On December 5, the campus celebrated this year’s Arts+ initiative with five concurrent events featuring UMBC students, faculty, and guest artists. In a sold out concert in Linehan Concert Hall, the UMBC Symphony Orchestra and String Chamber Orchestra, directed by assistant professor Philip Mann, performed Alexander Glazunov’s Violin Concerto, featuring professor Airi Yoshioka, and works by professor Linda Dusman and Rich Sigwald ’03, music.

Down the hall in the Black Box Theatre, UMBC Theatre presented Street Scenes, with text by Langston Hughes and his contemporaries, with music by Kurt Weill, adapted and directed by associate professor Eve Muson, with musical direction by adjunct professor Andrew Hann—also to a sold out house.

The Department of Dance presented the Fall Dance Showcase on the stage of the Proscenium Theatre, featuring striking capstone works by senior students and independent student research.

The PAHB lecture hall was home to a Film and Animation Showcase, featuring works by 18 students and recent graduates of UMBC’s Intermedia and Digital Arts (IMDA) program.

The Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture presented a collaboration between 2023 MacArthur Fellow María Magdalena Campos-Pons and musician Kamaal Malak, known collectively as KaMag. Their work, entitled Vignettes in 3 Sessions: An Immersive Ancestral Experience, delighted a capacity audience and was followed by the launch of a new public projection by KaMag, I Am Soil — My Tears Are Water, in the Fine Arts Building amphitheatre.

The Arts+ initiative will continue in spring 2026 with performances by Baltimore Dance Project and Orange Grove Dance, a faculty art exhibition, a lecture by visual artist Lynda Barry, a production of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and more than a dozen music concerts by faculty and guest artists. A full schedule will be available in January 2026.

UMBC’s annual collaborative art exhibition with Towson University, Spark, opened its doors this November at The Peale, Baltimore’s neighborhood museum, and has continued to delight audiences with its captivating installations. This year’s show, titled SPARK VII: Industrial Afterglow, gathers more than 20 artists working across sculpture, installation, sound, photography, video, textiles, and ecological documentation to explore what lingers in the wake of industrial and technological systems.

In addition to those highlighted in photos, participating artists from UMBC include Chelsey Barrera, B.F.A.’27, visual arts; McCoy Chance, M.F.A. ’25, intermedia and digital arts; Danielle d’Amico, M.F.A. ’19, intermedia and digital arts; Gracie Horne, B.F.A.’27, visual arts; Leah Clare Michaels, M.F.A. ’19, intermedia and digital arts; Edgar Reyes, assistant professor of visual arts; Sarah G. Sharp, associate professor of visual arts; Samantha Sethi, adjunct professor of visual arts; and Mariia Usova, M.F.A. ’25, intermedia and digital arts.

“From bioplastic light sculptures and cyanotype archives to rewilded cityscapes and AI-coded sea monsters, the exhibition casts light — literal and symbolic — on the residues of industry, the reconfigurations of ecosystems, and the speculative futures already blooming in the present,” says Liz Faust, who curated the exhibition on behalf of both universities.

”As a former industrial port city undergoing rapid urban transformation, Baltimore provides a vital lens through which to consider the aftermath of extractive systems and the possibilities of repair,” notes Faust. “Spark asks: What remains after infrastructures collapse? How do ecologies adapt and resist? What does it mean to imagine otherwise? By attending to what still glows, hums, or grows through the ruins, this exhibition transforms light from metaphor into method — revealing the unseen, mourning the obsolete, and illuminating paths toward speculative futures.”

Spark continues on display through this weekend, December 7, with free admission. On Saturday, December 6, at 11 a.m., the exhibition will host a panel discussion featuring assistant professor of visual arts Erik Millikin and Alexi Scheiber, M.F.A. ’25, intermedia and digital arts.

Top image: artwork by McCoy Chance.
Photography by Brad Ziegler/UMBC.

As International Education Week 2025 comes to a close, we’ve rounded up a few of the many ways Retrievers engage globally through their work and studies. Even though it has been a particularly trying time for international students, “…more UMBC students studied abroad in Academic Year 2024 – 25 than ever before. Our students are discovering new perspectives, building global connections, and transforming their futures through these life-changing experiences,” says Katie Heird, director of education abroad and global learning at UMBC. Here are a few ways international students and Retrievers who have gone abroad play a role in the lifeblood of UMBC.

1. Who is Fulbright material?

UMBC’s six 2025 – 2026 Fulbright U.S. Student Program recipients share their not-so-secret recipe for success. Deciding to apply for a Fulbright is just the first step, and with the support of UMBC’s Center for Global Engagement, which hosts Fulbright information sessions in the spring for undergraduate, graduate, and recent alumni. Retrievers can apply to earn a master’s, conduct research, or be an English Teaching Assistant in more than 160 countries. With the UMBC 2025 – 2026 Fulbrights already settled in Taiwan, Norway, and Indonesia, Belgium, Israel, and Germany, these alumni are eager to share tips to inspire and prepare the next generations of Fulbright Retrievers.

