Faculty from Hunter’s distinguished arts departments often visit the Muse classroom or otherwise work with the scholars to provide insight into their respective art forms. Read below to read about some of the faculty who have worked with the Muse Scholars.
Carrie Moyer, Art Department
Art Professor, painter, and writer Carrie Moyer has visited the Muse classroom with her MFA students to lead discussions about contemporary art, painting, and the Whitney Biennial 2017, which showcased a selection of Moyer’s work.
Moyer has exhibited widely, in both the US and Europe. Her work is in numerous private and public collections including Birmingham Museum of Art, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pizzuti Collection, the Rose Art Museum and the Tang Museum. Moyer has been the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim and Joan Mitchell Foundations, Anonymous Was a Woman, Creative Capital, and many others.
Before joining the Hunter faculty in 2011, Moyer taught for a decade at a variety of institutions including the Rhode Island School of Design, Yale, Rutgers, Pratt and Cooper Union among others.
Ana Nery Fragoso, Arnhold Graduate Dance Education Program
Ana Nery Fragoso is the Acting Director of the Arnhold Graduate Dance Education Program at Hunter College, CUNY.
First year Muse Scholars get specialized instruction in dance movement and criticism while working with both the Director of Hunter’s Arnhold Graduate Dance Education Program (AGDEP) and select graduate students in the AGDEP program.
AGDEP prepares candidates to teach Dance PreK – Grade 12 to students of diverse backgrounds, abilities, and interests. Fragoso served as Director of Dance Programs for the NYCDOE Office of Arts and Special Projects from 2014-2021. She provided leadership and guidance for dance programs in public schools, designed professional learning opportunities for dance educators teaching K-12 dance in NYC public schools, and served as a liaison between the NYCDOE and external organizations offering dance and dance-related services to schools. She also directed the Arnhold New Dance Teacher Support Program, which provides first and second-year dance specialists with mentorship, funds, and instructional support. She was a member of the NYCDOE Dance Blueprint Writing Committee in 2004 and has worked as an NYCDOE dance facilitator co-designing professional development workshops for New York City Department of Education dance specialists. In 2017, she was a member of the New York State Dance Learning Standards writing team. From 2007-14, Ana was a faculty member at the Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) at the 92nd St Y. Fragoso earned a B.A. Dance/Education from Hunter College and an M.F.A. in Dance/Choreography from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently a doctoral student at Ed.D. Dance Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Dance Teacher Award 2022.
Kathleen Isaac, Arnhold Graduate Dance Education Program
Isaac, the founding, now former, Director of the Arnhold Graduate Dance Education Program, is a longtime leader in dance professional development, advocacy, K-12 teaching practice and dance assessment in New York City, New York State, nationally and internationally. She authored, provided professional development for and was lead facilitator and trainer for Revelations – An Interdisciplinary Approach for the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater from 1999-2010. She wrote Read My Hips® for the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago and worked as a mentor with Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Education Director through the DELCAP program, among other achievements.
Geoffrey Burleson, Music Department
Associate Professor of Music and Director of Piano Studies, Geoffrey Burleson has visited the Muse classroom to lead the scholars in lessons on classical music and jazz.
Burleson has performed to wide acclaim throughout Europe and North America, and is equally active as a recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician and jazz performer. The New York Times has hailed his solo performances as “vibrant” and “compelling”, and has praised his “command, projection of rhapsodic qualities without loss of rhythmic vigor, and appropriate sense of spontaneity and fetching colors”. And the Boston Globe refers to Prof. Burleson as a “remarkable pianist” and “a first-class instrumental presence” whose performances are “outright thrilling.” His numerous acclaimed solo appearances include prominent venues in Paris (at the Église St-Merri), New York, Rome (American Academy), Athens (Mitropoulos Hall), Mexico City (National Museum of Art), Rotterdam (De Doelen), Chicago (Dame Myra Hess Memorial Series), Boston, Washington, Switzerland, England, Spain, and elsewhere. He has also appearedas featured soloist in many international festivals, including the Bard Music Festival, Santander Festival (Spain), Monadnock Music Festival, and the Talloires International Festival (France).
