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Jennifer Miller
AssociAte Professor
Circus Amok founder and artistic director Jennifer
Miller has been working with alternative circus forms,
theater, and dance, for over 20 years. Her work with
Circus Amok was awarded a “Bessie” in 1995 and an
OBIE in 2000. Circus Amok is the subject of a French
documentary film, Un Cirque a New York 2002 and
Brazilian documentary, Juggling Politics 2004. She has
taught at Cal Arts, NYU, and UCLA.
Tracie Morris
AssociAte Professor
Ph.D., New York University; M.F.A., Hunter College,
City University of New York; Tracie Morris is an
interdisciplinary poet who has worked extensively
as a sound artist, writer and multimedia performer.
Her installations have been presented at the Whitney
Biennial and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning.
Negar Mottahedeh
Professor
Cecilia Muhlstein
Visiting instructor; tutor
Cecilia Muhlstein was born in Texas, but grew up in Los
Angeles. Her work and interests reside in fiction, critical
theory, art, and eco-poetics. Her current work can
be found in the pages of NYArts magazine and in the
archives of Safe-T-Gallery.
Mendi Lewis Obadike
AssistAnt Professor Ph.d., duke uniVersity.
Robert Obrecht
Adjunct AssistAnt Professor
B.A., Sarah Lawrence Coll; TESOL Certificate, Columbia
University Teachers College. His compositions have
premiered in New York at Lincoln Center’s State Theater
and Alice Tully Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music,
Merkin Hall and LaMama E.T.C., among others. He has
scored exhibition videos for the Museum of Modern
Art, the Museum of Natural History, the Jewish Museum
and the Queens Museum of Science. His theme song
for the Disney/Henson “Bear in the Big Blue House” is
broadcast worldwide. Obrecht has been teaching at
Pratt since 1988.
Ethan Spigland
AssociAte Professor
B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., New York University; Matrise,
University of Paris VIII; has made numerous films and
media works including: Luminosity Porosity, based
on the work of architect Steven Holl, Elevator Moods,
featured in the Sundance Film Festival, and The Strange
Case of Balthazar Hyppolite, which won the Gold Medal
in the Student Academy Awards.
Suzanne Verderber
AssociAte Professor
B.A., Dartmouth College; Ph.D., Univ of Pennsylvania;
Suzanne Verderder’s teaching and research focus on
the relationship between subjectivity and power, and
on the relation between pre-modern periods (medieval,
Renaissance, Baroque) and contemporary concerns.
Specific fields of study include politics, literature, art,
critical theory, philosophy, religion, and psychoanalysis.
Christopher Vitale
AssistAnt Professor
B.A., State University of New York Binghamton; Ph.D.,
New York University; His areas of specialization include
continental philosophy, comparative modernist literary
and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, queer studies,
theories of race and ethnicity, radical political thought,
and film and film theory. Currently, he is writing a book
about complexity studies and theories of networks. He
has taught at NYU, UC Berkeley, and Hunter College.