Additionally, this year, four UMBC faculty and staff members received highly competitive Fulbright U.S. Scholar awards to teach, conduct research, and foster cross-cultural connections globally. The recipients span all three UMBC colleges and comprise three faculty members and one staff member. The UMBC awardees are connecting with international partners in areas of shared interest. Augusto Casas, an associate teaching professor of information systems, is working in Colombia; Cynthia Wagner, a teaching professor of biological sciences, went to Kyrgyzstan; Irene Chan, a professor of visual arts, is in Romania; and Tom Penniston, M.A. ’09, TESOL, Ph.D. ’14, language, literacy, and culture, the coordinator of learning analytics in the Division of Information Technology, is working in Croatia.

2. Building intentional international connections

A six-person UMBC team built international connections at the “PIWOT – World of Technology” conference, held in early 2025 in Mumbai, India. The science and technology conference is organized by the alumni association for graduates of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and attracts many of the leaders in science and technology in India and around the world. The CEO of Alphabet, Inc. (Google’s parent company), the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and the CEO of IBM are all graduates of IITs. 

This year’s PIWOT conference focused on the impact of technology across multiple dimensions of life, from the professional to the personal. UMBC’s Anupam Joshi, acting dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology, took part as a speaker on a panel about the impact of technology on education, and the UMBC booth also displayed the low-cost infant incubator developed by Professor Govind Rao.

3. International research collaboration challenges assumptions

Thanks to funding from the German Academic Exchange Service, Lorenz Kopp and Björn Michelmann, mechanical engineering students from Germany’s Regensburg University of Applied Sciences, came to UMBC to conduct research with UMBC’s mechanical engineering professor, Paris von Lockette. The project was part of a bigger assumption-questioning enterprise—in particular, probing the behavior of materials called soft magnets. Kopp’s and Michelmann’s advisor at Regensburg University of Applied Sciences knew von Lockette through the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and together they arranged the details of the two-month visit with the help of the Office of International Students and Scholars at UMBC. 

While Kopp and Michelmann spent plenty of time in the lab during their visit, they also had chances to explore the areas surrounding UMBC on weekends. They visited the National Aquarium in Baltimore, took in a Baltimore Ravens football game, and drove to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. They also enjoyed campus life, attending Homecoming weekend, and regularly visiting the Retriever Activity Center to work out.

4. Exploring politics in a global context, virtually

Professor Filomeno’s 2024 Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Brazil project on climate change equips students with the technical and interpersonal skills to thrive in professional online international and intercultural environments. COIL makes international scholarship and intercultural learning accessible by removing barriers of cost and travel while preparing students with essential skills for future in-person exchanges. COIL Brazil was part of Filomeno’s Global Citizenship class in collaboration with former colleague Clarissa Dri, a professor of international relations at his alma mater, the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil.

The ongoing Virtual Tandem Conversation project was created by Susanne Sutton, a teaching professor of German, and Talke Macfarland, a visiting lecturer of German in UMBC’s Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication. They established the program during COVID-19 to help UMBC students learning German and German students learning English socialize while continuing to improve their language skills.

The actual tandem meetings are entirely student-driven and take place outside of the classroom—each tandem pair arranges virtual meetings according to their schedule. Tandem participants have gone beyond the virtual classroom, such as UMBC Golden ID Program student Rebecca Smith, who, while on a recent trip to France, hopped over to Germany to visit Gertrud Krause-Traudes, her partner in UMBC’s Virtual Tandem Conversation project. After three semesters of virtual conversations in German and English, Smith was happy to meet Krause-Traudes in person.

5. Science that bridges two worlds

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted lives worldwide, Greema Regmi began her Ph.D. in UMBC’s atmospheric physics program. Studying remotely from her home in Nepal, she navigated a grueling schedule due to the time difference. Now in her fifth year, Regmi’s perseverance has earned her NASA’s prestigious Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) fellowship, which will provide up to $50,000 annually for up to three years to fuel her research on atmospheric dust.

Regmi has been able to accomplish so much in part because of the supportive community she found at UMBC, after finally arriving on campus in fall 2021. Regmi’s journey bridges her unique perspectives as a student in Nepal and the U.S. At UMBC, she’s embraced broader opportunities. “I think here you can push the limit. I don’t even know what the limit is in the U.S. Here you can dream more and be more experimental,” she observes.

Grounded in the UMBC physics department’s community of support, Regmi’s confidence has only grown since her arrival in Maryland. “There’s always a place for my opinion, which is very nice. Because of that, and all of the experiences I’ve had, now I have the confidence to start my own project,” she explains. “And that’s why I think now I’m confident to go back home, lead something there, and be helpful in some small way.”

Learn more about UMBC’s international opportunities.

Strolling through campus, you might have noticed the blend of architectural styles, with a strong leaning toward brick brutalism (nicknamed “brickalism”), normalized in the 1960s; a typical look for a chemistry or engineering building. But you’ve probably wondered why the Fine Arts building doesn’t look so “artsy”?

From the outside, it may appear like a stereotypical late 60s/early 70s college building. But inside, you’ll find brilliant creative minds hard at work, taking photos, painting, or rendering animations. Now, thanks to UMBC’s new Arts+ initiative, a public art installation by the Cheeky Magpie Collective—made up of more than 20 alumni and current UMBC artists—is transforming the windows of the first four floors of the Fine Arts Building. The bold colors and patterns give visitors an idea of the artistic processes and world-expanding learning that’s going on behind the facade.

“The Fine Arts Building was really integral to our development, not only as designers but as growing students, and now alumni. All the effort we put into this design is a direct reflection of how amazing all the people in the building are,” says Thomas Hammond ’25, design, a member of the artist collective.

Funding for creative endeavors

This fall, UMBC launched Arts+ to celebrate and connect our vibrant and multifaceted arts scene throughout campus and with the region. Through this initiative, funding was allocated for a public art installation. The Cheeky Magpie Collective’s pitch to install a window treatment on the Fine Arts Building, where many of them spent most of their undergraduate career, was accepted. Collective members Gwen Knott ’25, design, and Jayden Rhodes ’25, design, were the lead designers of the project, with administrators Jalen Boyd ’25, design,Hammond, and Ni Truong ’25, design.

“I taught with the students who are now the Cheeky Magpie Collective in one of our capstone design classes,” says Kelley Bell, M.F.A. ’06, imaging and digital arts, the visual arts coordinator for Arts+. “It’s almost magical to see what we at UMBC have taught them in action. This was a fantastic opportunity for visual arts and UMBC to shine and give visitors to the campus and our UMBC community a new way to see our campus.”

Members of the collective say that by showcasing the Fine Arts Building in an attention-calling way puts a crack in the perception of UMBC as “just a STEM school,” bringing the groundbreaking art by UMBC students and faculty out into the light. The building and the faculty working inside were “great creative inspirations to the collective as student designers,” says Hammond. The art installation highlights this creativity, becoming a beacon of encouragement and inspiration for emerging artists.

A meaningful mark

“I knew this project would be perfect to support a group of alums who are doing something exceptional in forming this collective,” says Bell who was the coordinator and art director for the job, “but the design and thinking behind that design was all theirs,” she adds.

“It felt like we were able to really contribute to the university and leave a meaningful mark on what arts can do for a community and how we can use it to build up our already pretty great university,” says Boyd.

The visual style is a fusion of different inspirations, selected for their use of pattern, color, repeating motifs, and geometric and organic forms. The primary inspirations were the Arquitectonica style, and artist Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings which are characterized by their bold use of color and form and exacting geometric precision, and finally, in line with the modern influences of UMBC, the Memphis and post-modern style which was emblematic of the 1980s.

While the design was handled by the members of the Cheeky Magpie Collective, the print and installation was done by the UMBC Facilities Management Sign Shop on cut vinyl.

“UMBC is about the community,” says Truong. “It just makes you feel like it’s home because they’re always trying to give back and looking to support local companies and businesses like the Cheeky Magpie Collective. And this is our way of giving back.”

Moments after the final notes of a Mozart flute concerto resounded from the walls of UMBC’s Linehan Concert Hall, the sold-out audience rose to their feet to applaud Martha Long, principal flutist of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Beside her, conductor Jonathon Heyward beamed in admiration, letting the applause linger before signaling the start of the next piece. 

The BSO’s concert on September 17 served as a fitting kick off for Arts+ at UMBC, a new initiative created to uplift the visual and performing arts at UMBC and to bring the surrounding community to campus to enjoy a vibrant celebration of creativity. 

“As the inaugural performing arts event of our 2025 – 26 season, the BSO’s performance perfectly exemplified the power of the arts to bring together a diverse community—students, alumni, faculty, staff, donors, and the general public—for a marvelous shared experience,” says Tom Moore, co-chair of the Arts+ initiative and director of arts and culture. “As we build on the momentum of the BSO, it’s our intention that Arts+ events across the disciplines create similar opportunities to build a more vibrant campus community, to raise awareness of the excellence in our arts programs, and to establish UMBC as a renowned destination point for exhibitions, performances, lectures, and more.”

Impact of the arts

Throughout the year, Arts+ will explore a number of thematic areas, including Trailblazers; The Harlem Renaissance; Space, Place, and Justice; Connecting the Arts; and Artful Stories. Programming will celebrate not only work produced by faculty, departments, and centers, but also highlight student-produced pieces. Through a partnership with the Division of Student Affairs, more than 40 student events ranging from film festivals to exhibitions to music theater will celebrate the impact of the arts on the lives of our students, regardless of major.

