Welcome new faculty to the 2022/23 academic year

Columbia University School of the Arts is delighted to welcome a number of new faculty members to the 2022/23 academic year.

María José Contreras Lorenzini, Associate Professor of Theatre
María José Contreras is a Chilean multi-disciplinary artist working in theatre and performance. Her work explores the interrelations and frictions of embodied practice, performance, memory and the urban space. Her engagement with decolonizing theatre-making, teaching, and research practice is recognized in The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader, an international volume featuring the 73 leading global artists working with innovative approaches to performance. In addition to numerous articles, she recently co-edited two interdisciplinary volumes Cadáver exquisito and Women Mobilizing Memory. She is completing the monograph Rigorously Undisciplined.

David Antonio Cruz, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts
David Antonio Cruz is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, and performance. His work explores the intersectionality of queerness and race, centering Black, Brown, and queer bodies. Incorporating literature, language, and sculptural elements, Cruz’s work engages portraiture as a place of permanence and as a form of resistance to normative conventions. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, ICA Boston, The Block Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, and El Museo del Barrio. Most recently, Cruz exhibited work with Monique Meloche Gallery at The Armory Show in New York.

Matthew Salesses, Assistant Professor of Writing
Matthew Salesses is the author of seven books, including the bestseller Craft in the Real World and his latest novel, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Two more books are forthcoming—a novel, The Sense of Wonder, and a memoir-in-essays, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time—both from Little, Brown. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, Best American Essays and elsewhere. In 2015, Buzzfeed named Matthew one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. 

Anocha Suwichakornpong, Assistant Professor of Film
Anocha Suwichakornpong is an independent filmmaker who lives and works in Bangkok and the US. Suwichakornpong’s work, informed by the socio-political history of Thailand, has received much international acclaim and has been the subject of many retrospectives worldwide. Her films include Graceland, Mundane History, and By The Time It Gets Dark. She founded the Bangkok-based production company, Electric Eel Films and co-founded Purin Pictures, a film fund that supports independent Southeast Asian cinema. 

About Columbia University School of the Arts
Columbia University School of the Arts awards the Master of Fine Arts degree in Film, Theatre, Visual Arts, and Writing, as well as an interdisciplinary program in Sound Art that leads to an MFA in Visual Arts. The School also offers a Master of Arts degree in Film and Media Studies. It maintains a strong commitment to undergraduate education in the arts by offering majors in Creative Writing, Film and Media Studies, and Visual Arts that lead to the Bachelor of Arts, awarded by Columbia College and the School of General Studies. More information about the School, its programs, and events can be found online.

Columbia University School of the Arts recognizes Manhattan as part of the ancestral and traditional homeland of the Lenni-Lenape and Wappinger people. We continue to address issues of exclusion, erasure, and systemic discrimination through ongoing education and a commitment to equitable representation.