DAAP Recognizes Outstanding Faculty with College Awards

As the 2010-2011 academic year nears its close, the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) recently recognized outstanding faculty with college awards. Award recipients included

2011 DAAP Annual Award for Outstanding Teaching
Vicki Daiello, Assistant Professor of Art Education

The DAAP Annual Award for Outstanding Teaching recognizes a DAAP faculty member for a high level of achievement and contribution to university teaching. Recipients of this award have demonstrated their ability to communicate a broad and accurate knowledge of their field, to challenge students to think and create, to counsel students wisely and to motivate students to perform to their fullest capacity.

Five of Vicki Daiello's students sent nomination letters, and their comments make it clear that Daiello is an exemplary and innovative teacher.

One nominator describes Daiello as “an exceptional teacher, role model and friend.”

Students describe her with words like “prepared, organized, passionate, outstanding, professional, and tireless.”

 Nominator and student Samantha Setterlin says, “She is always prepared and organized, leading powerful classroom experiences in which every voice is heard and every student is respected. Becoming a teacher is a rather daunting task, but I want to model my teaching after Vicki. She is so kind and so inspiring. It is rare to see professors truly passionate about what they are teaching, and Vicki is an exemplary example.”

Nominator and student Margaret Schmidt says, “Dr. Daiello is a perfect recipient for this and many awards.”

2011 DAAP Award for Outstanding Service             
James Postell, Associate Professor of Interior Design

The DAAP Award for Outstanding Service recognizes a DAAP faculty or staff member for a high level of achievement or distinguished accomplishments and contributions to the college, university, community or profession.

James Postell was nominated by colleague

Jerry Larson

, professor in the School of Architecture and Interior Design, who says, “I do this on the basis of his unselfish performance of his duties as the associate director for the School of Architecture and Interior Design for the past two years.”

Postell was asked to serve as associate director by Jay Chatterjee, interim school director in spring 2009. Because Chatterjee was new to serving as school director, he relied on Postell for significantly more assistance than was normally expected of an associate director.

Throughout the transition summer of 2010 before the arrival of William Williams, current school director, Postell maintained a key role at a time of significant efforts toward preparing the school for UC’s conversion to semesters in fall 2012.

Larson concluded his nomination by saying, “Quite frankly, I do not know how SAID would have survived the recent change in administration without Jim’s strong, but evenhanded involvement over the past two years.”

2011 DAAP Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty
Katie Parker, Assistant Professor of Art

The DAAP Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty  recognizes a DAAP faculty member for overall exemplary performance or for a particular outstanding contribution to the college, university, community or profession in one area of activity.

Comments from those who nominated her provide clear evidence that Katie Parker has excelled as an innovative and collaborative teacher and has made significant strides in combining her teaching and research interests.

Parker was nominated by colleague Charles Woodman, associate professor of fine arts, who describes how she “transformed the ceramics program and has revitalized both the physical facilities and the curriculum.”

He adds that  she “has successfully broadened the range of possibilities and techniques open to students by adding tools and methods both new and old, ranging from wheel throwing, mold making and slip casting, to rapid prototyping and 3D printing.”

Jim Williams, professor of fine arts, describes her as “visionary, ambitious, and entrepreneurial…a highly competent teacher” and credits her with “substantial improvement within the ceramics program.”

School of Art Director Mark Harris notes that Parker’s “innovative teaching approach” has led to “the nurturing of a remarkable production and research ethos within the ceramics area”.

Similarly, Ryan Mulligan, assistant professor of fine arts, who received this award last year, says “Not only is the work aesthetically stronger, Katie insists on thoughtful, content driven works that are connected to the discourse of contemporary art and craft.”

In addition to her teaching role, Parker has exhibited her own work: in a one-person show at Prairie Gallery and at the National Biennial Ceramic Invitational, as well as being scheduled for a solo show at the Taft Museum of Art in 2012.

Recipients of the Pogue-Wheeler Traveling Fellowship

This year, a joint project by two faculty in the School of Architecture and Interior Design received the highest ranking by the awards committee. The faculty members are

• Udo Greinacher, associate professor in the School of Architecture and Interior Design
• Patrick Snadon, associate professor in the School of Architecture and Interior Design
  

The Pogue-Wheeler Traveling Fellowship is intended to fund faculty travel and to improve the quality of faculty teaching. The fellowship provides financial support to DAAP faculty whose project is concerned with studies in architecture, interior design, and urban planning.

The focus of the duo’s project is to research a group of geographically distant buildings by Woodie Garber, Cincinnati's most brilliant modernist architect of the mid-20th-century.  

The Pogue-Wheeler Traveling Fellowship will allow Snadon and Greinacher to visit, photograph and make record drawings of Garber’s surviving buildings in Massachusetts and Canada; to research his project for the Cornell University Library in Ithaca, NY; and to record interviews with Garber family members and descendants of his clients who now reside in Maine, Massachusetts and New York.

In their proposal, they write: “As a result of our combined research, we have found Woodward ("Woodie") Garber (1913-1994) to be the most progressive of Cincinnati's mid-century modernist architects. His work was the most avant-garde of the period for its formal, structural and programmatic innovations, and his local buildings are the most endangered today. Large numbers of his best structures have already disappeared and many of his surviving buildings face demolition or unsympathetic remodeling.”

This research will then be disseminated to a larger public through a planned exhibition of Garber’s work in DAAP and the production of a comprehensive catalog of his buildings.

DAAP Professor of the Year
Jane Alden Stevens, Professor of Art

Each year, graduating undergraduate and graduate students may nominate faculty members for the Professor of the Year Award.

The criteria for Professor of the Year include excellent service in the form of devotion to teaching and personal and classroom creativity.

The nomination of Jane Alden Stevens came from five graduating MFA students and one first year MFA student.

The comments in the nomination letter submitted by Gretchen Ferber and signed by these students, provide a picture of a professor who is clearly deserving of this award:

“More so than any professor I know, she commits more time to designing courses, providing exceptional insight in critique and spends her own time outside class nurturing students to realize their greatest potential. Any student who has had the privilege to have Janie as instructor emerges from her class changed.”

“Janie does not ask excellence from her students, she demands it, and in such a way that is respectful and motivating.”

“Janie’s approach to classroom critique is both innovative and constructive. Her format of critique constantly changes and avoids stagnation but perhaps her greatest asset is her honesty. While some professors might avoid the painful truth and others drive, sometimes insensitively, to the point, Janie has a deft ability to deliver direct yet respectful critique. “

“My personal relationship with Janie is one that I will continue to cherish beyond graduation in June. Janie has opened her home and family to me and has allowed me the space to share my background, struggles and hopes with her. This is a rarity in academia since instructors’ pressure to publish and students’ stresses to succeed often prevail. I feel privileged to know Janie in such an individualized manner.”

2011 DAAP Special Dean’s Award
Karen Monzel Hughes, Associate Dean

 The Special Dean’s Award recognizes a faculty or staff member member for significant contributions to the college, university, community or profession.

This award is given at the dean’s discretion in recognition of contributions that have a lasting impact on the college.