With the support of the Arts+ initiative, alumni and student organizations are adding their artistic endeavors and passion for creativity to the campus landscape. For Jayden Rhodes ’25, design leader of the Cheeky Magpie Collective, that means helping transform the Fine Arts Building with window art on all five levels with playful shapes and colors. “We wanted to create a vibrant and energetic composition that called attention to the creativity contained within the university’s walls while also encouraging the emerging artists at UMBC,” says Rhodes, a Linehan Artist Scholar. The Cheeky Magpie Collective is made up of fellow class of 2025 design majors Gwen Knott, Jalen Boyd, Thomas Hammond, and Ni Truong.

On December 5, there will be a campus celebration of the Arts+ programming, says Linda Dusman, co-chair of the Arts+. “This is our pilot year—we’ve never done anything this big,” says Dusman, music professor, who looks forward to seeing the interdisciplinary success of the initiative, threading all of UMBC’s arts programming together more seamlessly. The end-of-fall celebration will feature collaborative performances and exhibits from each art department and center on campus. In one night, the festival atmosphere will highlight all the possibilities the arts possess. “Especially in dark times, art can bring things into focus that allow for reflecting, enjoyment, and processing,” says Dusman. She adds: “Everyone is going to be shining that night.”  

Find other Arts+ events and keep up with UMBC’s arts and culture on campus. 

Kayla Logue ’27 is a 2025 UCM intern and Linehan Scholar who is majoring in dance.

The Jim Crow era was marked by strict racial segregation, severely limiting Black individuals’ mobility and dignity. Public leisure spaces were often segregated, making travel dangerous and humiliating for Black people, which affected their leisure habits and options. Picturing Mobility: Black Tourism and Leisure During the Jim Crow Era, an exhibition curated by Elizabeth Patton, chair and associate professor of media and communication studies, is on view through December 19 at UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery.

The new exhibit, curated with organizational support from Beth Saunders and Emily Cullen ’06, with exhibition design by Tony Venne and Cullen, highlights how ordinary people captured moments from their personal lives.

These images depict mobility through scenes of relaxation, happiness, amusement, and community, challenging the dominant narrative of Black life during Jim Crow as primarily defined by restrictions and struggle. This exhibition emphasizes the power of these images to affirm Black humanity and provide meaningful insights into life fully lived despite the oppressive system of segregation.

Picturing Mobility invites viewers to explore what it meant for Black Americans to seek joy, rest, and travel amid a world shaped by exclusion and segregation. It draws on photographs, oral histories, audio, video, and travel ephemera related to Black tourism and leisure activities, mainly from the mid-Atlantic region, from the 1920s to the 1960s. The artifacts show how documenting and taking part in leisure and mobility were powerful forms of resistance.

Patton’s current book project, Documenting Black Leisure as a Form of Resistance, examines the history of Black leisure and tourism in the U.S. through Jim Crow-era media. The AOK Library Gallery will host an opening reception and curatorial talk with Patton on September 19 from 5 to 7 p.m.

The presentation of this exhibition and its public programs is supported by the Arts+ Initiative; the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; and an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, as well as individual contributors.

Used to working in beautiful sunny weather, Giovanna Orfali, a visual arts senior from São Paulo, Brazil, spent this summer behind the camera as a digital content intern at the Maryland Center for History and Culture (MCHC). A seasoned filmmaker and photographer, this internship was an opportunity to expand her professional network and bring a fresh perspective to Maryland history by creating short-form social media content to share the center’s unique exhibits and events with audiences across the state.

Orfali is a recipient of the #YouAreWelcomeHere scholarship that offers tuition support for international students. She came to UMBC with experience as a television video editor and videographer and has used her skillset working on a wide range of projects. She produced and edited “Arthropod Biodiversity and Applications,” a full-length instructional video course for the Department of Biological Sciences, and works part-time as a photographer for UMBC athletics events. When Orfali is not at the MCHC, she produces digital media for UMBC’s event and conference services, her second summer internship site.

“When I began taking classes back home, no one was interested in editing audio, so I volunteered. I learned to say yes to all opportunities. At the TV station, I filmed interviews, exercise classes, and tourism commercials,” says Orfali. “I did the same when I came to UMBC. Being open to learning all aspects of audiovisual production has made me more confident and helped me make a lot of connections in and outside of the classroom.” Orfali’s short film “A Shared Story of Distance” was chosen to represent UMBC at the 2023 Maryland Film Festival Day: Student Shorts Showcase.

Hundreds of Retrievers like Orfali maximize their summer by putting their hard-earned skills to work in collaboration with campus and community partners. The 2025 arts, humanities, and social sciences summer interns are getting it done, one sunny day at a time.

