Photo Spotlights

Mary-Beth Cooper, senior vice president for student affairs, ‘throws’ her support into the Quarter Mile Challenge on May 10. The campus-wide fundraiser, which featured a dunking booth, targets support toward beautification efforts along RIT’s Quarter Mile.

Silent Laughter is a silent movie performed live on stage and celebrates the glory days of the great comic actors of the 1920s such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Mack Sennett Comedy Factory. The play features deaf and hearing actors on stage without voice interpretation for the deaf actors or ASL interpretation for the hearing actors. Performance dates are May 10-13 in the Robert F. Panara Theatre and the production is directed by Jerry Argetsinger.

The RIT Color Run, a 5-kilometer road race, took place on May 6 at RIT. Runners started with a white T-shirt and had colored powder thrown at them at regular intervals throughout the race. Proceeds go to the Trevor Project, an organization providing support to LGBTQ youth.

Shawn Gray, left, fourth-year film and animation major, and Thomas Macias, third-year multidisciplinary studies major, rehearse for the upcoming production of “Dog Sees God” May 17-20 in Booth Hall room A428.

“Fine Arts Studio Senior Exhibition” runs through May 19 at Gallery r, 100 College Ave. in Rochester.

Refugee children from Mary’s Place joined RIT alumni and graduate students on a tour of Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival on May 5. Dave Kelbe (orange shirt), a doctoral candidate in imaging science, arranged the outing.

Four people were inducted in RIT’s Innovation Hall of Fame on May 4. From left to right, Kevin Surace ’85; Robin Cass, representing the School for American Crafts in honor of the late Aileen Osborn Webb; Patricia Moore ’74; Dean Kamen and President Bill Destler.

A record 35,000 spectators discovered the latest in the arts, science, technology and entrepreneurship on May 5 at the Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival. The festival, with Time Warner Cable as the premier sponsor, involved 2,700 participants and more than 600 volunteers. The festival has now drawn more than 140,000 visitors in five years. In 2013, the festival will be held May 4.

More than a dozen teams in the inaugural E-Dragster Race, this year’s kickoff event to Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival, took off on May 5. Participants, who included RIT students, faculty and staff, competed with electric-powered dragsters in time trials. The winning car, Hot Wheelz (shown here), from the Women in Engineering team, won a banjo from President Bill Destler’s personal collection.

Seabreeze Amusement Park in Irondequoit was the subject of the 27th RIT Big Shot on May 3. More than 1,500 students, faculty and community volunteers, manned with flashlights and flashes, lit up the historic Rochester landmark while RIT photographers shot a 30-second exposure from a nearby platform.

Sculptor and MacArthur-award winner Elizabeth Turk engaged an audience of more than 150 people during her May 2 presentation, “Emptiness of Matter,” wrapping up the 2011-2012 season of the Caroline Werner Gannett Project’s “Visionaries in Motion V” series. Turk discussed her tools, methods, drawings and preparations, and she revealed her sources of inspiration, as well as some of her creations. Go to www.cwgp.org and click on “Celebrating Six Visionary Years” to read comments about the series from past speakers.

“He was an entrepreneur, a risk taker and always did it his way,” John Del Monte, president of E.J. Del Monte Corp., said about his father, the late Ernest J. Del Monte Sr., during a luncheon on May 3 at Oak Hill Country Club. John Del Monte accepted the 2012 Herbert W. Vanden Brul Entrepreneurial Award in honor of his father, who founded his company in 1953, established Delcrete Building Systems and owned several Marriott franchise properties. The Vanden Brul award was established in 1984 and the annual event is sponsored by RIT’s E. Philip Saunders College of Business.