Luigi Allemano
Lecturer, Film Animation
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema
Candidate - MAA (Media Arts), Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2013); BFA (Film Animation), Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1997); Diploma (Music Performance), MacEwan University (1990)
Edmonton-born Luigi Allemano is a Montreal-based animation filmmaker, composer and sound designer. Allemano's animation, music and sound design appear in more than fifty productions of the National Film Board of Canada, four of which have received Academy Award nominations. Since 2009, Allemano has held full-time faculty appointments at Concordia University's Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema where he lectures on animation filmmaking, analog and digital animation techniques and sound for animation. Allemano's research interests include philosophy of improvisation in visual art and music, methodologies of pre-cinematic animation and contemporary approaches to visual music composition.
Meet our new faculty in 2013-14
Please join us in welcoming the following new faculty members holding tenure-track and extended term appointment positions in 2013-14.
Mitch Mitchell
Assistant Professor, Print Media
Department of Studio Arts
MFA (Fine Art), University of Alberta (2009), BFA (Fine Art) Illinois State University (2001), AAS, AFA (Engineering, Fine Art) Benedictine University (1998)
Mitch Mitchell is an interdisciplinary print-based studio artist originally from midwest Illinois, USA. His visual research focuses on remarks and identities of industry, trade and globalization surrounding material and objects through the role of print and the graphic multiple. His multiple bodies of work range from small photogravures to large-scale warehouse installations. Prior to joining Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts he taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Memorial University and the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Mitch has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada, the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Portugal and New Zealand. He has represented Canada in numerous biennials and was named Curator of Contemporary Canadian Graphic Print for the 2012 Novosibirsk Graphic Triennial in Russia. He has been an artist in residence at various cultural institutions including the Frans Masareel Centrum in Belgium, Atelier d'estampe Imago in New Brunswick and the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Quebec. Mitch has collaborated on numerous visual arts research projects with universities and artists, funded my multiple granting agencies (SSHRC, Canada Council and Edmonton Arts Council). He has received numerous awards for his studio practice and has been included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Berardo Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, and Shenzhen Art Museum in China.
Luc Otter
Lecturer (Extended Term Appointment), Film Animation, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema
MFA (Film Animation), Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre, Belgium; DEUG (Fine Art) Université des Sciences Humaine, Starsbourg, France; DUCAV (Film and Video), USHS, Strasbourg, France
Born in France, Luc Otter has over 15 years of experience as an animation filmmaker. His award-winning films showcase stop-motion puppets, clay/object animation, traditional and paperless 2D, and 3D digital animation, and have screened in competition at film festivals worldwide, including Hiroshima, Annecy, Tampere, and the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Awards include second prize at the IMAGINA festival in Monaco, Best Animation at theWorldwide Short Film Festival in Toronto, Best Animation at the Moncton International French Film Festival, and Best Film for Children in Namur, Belgium, among others. His latest film, ROSE and VIOLET, an ambitious 26 minute animated film co-produced with the National Film Board of Canada, won several international awards and has been screened commercially in France in over 100 theatres. In addition to his animation career, Luc has also worked as a puppeteer, a sculptor and a multimedia art director and has taught numerous animation workshops in Canada and France.
Department of Art History
PhD (History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture), MIT (2013); MA (Art History), Université Laval (2008); BA (Art History) Université Laval (2005)
Nicola Pezolet is an historian whose research focuses on collaborative practices between 20th century artists and architects, post-World War II reconstruction, modernist print culture, and critical historiography. Prior to joining the faculty at Concordia, he was a visiting lecturer in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University in Boston (2012-13). During his graduate studies at MIT, he received several research grants, notably from the SSHRC and the Social Science Research Council, which allowed him to live and do research at the Cité Internationale Universitaire in Paris. He has published essays on postwar art and architecture, in journals such as October, Grey Room, and Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, some of which have a special focus on the Danish artist and theoretician Asger Jorn. He is currently working on a book project dealing with the question of modern European architecture and the "synthesis of the arts" in the middle decades of the twentieth century. He is also doing research on the modernization of Catholic church architecture in the postwar years, leading up to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
MJ Thompson
Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies and Practices
Department of Art Education
PhD, Performance Studies, New York University
MJ Thompson is a writer and teacher working on dance, performance, and visual art. Her dissertation, Impure Movement: Mundane Body Techniques in 20th Century American Choreography (NYU 2009) was recipient of the Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull Memorial Award for Academic Excellence. She was a Lillian S. Robinson Fellow at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute in Montreal in 2010. Her articles have appeared in Ballettanz, Border Crossings, The Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, Dance Current, Dance Ink, Dance Magazine, The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Theatre Journal, and elsewhere.
Thompson's research interests include dance and performance studies, feminist performance, performance in visual art, theories of everyday life, experimental biography and writing.
Eldad Tsabary
Assistant Professor, Electroacoustic Studies, Department of Music
DMA (Music Education), Boston University (2013); Doctoral coursework (Music Composition), GSUC (1999-2002), New York; BM (Music Composition), Mannes College of Music (1999), New York; Undergraduate Diploma (Jazz Flute Performance), Rimon School of Jazz & Contemporary Music (1995), Israel; Diploma (AEC) in Computer Assisted Sound Design, Musitechnic (2004), Montreal
Since 2005, Eldad Tsabary has been a lecturer and researcher at Concordia University where he has been developing a new aural training method for electroacoustic studies that is inspired by precepts from auditory scene analysis studies--primarily integration and segregation. Driven by action-research transformational methods, this method fosters autonomization of skill acquisition through students' self-evaluation, critical reflection, and design of practice strategies. Tsabary's related writings include his doctoral dissertation, a chapter in the book Sound Musicianship (A. Brown, Ed., Cambridge Scholars, 2012), and journal articles. Tsabary is the founder and director of Concordia Laptop Orchestra (CLOrk), which has performed (physically and telematically) with symphonic, jazz, chamber, and laptop orchestras worldwide and collaborated with dancers and video artists. CLOrk specializes in networked and multidisciplinary performances, and its sound is characterized by wide textural variety and dynamic range and rich, glitchy rhythms. The orchestra consists of 15 to 25 performers and is guided by soundpainting conduction. Tsabary is the president of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC).