Honors Program

About: Colleen Jennings-Roggensack has presented the performing arts for the past 18 years. Formerly a dancer and choreographer, Ms. Jennings-Roggensack has held positions at Dartmouth College, Colorado State University and has served as Director of Performing Arts and Professional Development for the Western States Arts Federation. She has served on numerous NEA, regional and state panels, as well as being an invited speaker at national conferences. Colleen has been on the Board of Directors of the American Arts Alliance and has testified before Congress on behalf of public funding for the arts.

In August 1994, the Honorable Ms. Jennings-Roggensack was sworn-in to serve on the National Council on the Arts. She has worked with the National Endowment for the Arts and Department of Education on the Goals 2000 Arts Education Action Planning Process.

Having served three years as the President of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Colleen currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Arizonans for Cultural Development, is the Vice President of the Tempe Visitors & Convention Bureau, and is Executive Director of Arizona State University Public Events.

About: Sherman Alexie's razor sharp imagery and poignant directness allow him to affirm the continuing power of his tribe's cultural history. Alexie has a voice that resonates from his own experiences on the Spokane Indian reservation, a voice filled with passion and affection, yet echoing the irony, anger and pain of reservation life. Born in October 1966, Alexie is an enrolled Spokane, Coeur d'Alene Indian from Willipinit, Washington.

Sherman has published more than three hundred poems, stories, essays, reviews and translations. His book entitled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven depicts the distances between people: between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women and most poetically, between modern Indians and the traditional figures from their past. Alexie's first novel, Reservation Blues, is at once painful and comical, realistic and magical in an ultimately redemptive symphony.

Sherman Alexie is the author of four other books of poetry and prose: I would Steal Horses, Old Shirts and New Skins, The First Indian on the Moon, and The Business of Fancydancing . Citations and awards include: 1992 Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, winner of the Slipstream's fifth annual Chapbook Contest, citation winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book of Fiction and the 1994 Lila-Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.

He was educated at Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington and Washington State University, Pullman, Washington. Fellowships include the 1991 Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship and 1992 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.

About: William Bruder's professional studio and private residence are located on 10 acres in New River, north of metropolitan Phoenix. His portfolio of accomplishments as a sculptor and architect include the recently constructed City of Phoenix Central Library.

He has been quoted by the Arizona Republish/Phoenix Gazette as saying, "Architecture has its pragmatic side, but it also needs to be a search for poetic possibilities." He has further stated, "I look for the unique and special qualities of the real world and sift away layers of fashion and novelty to get to (human) simplicity, where there's something basic and good."

Mr. Bruder received his architectural registration in Arizona in 1974. A BFA degree was conferred upon him in sculpture by the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. Apprenticeships have been completed under the Paolo Soleri Cosanti Foundation of Scottsdale, Arizona and Gunnar Birkerts Associates Architects of Birmingham, Michigan.

Both nationally and internationally known, Will Bruder has served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as several other universities and professional organizations. Selected honors and awards include the 1996 DuPont Benedictus Award for the Phoenix Central Library, and the Honors Award, AIA Western Mountain Region for 1985 and 1995.

About: For nearly four decades, Richard Loveless has been active as an artist, teacher, researcher, arts administrator and advocate for "re-visioning" the role of the artist in developing and shaping new technologies for their aesthetic and expressive potential. Early training in music and the visual arts, coupled with a passion for performance, film and video production challenged him to accept the inevitability of collaboration as a process for confronting the technologies that would emerge in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Loveless views his leadership role in conceptualizing, executing and nurturing new and very diverse modes of communicating as a creative process. As Director of the Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University, he is responsible for an array of resident and visiting artist/scholars and technologists who conduct some twenty-five to thirty creative research activities annually.

Richard Loveless has consulted with community arts centers, museums, performing arts centers, arts education research centers, science centers, arts councils, artists' cooperatives, foundations and government arts agencies. He has been the recipient of over thirty-one grants and contracts from private and public foundations, corporations, the National Endowment for the Arts, other national arts organizations, and local, state and federal agencies. his accolades include a post-graduate fellowship for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute for technology.

About: Director and screen writer Gregory Nava collaborated with his wife Anna Thomas on the Academy-nominated drama El Norte . Shot on a modest budget, Nava's film about two young Guatemalan refugees who endure numerous hardships to reach the American border, was one of the first contemporary films to honestly and compassionately address the modern immigrant experience in America. He also wrote and directed the critically acclaimed film Mi Familia . He is currently at work on a film about slain Latin singer Selena.

Born in San Diego of Mexican-Basque heritage, Nava was interested in filmmaking at an early age. While at UCLA Film School, he was awarded the Best Dramatic Film Award at the National Student Film Festival.

Other credits include the 1976 Best First Feature Award at the Chicago International Film Festival for The Confessions of Aman, the tale which Nava wrote, produced and directed about a wandering medieval scholar. Nava is also accomplished as a cinematographer for the 1977 feature The Haunting of M .

About: Charles Lewis is the founder of the Charles Lewis Quintet. Mr. Lewis and the quintet have been recipients of many grants to perform throughout Arizona and the United States. He has served on the Musical Advisory Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Arizona Commission on the arts.

As a workshop leader, Mr. Lewis has presented on the relationship of music to colors, textures and linear shapes for the National Alliance for Arts Education.

As a composer, Mr. Lewis' work includes music for the PBS documentary film, "Jiminez and the Rose Tattoo," the Arizona Theater Company's production of "Streetcar Named Desire," pieces for the Arizona State University Department of Dance and a three movement piece for the Phoenix Boys Choir and Jazz Quintet.

Most recently, Mr. Lewis set twenty-three poems of Langston Hughes to music for three vocalists, a dramatic reader and a jazz quintet to be performed at Arcosanti, Herberger Theatre and Gammage Auditorium.

As an educator, he teaches privately in the areas of jazz piano, harmony and theory, jazz improvisation and vocal performance.