Photo Spotlights

Noted poet and playwright Amiri Baraka will present a master class on the craft of creative writing and be present at an RIT performance of his award-winning play Dutchman on Dec. 13. The master class will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. in the 1510 Lab Theater in Lyndon B. Johnson Hall at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf. The play will be performed at 7:30 p.m.

The Metals Alumni Exhibition showcases national and international artists who have graduated from the RIT program and have achieved recognition and success for their work. An opening reception in RIT’s Bevier Gallery was held Dec. 10 and the show runs through Jan. 19. Bevier Gallery is closed Dec. 18 to Jan. 2.

Approximately 30 vendors participated in the annual Winter Craft Sale, offering a variety of items created by faculty, staff and alumni. Ashley Tyler, a fifth-year mechanical engineering student, shopped at Jesarah Jewelry Designs for a gift for her mother.

RIT students rehearsing for this year’s performances of The Vagina Monologues took time to support University of Hartford student Ally Pfeiffer, a target of cyberbullies, who told her story on NBC’s Today Dec. 8. The RIT students created cards and wrote letters and plan to send them to Pfeiffer in Connecticut. The effort was coordinated by RIT’s Center for Women and Gender.

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, was among the featured speakers at the RIT Social Media and Communication Symposium on Dec. 8. He also delivered the School of Print Media’s Paul and Louise Miller Lecture about the future of journalism. Benton said that as someone who grew up in a poor town in South Louisiana, his sources for news were a small, daily newspaper and Dan Rather. Benton believes journalism is better than it was in the past and the ability for everyone to publish on the Internet is an amazing innovation. Benton says that traditional news organizations have been wary of aggregation, but journalists have been active aggregators for years as they are the ones who are “aggregating” the brains of their sources for stories. Before coming to Harvard, Benton was an award-winning education reporter at The Dallas Morning News.

Students react to a reading during the Poetry Slam Dec. 3 in Java Wally’s, a coffee shop in Wallace Center.

Industry professionals discussed the use of social media in marketing and advertising during RIT’s Social Media and Communication Symposium Dec. 8. Keynote speakers included Jeff Jarvis, associate professor of journalism at the City University of New York and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly.

RIT’s Women in Computing group created a Techie Tree for the holiday season. Students, faculty and staff decorated the tree, which is located in the Golisano Hall atrium, with ornaments that they created out of computer hardware. Jennifer Piepenburg, a fifth-year computer science major, puts the finishing touches on her ornament.

RIT President Bill Destler was presented with a special award on Dec. 2 recognizing the university community’s outstanding commitment to the Red Cross blood program. Kay Schwartz, CEO of American Red Cross Biomedical Services, says RIT’s participation over the past five years has positioned the university as an academic leader across the state and throughout the Northeast in regards to lives saved.

In an effort to boost school spirit, RIT Student Government hosted a kick-off event for its “We Are RIT” spirit campaign on Dec. 3 in the Campus Center. Student Government leaders also turned the Campus Center fountain orange as a display of RIT spirit.

Award-winning graphic artist Alison Bechdel discussed her artistic process and the use of graphic narrative during the talk “Drawing Words, Reading Pictures” Dec. 2 at RIT. The presentation was sponsored by the Caroline Werner Gannett Project’s “Visionaries in Motion IV” lecture series. Bechdel’s nationally syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For ran from 1983 to 2008 and was one of the earliest ongoing representations of lesbians in popular culture.

A FIRST Lego League team coached by Stephanie Ludi, an associate professor of software engineering, and mentored by students from the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, practices for a recent FIRST regional championship. The team is comprised entirely of girls, an underrepresented group in computing. From left, Mike Dapiran, a second-year graduate student in game design, Rachel Wells, a fifth-grader at Indian Landing School, and Katrina Myers, an eighth-grader from Berger Middle School.