Liberal Arts
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- M.A., Dance and Cultural Studies, UCLA
- B.F.A., Theater Studies, Boston University
- Vocalist
- Performances with Alicia Keys, Mos Def, John Legend, Reggie Gibson, Joshua Bennett, and Donna De Lory
- Recordings include HBO's Def Poetry season 5 and Ever Widening Circles
- Published in the Legendary, Numinous Magazine, and the Charles River Review
- Participant in Slam Team San Jose 2004 and Boston Cantab Slam Team 2005
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"History is about choices and outcomes—the ideal learning opportunity. History brings people back to primary sources. So much of our information is filtered. Newspapers, books, and television offer someone else's conclusions. We ask students to peel back a layer and look at the evidence for themselves. Often students are surprised at what they find. In the discussion that follows, we can all learn from each other."
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Eric Reuter, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"Outside of Berklee, I'm a live engineer and acoustician, and I integrate these experiences into my classes. The reality is that there aren't enough jobs in recording studios. It's a really difficult world. So I try to introduce other possibilities. There are a lot of jobs in audio that aren't 'recording engineer' or 'producer.' And the things that you need to know, or that are useful to know, are very similar for a lot of these various careers—live sound or location recording, or even acoustics to some extent. These other jobs are viable and respectable. I think it's our responsibility to present those as options."
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Linda Chase, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"My class in interdisciplinary arts is about the big picture: how all the arts are expressions of our human experience on earth. Understanding visual art, dance, and poetry—and incorporating aspects of them—enables our music to reach new levels of communication and expression."
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"I realize that most students are not here because they want to take a science class, so I want them to see that what we're talking about in class is absolutely relevant to their everyday lives, whether or not they think of those things as science, per se. Whatever's on the news, we'll be talking about it in class. Somewhere over 4 million people have been affected by the floods in Pakistan. They're not getting food; they're not getting water supplies that are safe to drink. That starts a lot of political unrest, and that's all related to the environment. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico absolutely has relevance in terms of seafood supplies, economic impact to the United States, etc. Hopefully we can tie all of those in and see why they should care about those things."
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Stephanie Reich, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"If you've hit the wall on a music project and you feel tapped out, that's a perfect time to pick up your pen and write some prose, even a stream of consciousness, to free you up. When words start to flow, so does the music."
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Michael Heyman, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"In addition to poetry and literature from around the world, I teach nonsense literature. This might sound strange. It's not something students would see in a typical college lit. class, but I suppose mine are not typical college lit. classes. Behind the fun and craziness of literary nonsense is a rigorous sense of aesthetics and a bedrock of intelligent and constructive rebellion—a way of questioning the status quo and an outlet for individual, creative thought. What better education for a Berklee student, or anyone for that matter?"
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"To musicians who are writers, the kind of practices that we do in the classroom—writing philosophical essays and short stories—emphasize the importance of literacy in writing, and this directly relates itself to musicians, particularly those who write music. And so the students themselves become literate writers. They appreciate literature, they understand it, they can analyze it, can take positions against it and on its behalf, and they, more importantly, may want to write about their own music for newspapers, magazines, websites, and many other venues."
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"I am consistently impressed by the capacity for critical thinking, the engagement, and the verbal acrobatics that the students are able to achieve in class. These are some of the best and brightest students that I've ever taught. They love to talk. Students are invariably interested in sharing their own experiences and applying reading, theory, and philosophy to their everyday life. I think that students welcome reflection. That's something that's special about Berklee. I think it has to do with their being creative artists."
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Wayne Wild, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Liberal Arts Department"The supreme moment of creativity is reaching that level in which you are both entirely engaged with what you're doing and yet aware that you're in it, what Aaron Copland calls being both inside and outside a work simultaneously, as creator or audience. It's kind of an exquisite moment. Poets also speak to that, and how to combine spontaneity with form, to be both Dionysian and Apollonian. That is a supreme aesthetic question I ask students to consider, as they learn so much order and form at Berklee yet want to express their own spontaneous impulses."
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