News Bureau

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A voice student in the School of Music at the University of Illinois won first place in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Central Region finals in Evanston, Ill., on Sunday (Nov. 7).

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Five students from the University of Illinois are among the artists who have been selected to exhibit their work at Art Chicago 2010, an annual international fair of contemporary and modern art.

Several dozen University of Illinois students of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban and regional planning are working with Danville, Illinois, city officials to look at how the city could develop the riverfront as a public space connected to its downtown.

University of Illinois students developed ideas to revitalize an industrial area in Chicago, as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration involving graduate students in architecture, landscape architecture and urban and regional planning.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - What's in your closets, basement, garage or attic?

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A team of four undergraduate students from the University of Illinois has designed a concept for an interactive thrill ride that has been named a finalist in Walt Disney Imagineering's 19th ImagiNations design competition. The students will travel to Glendale, Calif., June 8-16 to present their completed project to a judging panel of 25 Walt Disney Imagineering executives.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The creators of the new musical "1787: We the People" don't mind if audiences compare this homegrown original to "1776," a 1969 Broadway hit. In fact, executive co-producer Lucinda Lawrence hopes the new show, about the Constitutional Convention, will be thought of as the sequel to the show that inspired it - the musical version of the drafting and ratification of the Declaration of Independence.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Japan House, an educational and cultural facility at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, invites the community to its annual spring open house on April 8. The event, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., is free and open to the public.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Japan House will observe Children's Day with crafts and a puppet show on May 7 (Saturday).

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -The Pacifica Quartet has added a Grammy Award to its growing collection of musical achievements.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Jeffrey Magee, a music and theater professor at the University of Illinois, will talk about his latest book, "Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater," at the 92nd Street Y Tribeca in New York City on Thursday (Sept. 13). The book draws on materials Berlin's daughters donated to the Library of Congress, and reveals the theatrical context of many of Berlin's most popular songs.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The events of Sept. 11, 2001, will be remembered again this year in a brief observance on the campus of the University of Illinois.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Organizers of an annual planning institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are taking it to the streets this year with a three-day, pre-institute workshop on "Developing Pedestrian Safety Action Plans and Designing Streets for Pedestrian Safety" Feb. 26-28, at the Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Attention fans of University of Illinois music makers: Did you miss the "Beyond Cool" performance of Mile Davis' "Bobplicity" at last year's Allerton Music Barn Festival? What about the Opera Program's production of "Cosi fan tutte" last spring at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts? Wishing you could hear - and see - highlights of the Jerry Hadley Memorial Concert one more time?

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Eduardo Diazmuñoz, the artistic director of the opera program at the University of Illinois and director of the U. of I.'s New Music Ensemble, has been named artistic and music director of the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra, effective January 2007.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Vocalists were in abundance in Connecticut's capital city last week as the Eastern Division of the American Choral Directors Association met in Hartford for its annual convention.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - As it has in past years, the University of Illinois School of Music will mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States with a short commemorative program on Tuesday (Sept. 11).

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - University of Illinois musicians - faculty members and students - perform works by renowned composer Augusta Read Thomas on a new CD. The music on "Astral Canticle" was recorded in December 2014 in the Great Hall at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - When jazz bassist Lawrence Gray and violinist Stefan Milenkovich perform music by Bach this weekend, it won't be a straight-up, standard interpretation of the music. The duo will improvise on a classical composition in a Friday evening concert, "Baroque-n-Roll."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The old warning about judging a book by its cover applies to the new album by flutist Jonathan Keeble and harpist Ann Yeung, music professors at the University of Illinois who perform and record as the Aletheia Duo. Their second CD is "Song of the Black Swan: Works Inspired by Nature." The instrumentation and New Age title combine to suggest the CD is an hourlong soundtrack suitable for meditation or a garden wedding.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The expansion has begun.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - For centuries, barn raisings have brought neighbors together to build structures to help families prosper and to celebrate the fruits of their communal labor once the last rafter is hoisted into place. This Friday (Dec. 10), the department of dance and the School of Architecture, both in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois, will celebrate the grand opening of the Graduate Dance Center, a 5,000-square-foot facility for dance research that was realized through the collaborative efforts of student and faculty volunteers and donated materials from an Iowa barn and a campus basketball court.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The artwork in the comic books would look familiar to any comic book fan. A well-muscled, green-skinned man and a Wonder Woman-type character square off against several figures with the faces of humans and bodies of snakes. There are explosions, a superhero climbing up the outside of a building and another breathing what appears to be green fire.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The University of Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired the literary archives of Gwendolyn E. Brooks, the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize and the poet laureate of Illinois for the last 32 years of her life, until her death in 2000. The archives, which had been kept by Brooks' daughter Nora Brooks Blakely, comprise more than 150 boxes stuffed with manuscripts, drafts, revisions, correspondence, scrapbooks, clippings, homemade chapbooks in which Brooks neatly handwrote her earliest (unpublished) poems, and heavy bronze awards ensconced in velvet-lined boxes collected later in her career.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Adelaide Muir, a junior in vocal performance in the School of Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was among seven singers selected as finalists in the 2004 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Seven faculty members and seven graduate students are recipients of Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities fellowships for the 2015-16 academic year. The fellowships support research and writing on topics chosen by the fellowship recipients.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In a review of the scholarly research that captured the most public attention online this year, three of the top 100 articles had authors from the University of Illinois.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The Christmas lists of youngsters will likely be filled with their share of video games and other electronics. But good-old-fashioned books (and e-books) hold their own as items to both give and receive, especially if they include an intriguing villain, a hen-pecked superhero or a girl who sells graves for the family cemetery business.

