visual Arts faculty at UMBC in Baltimore, he teaches animation and brings students and symphony orchestras together to create music visualizations and animation performances. In 2008 his students presented with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He has taught workshops at institutions such as ECNU in Shanghai and CalArts. Dyer has received Animasivo, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and Ammerman Center for Art and Technology commissions, and has recently been awarded an Imaging Research Center Summer Research Fellowship, Creative Capital grant, and Guggenheim Fellowship. He is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Admission is free.