MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts Visiting Faculty: Walter Kitundu

Sierra Nevada College (SNC)’s low residency MFA-IA program is pleased to welcome Walter Kitundu to our growing list of visiting faculty and scholars this summer 2019.

Walter Kitundu creates sculptures and sound installations, develops public artworks, builds (and performs on) extraordinary musical instruments, while researching and documenting the natural world. He is the inventor of a family of Phonoharps, multi-stringed instruments made from record players that rely on the turntable’s sensitivity to vibration. Kitundu has created hand-built record players driven by the wind and rain, fire and earthquakes, birds, light, and the force of ocean waves. In 2008 he received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

His eclectic art practice includes receiving a major public art commission, creating a complex site-specific installation in a small-town museum, developing wildly imaginative instruments for a string quartet, composing for dance and theatrical production, engaging in research fieldwork with wild birds of prey, and heading the design and fabrication of environments for learning at a prominent science institution. In addition to his art practice Kitundu occasionally teaches in the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been a visiting professor at other institutions of higher learning.

Kitundu has performed and been in residence at art centers and science museums internationally. He has collaborated with the renowned Kronos Quartet and other renowned artists in venues from Carnegie Hall to a high school library in Egilstaadir, Iceland.

There are a few spots still open for new graduate students to begin the MFA-IA program this summer—please see our website for application instructions here.

The MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts Program is low-residency, and consists of two intensive ten-day, on-campus residencies during summer and winter sessions over the course of two and a half years. During the fall and spring semesters, students work in their home studios and continue relationships with faculty mentors and fellow colleagues remotely through online seminars and other points of contact.

Sierra Nevada College is a small, liberal arts college, located three blocks from Lake Tahoe, within a national forest, on an easily accessible campus in Incline Village, NV. The low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts is a locus for creative problem solving, fostered by creative thinking with an emphasis on community. The experience and exploration of embodied place is a central element of this distinctive program, encouraging students’ multi-dimensional relationship with their environment both in the Tahoe Basin and within their own communities.

Rotating Visiting Faculty
Roman DeSalvo / Matt Freedman / Christine Heindl / Ayanah Moor / Jared Stanley / Sameer Farooq / Julie Weitz / Llane Alexis / Peter Rostovsky / Rob Reynolds / Ashley Stull Meyers / Amy Khoshbin / Macon Reed / Beth Campbell / Aaron Gach / Scott Oliver / Gabie Strong / Mary Donnelly

Contact: Assistant Program Director, Julia Schwadron—jschwadron [​at​] sierranevada.edu.