University of Illinois faculty will spend an evening drinking wine and discussing the nature of time at Krannert Art Museum. The conversation constitutes a performance, “Time Symposium,” that will be staged by Raqs Media Collective, artists from India.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - She exhibited with the surrealists in Paris in the 1930s and with the abstract expressionists in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. Today, her work is in the collections of some of the most respectable art museums in the United States. Yet, if the name Hedda Sterne appears at all in textbooks documenting 20th-century art history, it's typically as a passing reference or a footnote.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Growing up in Chicago's Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood, Audrey Petty lived about two miles from the Chicago Housing Authority's Robert Taylor Homes. Those 28 high-rises, arranged in horseshoe clusters along the Dan Ryan Expressway, contained more than 4,400 apartments, giving the complex the dubious title of largest public housing development in the nation. But though she could practically see the drab concrete towers from her doorstep, Petty regarded the Robert Taylor Homes as a foreign, mysterious and impenetrable enclave.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Saxophonist and band leader Isham Jones is best known for writing the melody for "It Had to Be You" and other hit songs. Although a well-known songwriter and band leader during the 1920s and '30s, Jones' early recordings are largely unknown and overlooked. Meagan Hennessey hopes that will change, with the reissuance of music Jones recorded in 1920 in Chicago with his Rainbo Orchestra.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Tere O'Connor, a professor of dance at the University of Illinois, has been selected as a United States Artists Fellow. The annual fellowships are awarded in the form of $50,000 unrestricted grants to 50 artists who have made significant contributions to their fields and demonstrated artistic excellence and unique artistic vision.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - These days, when people walk down the street "alone," chances are they're actually doing so in the company of remote others - connected by a cell phone. Or the tell-tale iPod cord extending from an ear means they're otherwise focused, marching to the beat of their own personal soundtrack.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Jazz fans in the Champaign-Urbana area are accustomed to hearing University of Illinois musicians performing around town in small ensembles virtually every night of the week. It's rare, though, for audiences to hear all the top players perform together on the same stage.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The University of Illinois Concert Jazz Band won top honors and the prestigious Gene Hall Award for best big band at this year's University of North Texas Jazz Festival last weekend in Addison, Texas.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Erin Gee, a composer known for her works that use nontraditional vocal techniques, is one of two composers to win the 2015 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gee, a University of Illinois professor of composition-theory, won the fellowship based on two new pieces that premiered in 2014.

Composer Erin Gee, a professor of composition-theory in the University of Illinois School of Music, is one of 10 composers selected to participate in Kronos Quartet’s Fifty for the Future project in 2017.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Most days of the year, Nicholas Temperley is a relatively

The Barack Obama Presidential Library is open in Hyde Park, Illinois. Not the official presidential library, which won’t be completed for years, but a Barack Obama Presidential Library exhibit at the Hyde Park Free Theater, a new storefront community arts center.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois is opening an exhibition space called Figure One in downtown Champaign that will link creative activity on campus with the surrounding community.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The University of Illinois School of Architecture is a charter member of a new research consortium of the American Institute of Architects, focusing on issues of design and health.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A one-man retrospective featuring installation and architectural projects will be exhibited June 15 through July 7 at I space, the Chicago gallery of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Jeffery S. Poss, a professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, has been elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects. Poss was one of 134 AIA members to be elevated to fellowship by the 2010 Jury of Fellows.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In Sarah Wisseman's third and fourth installments of her Lisa Donahue mystery series, the archaeologist and amateur sleuth becomes embroiled in two very different types of whodunits.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Five recent graduates of the master of fine arts program in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a "Monster."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Even if you're too young to be able to match the songs of Irving Berlin with the composer, you likely can sing a few lines of "White Christmas" or hum the tune to "God Bless America."

CHAMPAIGN,Ill. - John P. Wilkin has been named university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, effective Aug. 16, pending approval by the U. of I. Board of Trustees at its July 24 meeting in Chicago.

The University of Illinois theatre department has selected its first female leader – Kirsten Pullen, a professor of performance studies at Texas A&M University.

Illinois Theatre's 2015-16 season is based on the theme “Free Expression: Censored,” and features plays that have been censored or banned.