College of Arts + Architecture

Ghosts, haunted houses, spiders and spirits are all commonplace in American society. With the popularity of Halloween and highly realistic horror films, people can enjoy immense scares, while also dressing up and collecting candy to celebrate the year’s spookiest season.

The “Bleachery Heritage Plaza,” designed by Associate Professor of Architecture Rachel Dickey, has received the 2023 BLT Built Design Award for Cultural Heritage Landscape in the Landscape Architecture category. This annual international competition recognizes “the most pioneering and groundbreaking designs” in four broad categories.

Carmen Neely ’12 completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at UNC Charlotte and within five years, she he was giving solo gallery exhibitions in major U.S. cities like New York and Miami. Since then, she has added Chicago, where she currently lives, Paris and Düsseldorf, Germany, to the growing list.  

Most recently, she added the installation of one of her paintings in the residence of Vice President Kamala Harris to her list of accomplishments.

A new book by Professor of Art Education Jane Dalton introduces mindfulness-based expressive arts practices to art teachers.

Alumna Pooja Nair has been named “Rookie Teacher of the Year” by the North Carolina Art Educators Association, the state’s largest advocacy group dedicated to supporting visual arts education. The NCAEA honors one beginning teacher each year who has made “an exemplary initial contribution” and “demonstrates the potential for development.”

Classroom management, curriculum development and dance instruction. These were the tasks given to a talented, motivated group of students from the University’s Department of Dance who interned at Barre Belle over the past summer.

CarlosAlexis Cruz, associate professor of theatre, is the new president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the national professional membership organization for college and university theatre departments and administrators, educators, graduate students and theatre practitioners. He assumed leadership of the organization at the 2023 ATHE Conference in Austin, Texas.

The Department of Art & Art History and Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, Poland, recently jointly presented an exhibition, “The World Without Us,” curated by UNC Charlotte painting professors Andrew Leventis and Maja Godlewska.

Tom Burch, associate professor of scenic design, recently returned from six weeks in Italy, where he designed two opera productions for La Musica Lirica, an intensive opera training program for young professional singers. Premiering first in the town of Novafeltria, each production traveled to additional locations in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.

A house designed, built and owned by Marc Manack, associate professor of architecture, with his firm SILO AR+D, was awarded the 2023 George Matsumoto Prize from NCModernist, a nonprofit organization and educational archive established for the documentation, promotion and preservation of residential modernist architecture in the state.