Retreat Instructors

Tracy Chapman Hamilton

  
Associate Professor of Art History at Sweet Briar College

Tracy Chapman Hamilton is an art historian whose research focuses on late medieval and early modern visual culture in Europe and the Mediterranean, especially rooted in questions of gender studies, collecting, spatiality, and material culture. How women made themselves visible through patronage is the subject of her book Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France: The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie of Brabant (1260-1321) (Brepols/Harvey Miller, 2019), recipient of the 2020 International Center of Medieval Art’s Annual Book Prize, and collection, Moving Women Moving Objects (300-1500), co-edited by Mariah Proctor-Tiffany (Brill: Maps, Spaces, Cultures Series, 2019). Her forthcoming book The Ceremonial Landscape: Art, Gender, and Geography in the Late Medieval World, and digital project, Mapping the Medieval Woman. Hamilton has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kress and DuPont Foundations, the International Center of Medieval Art, The Bonnie Wheeler Foundation, was a participant in the Kress Foundation Summer Institute for Digital Mapping and Art History, and was one of the first two Mellon Fellows in the Digital Humanities at The Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She has held positions at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Richmond where she was an NEH Visiting Associate Professor, and returned to Sweet Briar College in the fall of 2021 as Associate Professor and Director of Faculty Development.

tracychapmanhamilton.com

Medford Taylor

  
Adjunct Instructor of Studio Art at Sweet Briar College

After serving five years as an officer in the U.S. Navy, Medford Taylor discovered his passion for photography while attending graduate school at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He began his photojournalism career as a staff photographer for the Houston Chronicle and then the Virginian Pilot in Norfolk, VA. He soon moved on to a freelance life, traveling the world while completing numerous assignments for National Geographic Magazine, NG Traveler, Time Magazine, Newsweek, GEO, Air & Space Magazine, and many other organizations and publications. His honors include the Slover Award (Virginian Pilot) and the White House News Photographers ‘Eyes of History®’ 1st Place.

His work has been shown in individual and group exhibitions including Visa pour L’Image, Perpignan, France, Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, and Capital One Art Collection. His book Saltwater Cowboys: A Photographic Essay of Chincoteague Island was published in 2002.

He is currently Adjunct Instructor of Visual Arts: Studio Art/photography at Sweet Briar College in Virginia where he lives with his very handsome cat ‘Cool Hand Luke’.

medfordtaylor.com

John Gregory Brown

  
Julia Jackson Nichols Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College

Born and raised in New Orleans, John Gregory Brown is the author of the novels Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery; The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur; Audubon’s Watch; and A Thousand Miles from Nowhere. His honors include a Lyndhurst Prize, the Lillian Smith Award, the John Steinbeck Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Award, and the Library of Virginia Book Award.

His visual art has been displayed in individual and group exhibitions and has appeared online and in print in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the New England Review, Flock, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere.

He is the Julia Jackson Nichols Professor of English at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Carrie Brown.

johngregorybrown.com

Erica Trabold

  
Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College

Erica Trabold has been teaching English and creative writing at Sweet Briar since 2019. Her debut essay collection, Five Plots (2018), won the inaugural Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and a Nebraska Book Award. With Zoë Bossiere, she co-edited The Lyric Essay as Resistance (2023), which Publisher’s Weekly has called an “exciting compendium” that exemplifies “the profound possibilities inherent in the lyric essay.” Trabold’s essays appear in Brevity, The Rumpus, Passages North, The Collagist, South Dakota Review, Seneca Review, Essay Daily, and elsewhere.

She lives in Lynchburg with her husband, daughter, and three cats.

ericatrabold.com

Colette Krogol and Matt Reeves

  
Artistic Directors of Orange Grove Dance Company

Colette Krogol and Matt Reeves are directors, choreographers, filmmakers, educators, and mixed media designers. They are groundbreaking artists who bring virtuosic athleticism, mesmerizing design landscapes, and powerful imagery to their work. They have been making work collaboratively for over fifteen years as the Artistic Directors of Orange Grove Dance (OGD), a dance, design, and film company that exists at the intersection of performer operated design.

Krogol and Reeves are the recipients of the 2020 Helen Hayes Award for “Outstanding Choreography in a Play” for their work in Round House Theatre’s production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Their acclaimed works and commissions have been produced and presented worldwide in museums, concert stages, film festivals, underground tunnels, city streets, black box theaters, public parks, botanic gardens, and high-end hotels. They have served as faculty at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute, George Washington University, University of Florida, University of Maryland, and the Wuhan Institute of Design and Sciences. On screen, the duo has produced multiple independent dance films that have shown in cities around the US and Europe as well as through online distribution. Krogol and Reeves have been Artist-In-Residence with numerous organizations, creating choreographic and cinematic works in Finland, Iceland, Italy, Spain, China, and around the US. Their 4th Annual OGD INTENSIVE 2023 will take place this July at Sweet Briar College for more info visit: Orangegrovedance.com Instagram: @orangegrovedance

Joshua Harris

  
Associate Professor of Music at Sweet Briar College

Joshua Harris is a composer and sound designer from whose work explores stasis and texture through radical chance procedures. A fascination with visual art, textures, non-linear narratives, and extreme temporal manipulations informs his sound art.

Harris’s work has been performed throughout the US and internationally and has been featured by the American Composers Forum, the Missouri State University Composition Festival, and the PBS series Curate 757. He has presented his compositions at the conferences of the International Computer Music Conference, the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the US, the Society for Composers, Inc., the New York Electroacoustic Festival, and others. He is the composer of two feature film scores and his music can be heard in several collections of electroacoustic music. He has been commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Nova Ensemble at UNT, Akropolis Reed Quintet, Virginia Wesleyan University, Hub New Music, and other notable performers.

joshuaharriscomposer.com

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