Designing a career

No matter where a Retriever is in the world, they can search the online student job platform Handshake for thousands of summer internships, including on-campus opportunities. This was crucial for Humanities Scholar Kendal Howell, who stepped off the plane after studying business management abroad in France this past spring and into the office as an intern at UMBC’s Division of Student Affairs for their new academic partnerships and high-impact experiences (APHIE) unit. James DeVita, assistant vice president for APHIE, says his group needed materials and resources to help stakeholders understand the value of developing and engaging in high-impact experiences. So he turned to the experts in student experiences—the students themselves.

“We wanted to add to the number of on-campus internships. It was wonderful to have created a new professional experience for over 25 students, whose research will directly benefit their peers in a multitude of ways,” says DeVita. “By the end of the internship, the interns had collectively reviewed over 30 publications and drafted six resources in addition to completing the mapping research and related presentation.”

“The student-led research team studied high-impact practices for scholars programs, including UMBC’s, and synthesized academic research of these practices on student success in higher education,” says Howell, an Africana studies and sociology senior, with a minor in entrepreneurship. She focused on entrepreneurship, education abroad, work-based learning, and student leadership opportunities. “The information we gathered will help inform campus leaders in improving UMBC’s scholar programs. This was my first internship, and I loved it!”

Second-year gerontology doctoral student Claire McDonald also had the opportunity to conduct new research. Trained in quantitative research in psychology, McDonald gained qualitative methodology skills in her spring sociology class as part of her training to conduct research about aging in the LGBTQ+ community, a growing area of research. She is utilizing the mixed-methods LGBTQ+ Social Networks, Aging, and Policy Study, one of the few datasets on this topic, and hopes to add to her dissertation qualitative data from interviews with older LGBTQ+ adults in Baltimore for a mixed-methods project. Impressed with McDonald’s rigor, her professor recommended her to Rowena Winkler, the new assistant director for graduate student career development at the UMBC Career Center, who was seeking graduate students to conduct a 10-week qualitative research project. 

“I recruited over 100 students, conducted 11 individual interviews, and three focus groups to learn how and why graduate students use the Career Center and why they don’t,” says McDonald.  Winkler appreciated the partnership. They co-facilitated two of the focus groups together. “I watched Claire build rapport with the students. She was very open-ended and asked great prompts and follow-ups,” says Winkler. “I’m happy she had the opportunity to hone in on some of these skills that she learned in her class.”

From intern to staff

Professional growth and community building throughout the summer help students maintain ongoing growth at every stage of their learning process, leading to new jobs in other organizations, extending their internship to another semester, or a promotion from an intern to a staff member.

Like Howell, Handshake helped Orfali find both her summer internship at the MCHC as well as a spring internship in media production and audiovisual at the CATO Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. She impressed the MCHC team so much that they have extended her internship through the fall. “I learned a lot about working at a nonprofit that values the importance of history and culture, as well as collaborating with the external affairs team to create content for marketing purposes,” shared Orfali on LinkedIn. “This experience made me very interested in producing informative and educational videos and documentaries.”

As students advance in their academic careers, they can access paid, hands-on learning opportunities by serving as graduate assistants. Over the last eight years, Caleb Ruck, a language, literacy, and culture doctoral student and two-time alum, has climbed UMBC’s student worker ladder, including as a graphic designer and social media manager for UMBC’s Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion, and Belonging. He served as a special projects intern for the Center for Democracy and Civic Life and moved to the front of the classroom as a graduate teaching assistant for the modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication department. 

Ruck is now the first year-long graduate assistant for the Center for Social Justice Dialogue where he is helping develop and establish programming and procedures, such as co-facilitating a first-year seminar on the intricacies of dialogue around social identity, race, power, privilege, and oppression, and co-facilitating Building Bridges Across Difference: A Dialogue for Every Day for staff and faculty. 

This summer, Ruck focused on professional development by attending the National Intergroup Dialogue Institute, hosted by the University of Michigan’s program on intergroup relations, and preparing to welcome the first group of interns he helped interview.

“The skills I’ve acquired in this job make me feel more competent and prepared to co-facilitate dialogue, especially in student, staff, and faculty-facing contexts,” says Ruck ’22, modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, and M.A. ’24, intercultural communication. “I want to be a faculty member, teach, and conduct research on social identity topics. Being able to navigate dialogue across differences is key.”

The UMBC Career Guide has templates and resources for students to help with internet and job search at every stage of their internship and job search. Listen to more tips on UMBC’s Careers Unleashed podcast.

Four UMBC faculty and staff members have received highly competitive Fulbright U.S. Scholar awards to teach, conduct research, and forge cross-cultural connections around the world in the coming year.  The recipients span all three UMBC colleges and comprise three faculty members and one staff member. Augusto Casas, an associate teaching professor in information systems, will travel to Colombia; Cynthia Wagner, a teaching professor in biological sciences, will travel to Kyrgyzstan; Irene Chan, a professor in visual arts, will travel to Romania; and Tom Penniston, M.A. ’09, TESOL, Ph.D. ’14, language, literacy, and culture, the coordinator of learning analytics in the Division of Information Technology (DoIT), will travel to Croatia.

