SMU Art Division Faculty artist Melanie Clemmons and composer Courtney Brown will be giving an artist talk on Friday, March 9th, at 12p CST. Come join us!

Zoom link: https://smu.zoom.us/j/92699852967

Melanie Clemmons

Melanie Clemmons (she/her) is a new media artist interested in reimagining our use of digital technology toward a softer, calmer, and more careful future. She makes videos, net art, installations, 3D printed sculpture, & XR experiences and performances. In addition to national/international gallery and museum work, Clemmons toured with Pussy Riot doing visuals during their first North American tour and has collaborated on several of their music videos, and along with Zak Loyd, makes video performance and installation collaborations as Clemmons & Loyd. She is an assistant professor of Digital/Hybrid Media at SMU in Dallas, TX.

Along with having her work collected in The Smithsonian Institution (as part of the Women and Their Work archive) and The Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of Ways of Something), her work has been shown at, among others: HeK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel, Switzerland; CICA Museum Gyeonggi, Korea; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Light Year, Brooklyn; Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles; LRLX, San Francisco; Aggregate Space Gallery, Oakland; UPFOR Digital, Portland; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Denver Digerati; Women and Their Work; Austin; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; and many other DIY spaces and venues.

Courtney Brown

Courtney Brown is a composer/performer, software developer, and tango dancer. She creates new musical instruments, installations and performance work investigating how musical interaction can be transformative. For instance, in her work, tango dancers become musical ensembles and people become dinosaurs. She is also a classically trained soprano, an accordionist, a guitarist, and a veteran of numerous rock/new wave/goth/free improv bands and composer collectives — all influences that weave in and out of her musical work.

Her work has been featured and performed in North America, Europe, and Asia including  National Public Radio (NPR), Ars Electronica (Austria), Diapason Gallery (Brooklyn), International Computer Music Conference (Korea), ACM Movement and Computing Conference (Italy), International Live Interfaces Conference (Sussex, UK), New Interfaces for Musical Expression/BEAM Festival (London), Frequency Festival (Chicago), the Telfair Museum (Savannah), Itinerant Performance Art Festival (NYC), International Tuba Euphonium Conference (TN), and Modified Arts Gallery (Phoenix). She also received a Fulbright Fellowship in Music Composition to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she began work on her ongoing project, Interactive Tango Milonga, creating interactive Argentine tango dance.

She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Center of Creative Computation, Southern Methodist University. She received her D.M.A in Digital Media and Performance from Arizona State University, her M.A. in Electroacoustic Music from Dartmouth College, and her B.S. in Music (concentration in soprano voice) and Computer Science from Loyola University New Orleans.