This story is published in YFile’s New Faces feature issue 2022. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments.
The School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design (AMPD) welcomes six new faculty members this fall.
“We are excited to welcome these new colleagues to AMPD. Each of them brings an original combination of skills, expertise and talents. I am particularly impressed by their respective range of skills and the ways in which they can build and enhance novel connections across AMPD and the University. I look forward to what they will do at York and how they will nurture our students’ creative and collaborative work,” Sarah Bay-Cheng, dean, AMPD.
Sihwa Park
Sihwa Park joins AMPD in the Department of Computational Arts. He is a sound interaction designer, media artist, and researcher in interactive audiovisual software art, computational algorithms and audiovisual interfaces emerging technologies. Park’s data-driven audiovisual arts reflecting the relationship between humans and machines, data and algorithms has been showcased at international venues including New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), the Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia (SIGGRAPH Asia) and NeurIPS, a Neural Information Processing Systems conference.
Park earned a PhD in media arts and technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was a Chancellor’s Fellowship recipient from 2016-21. He also holds a master of science in Graduate School of Culture Technology (with a focus on music technology and interactive media art) from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).
Hector Centeno
Hector Centeno joins AMPD in the Department of Creative Technologies. He is a digital media creator with over two decades of experience as an independent artist, interactive systems programmer and designer, digital media technician and media arts instructor.
Centeno’s presented his work on the reflective ability of immersive digital sound aesthetic and visual and interactive experiences at national and international cross-disciplinarity presentations. As an industry software and interactive system developer and designer, Centeno has worked with industry leaders like with New Adventures in Sound Art (as Technical Director) and Impossible Things (as Technology Director) to produce virtual and augmented reality interactive experiences and video game mechanics and simulation systems.
As an academic, he has previously taught courses related to the theory and production techniques of digital media art at OCADU and at George Brown College and Sheridan College’s Screen Industry Research and Training Centre (SIRT).
Denis Martin
Denis Martin joins AMPD in the Department of Music Technology and Production. As a freelance audio engineer, Martin specializes in Western classical music recording and popular music mixing and mastering working with local R&B, reggae, indie, jazz, and folk artists thought out Montréal and Toronto. Martin’s work earned him three Juno nominations, two East Coast Music Association (EMCA) nominations, and the “Académie Charles Cros – Coup de Cœur Musique Contemporaine” award. Exploring the new medium of 3D music production, Martin is now involved in releases in Dolby Atmos and Apple Spatial Audio.
Martin taught at McGill University and The State University of New York in Potsdam. He is known for his compassionate approach, dedication to his students, and research-based methods of instruction resulting in the “Schulich School of Music Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award” from McGill.
Yasmine Espert
Yasmine Espert is joining the AMPD Department of Visual Art & Art History at York University, brining expertise in the field of visual art and art history production and scholarship from her experince with Seen, a journal published by BlackStar Projects, MoMA’s Museum Research Consortium, the Oxford University Press and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Her publications on film, photography and the African Diaspora include “Listening to Revolution” for Artpress, “Can Photography Be Decolonial?” for Public Books, as well as a creative essay on sovereignty for Spectator, and an article on Black British film for Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Her research is supported by ACLS, Union Theological Seminary, the University of Michigan, Fulbright and others.
Espert was an advisor for Student Voices, a digital humanities collaboration with Smarthistory and the AUC Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective. With the support of Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism, she curated made vulnerable – an online exhibition for sx visualities. She was a research associate at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the University of Illinois, Chicago (Bridge to Faculty). She received a doctorate in art history from Columbia University.
Syreeta Hector
Syreeta Hector is a dance artist and educator in Toronto, Ontario, and joins AMPD in the Department of Dance. As a highly accomplished performer, Hector has worked for internationally recognized companies like Adelheid Dance Projects, Citadel + Compagnie, and Toronto Dance Theatre. Her solo work “Black Ballerina” gained recognition at the SummerWorks Festival (2019), won the Stratford Festival Lab Award for Research and Creation and received a Dora Mavor Moore nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Individual. This work is now touring live across Canada.
Hector is currently choreographing three new dance creations commissioned by Mocean Dance (Nova Scotia), and ProArteDanza (Ontario). She is also supported by the Concept to Realization Program at the Canada Council for the Arts to create a new work group piece which will act as the second chapter in her “Black Ballerina” series.
Hector is a proud graduate of The National Ballet School’s Teacher Training Program, The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, and has achieved her master of arts in dance studies from York University.
Katherine Dowling
Katherine Dowling joins the Department of Music in AMPD. Praised by the New York Times for her “crystalline performances, gestural expressiveness, and careful attention to color”, award-winning pianist Dowling performs across North America and Europe as a soloist and chamber musician.
Dowling sat as an artist-in-residence at the Orlando Festival (Netherlands), a resident Fellow of the Avaloch Farm Music Institute (USA), a multi-year Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center and a New Fromm Fellow with performances broadcasted on the CBC (Canada), Radio-Canada, BBC (United Kingdom), and National Radio 4 (Netherlands). In the community, Howling served on the National Finals of the Canadian Music Competition jury, adjudicating at the regional and provincial levels, and teaches masterclasses and workshops across Canada.
She holds a doctor of musical arts (performance) degree from Stony Brook University. Howling has taught piano performance at the University of Regina and the duo526 Sonata Seminar and the European Summer Course for Chamber Music (Netherlands).