“Fulbright Scholar awards are not just a globally prestigious academic award; they are also a centerpiece of public diplomacy,” says Brian Souders, Ph.D. ’09, language, literacy, and culture, M.A. ’19, TESOL, the associate director for global learning in UMBC’s Center for Global Engagement.

The Fulbright Program was founded in 1946 with the goal of increasing mutual understanding and supporting friendly relations between people in the United States and other countries. It is the flagship international academic exchange program sponsored by the United States government. UMBC has had 18 Fulbright Scholars over the past 10 years, not including the upcoming year’s four recipients. Past awardees have taught or conducted research throughout the world, including in Ethiopia, Kosovo, Colombia, Germany, Australia, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and China. 

Sharing a passion with international partners

The new UMBC awardees will connect with international partners in areas of shared interest. 

“My primary responsibility at UMBC is to support data-informed pedagogy, and my Fulbright grant aligns directly with this work,” says Penniston, who will be working with colleagues at the University of Zagreb in Croatia on projects such as AI-assisted course redesigns and mapping how learning analytics tools are adopted within and between universities. “I am most excited to dive headfirst into work and be a data wonk,” he says. 

Casas, who is an associate teaching professor in the online M.S. in information systems program at UMBC, will assist the Universidad del Atlántico in Barranquilla, Colombia, in creating an online software engineering degree program to reach beyond the university’s physical campus. He will support creating the curriculum, help select the most appropriate technology, and train their faculty.

Wagner, who recently retired from UMBC after decades of inspiring students in her popular biology courses, will teach biology classes in English to students at Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She’ll also conduct research searching for novel antimicrobial agents in the soil of Kyrgyzstan. 

Lastly, Chan, a multidisciplinary artist engaged in conceptual work across print media, papermaking, installation art, and storytelling performance, will instruct both undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Art and Design in Cluj Napoca, Romania, utilizing concepts and methodologies she has developed during her tenure at UMBC. Additionally, she will produce a new collection of artist books, focusing on research into fiber art techniques and Romanian folk tales. These books, intended for display in both Romanian and international art collections, will also subtly reference corresponding motifs found within Chan’s own Chinese and American cultural heritage. This recognition of folk art traditions provides a foundation for cultural exchange, Chan says. 

Finding support at home and abroad

Souders, who serves as the Fulbright Scholar Liaison, says most UMBC faculty and staff work with him to hone their application. Casas shares that while he had been interested in the Fulbright awards since he started his academic career in the early 2000s, it wasn’t until he attended an informational webinar by Souders that he realized he was ready to apply. He met with Souders for advice, reached out to colleagues at the Universidad del Atlántico to assess where their needs and his interests overlapped, submitted his application, and “Here I am,” he says.

Penniston credits his supervisors and colleagues in DoIT with supporting his application and the opportunity for him to work remotely from Croatia following his six-month residency at the University of Zagreb. He hopes his time abroad will deepen his understanding of European Union education policy and seed partnerships that will ultimately benefit UMBC students and faculty.

Different scholars find different ways to bring bits of the world back with them when they return to the UMBC community, Souders says. For example, the College of Engineering and Information Technology’s award-winning Global Engineering course, co-taught with faculty at the University of Porto in Portugal, originated with the Fulbright project of Marc Zupan, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Wagner  says it would be amazing to make a discovery that might one day help alleviate the antibiotic resistance crisis in the world. “A good majority of our current antibiotics come from soil microbes,” she says. “Kyrgyzstan has several different ecological niches in which the soil could vary and so could the microbes.”

Across the board, UMBC’s newest crop of Fulbright Scholars is excited to connect internationally and advance projects of shared interest.

“My Croatian hosts have already gone out of their way to make me feel welcome,” says Penniston. “I am thrilled to embark on this immersive intercultural experience, and to share it with my wife and our children.”

Wagner echoes the sense of excitement at a new, horizon-broadening opportunity: “It will be an adventure!” she says. 

Art historian James Smalls, a professor of visual arts, researches the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexuality in both 19th-century art and the broader visual culture of the Black diaspora. Smalls is on a thrilling adventure to uncover the life and legacy of Senegalese performer known as Féral Benga and restore him to his rightful place in art history, and in a twist of timing fate, his research might also protect Benga’s final resting place. Smalls spent nine months in 2024 at the Getty Research Institute in California as part of their Getty Scholars Program, which gave him time to work on his next book, Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism, and continue connecting the dots of Benga’s artistic impact.

Q: What led you to research Féral Benga?