Catherine Coppola, Music Department
Catherine Coppola teaches music history (graduate and honors courses on women in Mozart’s operas, capstone major course on musical borrowing, major survey courses) and performance, and she is Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music as well as a lecturer for Lincoln Center’s Great Performers Series. Scholarly interests include gender, race, and power in Mozart’s operas; censorship and social justice in opera; the fantasy genre; and musical borrowing. Her work has been published in 19th-Century Music, The Journal of the Society for Textual Scholarship, and Teaching Music. An invited speaker at the Venice International Conference on Improvisation and Open Forms, her paper was published in the proceedings as “Didacticism and Display in the Capriccio and Prelude for Violin, 1785-1840,” Musical Improvisation and Open Forms in the Age of Beethoven, ed. Gianmario Borio and Angela Carone, London: Routledge, 2018.
In addition to the Ph.D. in musicology, Prof. Coppola holds the M.M. in piano performance from the Manhattan School of Music, having studied principally with Seymour Lipkin, and in master classes with Gary Graffman and Menahem Pressler. Recent collaborative performances include Grieg songs with Susan Gonzalez; violin sonatas of Strauss and Brahms with Lucy Morganstern; songs of Pauline Viardot and Chopin with Stephanie Jensen-Moulton; and song cycles by Schumann and Richard Burke with NOA Director, Paul Houghtaling. Prof. Coppola has also appeared as soloist with the Bloomfield Symphony Orchestra and with the Rockland Symphony.
Suzanne Gonzales, Music Department
Susann Gonzalez holds degrees from Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and Eastman School of Music where she earned her DMA in Literature and Performance. Professor Gonzalez has professional experience internationally in theater, opera and concert repertoire. Appearances include solo performances at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall with the National Symphony, and Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra, and New Orleans Opera, among many others. Her international credits include debuts with the Bolshoi Opera in Chboksary and Nishny Novgorod, Russia. Some of her acting credits include a role in a BBC Series, SAILOR, which wono British National SUN AWARD for excellence as well as her appearance as Rosina in a filmed version of Il Barrbierre di Siviglia which received an EMMY nomination. She can be heard on CD’s released by Artek and Naxos singing songs and arias of Nicholas Flagello and on Leonarrda in Songs by Women.
As a director, Susan Gonzales has been producing opera scenes at Hunter College since 1995, Hunter College Opera Theatre performs fully staged productions in the Kaye Playhouse primarily finding a voice through new and rarely performed operas. Susan has also directed opera productions regionally for The Bronx Arts Ensemble, New Jersey’s Garden State Opera, Dell’Arte Opera and Satori Opera.
Ryan Keberle, Music Department
Music Professor and Hunter Jazz Ensemble Director Ryan Keberle has visited the Muse classroom to lead lessons in jazz appreciation, preparing scholars for live jazz performances.
Keberle is the leader of his pianoless quartet Catharsis, and he has toured with or accompanied a variety of musical legends: indie rock songwriter Sufjan Stevens, the ground-breaking big bands of Maria Schneider and Darcy James Argue, Alicia Keys and Justin Timberlake as well as jazz legends Rufus Reid and Wynton Marsalis. He’s been heard on movie soundtracks for filmmakers like Woody Allen and in the pit for the Tony-winning Broadway musical “In the Heights.”
Louisa Thompson, Theatre Department
Theatre Professor and set designer Louisa Thompson has accompanied the Muse Scholars on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and come into class to discuss theater design.
Louisa Thompson is a designer and a creator of theatrical work for young audiences. She received the 2019 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Scenic Design. In addition to the 16+ years she has taught at Hunter College she has designed for a variety of New York City theatres: Second Stage Theatre; Signature Theatre; Playwrights Horizons; Soho Repertory Theatre; The Play Company; Target Margin Theater; Clubbed Thumb; Rattlestick Playwrights Theater; Elevator Repair Service; The Foundry Theater Company. Her regional credits include: The Alliance Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Kirk Douglas Theater, Arden Theatre; Bard Summerscape, The McCarter Theatre, The Papermill Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse; The Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis. As Lead Artist she created “Washeteria” a site-specific all-age event that featured the work of Cesar Alvarez and Charise Castro-Smith. She has degrees from Yale School of Drama (MFA) and Rhode Island School of Design (BFA).
