Veena Chandra
Veena is the founder and director of the Dance and Music School of India in Latham, NY (celebrating 31 years) where she teaches Indian classical music. She has been a faculty member at Skidmore College since 1990, teaching sitar in the Music Department. Since, 2014 she is also the Artist Associate in Sitar at Williams College (MA). She has several CDs to her credit, including two very popular recordings with renowned Pandit Bikram Ghosh on tabla. Veena Chandra’s 2009-2010 India tour was in part sponsored by NYSCA and The Arts Center of the Capital Region. In December of 2018, Veena received the SRIJAN Music Excellence Award “in recognition of outstanding contribution in the field of Indian Classical Music”. Veena received a New York Foundation for the Arts/New York State Council on the Arts Artist Fellowship, July 2019 in the category of Music/Sound to “continue to create, promote and preserve” musical tradition.
Yvette Cortes
Yvette Cortes has been the Fine Arts Librarian at Skidmore College since 2007. Prior to Skidmore, she worked as an art librarian at Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute. She has an M.S. in History of Art and Design from Pratt Institute and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College. Yvette has organized the annual Student Art in the Library juried exhibition in the Lucy Scribner Library since 2008, which provides an opportunity for Skidmore’s students to exhibit their work.
June C. Paul
June has a lifelong career history of working to promote social and economic justice and advocating for individuals and communities living in oppressive contexts. Prior to returning to graduate school to obtain her Ph.D., June worked in the field of human services for nearly 17 years as a direct service practitioner, policy advisor, and statewide administrator in both public child welfare and education. Consequently, she brings a great deal of real-world knowledge and experience in practice, policy, and service-delivery to her teaching and scholarship. As an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work, her primary objective is to provide an academically challenging curriculum that is engaging and accessible to all students, values the resources each student brings to class, and promotes strategies that aid students in advancing a more just and equitable society. June received her MSW and PhD degrees from the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
Sarah Sweeney
Sarah Sweeney’s digital and interactive work interrogates the relationship between photographic memory objects and physical memories, and is informed by both the study of memory science and the history of documentary technologies. In her work, she explores the space between information that is stored corporeally in our memory and the information that is captured and stored in memory objects created by documentary technologies including camera phones, stereoscopic cameras, and home video cameras-each project makes tangible the deletions and accretions produced through our interactions with these technologies. She is the creator of The Forgetting Machine, an iPhone app commissioned by the new media organization Rhizome, that systematically destroys digital photographs each time they are viewed or refreshed to simulate the theory of reconsolidation proposed by scientists studying memory. Her work has appeared nationally and internationally in exhibitions at locations including the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the New Jersey State Museum, the Black and White Gallery, and the UCR/California Photography Museum.