A: I found a black and white photo of a sculpture by Richmond Barthé, an African American sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s a beautiful sculpture of a Black man holding aloft a kind of saber, doing this hypnotic dance. It was titled Féral Benga, and I thought, ‘Well, what’s that? Is that a type of dance that I’m looking at or something else?’ Eventually, I found out that this is the stage name of François Benga, who adopted the name when he began performing at the Folies Bergère [a famous cabaret music hall in Paris]. Benga was a very statuesque sort of dancer. His dance technique combined African dance with classical ballet and acrobatics. I wanted to learn more, which led to years of research trying to create an archive of his life and art.

Q: How did Féral Benga‘s statue inspire the next step of your research journey?

A: I discovered that Benga became a muse for visual artists during the early part of the 20th century and that he had a very interesting personality. 

He was a very magnetic sort of person and had many amorous affairs. Benga was gay and belonged to a gay circle of avant-garde artists. Jean Cocteau was one of those people and included him in his first avant-garde film, The Blood of a Poet, in 1932.

Q: What were some of Féral Benga’s contributions before and after World War II?

A: Before WWII, Benga owned a cabaret and a Senegalese restaurant in Paris where he performed. After WWII, he again established a nightclub, a cabaret called La Rose Rouge, where young African artists and students gathered and created works, leading to the beginning of the Négritude movement within the performing arts. [The Négritude movement was an anti-colonial cultural and political movement founded by a group of African and Caribbean students in Paris in the 1930s who sought to reclaim the value of blackness and African culture.]

I want to dispel the notion that women and people of color did not contribute to modernism and the avant-garde movement. They are sort of written out of art history. I’ve learned Benga contributed greatly to these two movements. Through my research, I want to bring that to the surface so that people are aware of that, that they’re just not on the side. 

Q: Did your research bring any unexpected finds?

A: I put an alert out on eBay for any imagery of Féral Benga. For a while, I didn’t hear anything. Then, suddenly, something came up. A woman in France started selling photographs of him without knowing who he was. She had this huge box of images and wanted to sell them piecemeal to make money. Each time she sent me a photo, she added some candid shots of the dancer. One shows him smoking a cigarette at a party, and another in a park. Suddenly, Swiss art dealers bought the rest of the collection. They have agreed to let me use the photos for my book.

It turned out the woman’s father was an estate dealer. He found this box of photos in a house in Châteauroux, in central France, that I later discovered was Féral Benga’s house.  

Q: Did you find additional traces of Benga’s life during your trip to France?

A: I went to the Saint-Denis cemetery in Châteauroux and found the family tomb where he is buried. I’m still researching the family, which is difficult because there are no records. It’s interesting work because I’m trying to piece together this life that was very popular and well-known at the time but then suddenly sort of disappeared from history.

The concession [rights to the plot of land] on the family tomb is set to run out in 2028—the French government will disinter the remains and put them in different ossuaries. I’m petitioning the French government to preserve Féral Benga’s grave because he is an important icon of Black diasporic modernism. 

Q: Are there connections between this research and the research for your first book, The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts?

A: Carl Van Vechten was a great patron of the Harlem Renaissance, a writer, and a photographer. If you see old photographs of African Americans from the Harlem Renaissance, portraits of people in music, dance, theater, and cultural people, those images are by Carl Van Vechten. He was very well known during the period. He also did a lot of private erotic photography, which is what my book was about.

The connection to my new book is that Féral Benga arrived in New York City in 1937, and Carl Van Vechten invited Féral Benga over into his studio apartment and took many interesting photographs of him.

It’s been a great journey piecing all this research together. Now, I must finish the book.

Learn more about UMBC’s Department of Visual Arts.

When associate professor of visual arts Kelley Bell thinks back to her childhood growing up in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, D.C., she recalls fond memories of playing in her neighborhood playground, locally dubbed as “Turtle Park.”

“I remembered the concrete structures behind the turtle in the playground and it really inspired me to want to figure out how they came to be,” Bell says. 

The public park, officially named Marion Park, was given the “Turtle Park” moniker because of the large concrete turtle structure that lived in the center of its playground, designed by Virginia Dortch Dorazio in 1953. Bell, M.F.A. ’06, imaging and digital arts, remembers Turtle Park as a prominent staple of her adolescence and decades later, the park also acts as the inspiration behind her latest project “Fantastic Village,” which will be on display at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) from April 27 through July 27 as part of the museum’s Baker Artist Awards exhibition. 

The power of design

Bell was a 2024 recipient of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance’s Baker Artist Award. The BMA exhibit will feature 20 works from five recent Baker Artist Award recipients, including Bell’s “Fantastic Village.” The colorful geometries of Bell’s installation draw on memories of now-demolished playgrounds of her youth in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore’s iconic rowhomes, bridging together the two places she calls home. 

Bell creates vibrant projection-mapping works on a grand scale and gallery installations that emphasize joy, playfulness, community, and human connection. Before pursuing her current career as a visual artist, designer, and educator, Bell initially thought she’d be a lawyer. She believed that since her father was a speechwriter for President Gerald Ford and her mother was a teacher, she’d continue the family’s lineage of public service work. 

However, “drawing in class was always a problem with me to the degree that it’s written on a lot of my report cards, saying, ‘Kelley has a lot of attention issues.’ I never thought of art as a career,” says Bell.

Growing up in the nation’s capital, Bell was heavily influenced by the city’s independent music scene. During her wanderings through downtown Washington as a teenager, a chance encounter with a repurposed “five and dime” store (then home to the Washington Project for the Arts) changed everything.

“When I walked in that store, I never saw anything like it,” Bell recalls, “There were zines, posters, paintings, and tapes for bands all around. It was a window into this idea that art doesn’t have to be this picture on the wall and that was an amazing idea to me even at a young age.”

After graduating from Pratt, Bell landed a designer role for a record pressing plant that worked with dance music labels. Continuing her work in the entertainment industry, she freelanced for MTV Networks for several years before she was encouraged to explore Baltimore after a recommendation from a fellow designer who boasted about the city’s arts scene. A one-day exploration of the city convinced Bell that Baltimore was the place for her.

Bell was accepted into the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where she initially majored in illustration. But once there, she was introduced to the concept and the power of design. “A friend explained that designers construct the existing world, and I believe that’s an amazing power to have. I quickly switched my major after that,” says Bell.

In 1997, Bell moved into Baltimore’s now-defunct H&H Arts Building, a five-story warehouse where local artists lived and worked for more than two decades. It was at H&H where Bell was initially connected toperformer and fellow UMBC alum Beatrix “Trixie Little” Burneston ’99, visual and performing arts, a founding member of Fluid Movement, a Baltimore-based organization that utilizes public spaces to create joy and community through performance art that most notably includes quirky water ballet performances in Baltimore City public pools.

“Fluid Movement did a rendition of the opera ‘Carmen’ with hotdogs on sticks. They designed a stage and costumes for hotdogs and had a composer to do the score,” shares Bell. “To see people pour that much love and effort into something that ultimately is incredibly silly and unusual is, to me, a heroic act.”

Bell worked with Fluid Movement as a designer and the group then became a long-time client that she worked with throughout the years. Bell has also collaborated with a number of organizations and art collectives across Baltimore, including working with the Enoch Pratt Library and the community art space Creative Alliance. Bell’s project “The Clock Strikes 100,” a series of short animations designed for and projected within the Baltimore’s historic Bromo Seltzer Art Tower, was designated “Best Public Artwork” in Baltimore Magazine’s “Best of Baltimore 2011” issue.

“Projections, Inflatables, and Artistic Spectacles”

Bell’s first introduction to UMBC was on a snowy day in 2001. Her friends recommended UMBC’s campus as a great place for sledding due to the campus’ hilly landscape. Soon after, Bell decided to expand her skillset and enrolled in UMBC’s M.F.A program. 

“I was like a kid in a candy store with all of the stuff that I could do. It was a new world being opened up to me,” says Bell.

After experiencing difficulties in executing her thesis project to her satisfaction, Bell was advised by her then-thesis chair Preminda Jacob to consider extending her time in the program for an additional year. 

“That extra year was the year that I figured out projection mapping. Doing guerilla projection projects changed the way that I thought about making art. That has been a form of art that’s served me since I’ve graduated from UMBC and it was all because of that fourth year,” says Bell. Guerilla projection mapping—the use of projectors to display images, animations, or videos onto various surfaces in public spaces without formal authorization or permits—helped to inform the foundation of Bell’s artistic pursuits.  

Bell’s large-scale projection-mapping works and public installations have been featured in national and international festivals for almost two decades. Among her notable works include “The Herd,” a 2018 installation that was part of Light City Festival in Baltimore City. The project featured more than 300 solar powered inflatables that were placed into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor as a call to action for healthy waterways in the harbor. 

In addition to her artistic practice, Bell has been an educator at UMBC since 2008. Earlier this year, Bell presented a retrospective of her work and her research practice with the presentation “Projections, Inflatables, and Artistic Spectacles,” organized by the UMBC’s Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA). 

“The CIRCA talk was a breakthrough. It was the first time that I took in the full scope of starting with an M.F.A. and how that work led up to the BMA exhibit,” she says. 

The motivation behind Bell’s BMA exhibit “Fantastic Village” largely stemmed from her collaboration with UMBC theater professor Collete Searls on the “Enchanted Jangle” installation that was part of the 2024 Sweaty Eyeballs: Animation Adjacent gallery exhibition, curated by Corrie Parks, associate professor of visual arts. The installation is described as an “epic cardboard fort your five-year-old self dreamed of.”

“There’s a playfulness about it but also a deeply-weird and creepy aspect to it. This is the place I like to dwell—giving people something new and something that they can’t figure out is something that is very important to me in my work.”