PCA&D announces faculty promotions and additions

Pennsylvania College of Art & Design is pleased to announce upcoming promotions and additions to the College’s faculty and staff:

• Michelle Fogel has been promoted to Assistant Professor in General Humanities and will also work with students this fall as a faculty persistence mentor. Fogel has been a part-time faculty member in the Liberal Arts department at PCA&D for 13 years, teaching courses in theater, linguistics, verbal communication, folklore, and cultural studies. In 2020, she helped to launch the college’s Writing Center as co-director, and she has been the faculty advisor for multiple student clubs, including PCA&D’s improv theater group Yes &. Her background in arts-based education, teaching artist residency programs, and critical literacy curriculum development has enabled her to empower students by fostering creativity and life skills through storytelling, writing, dramatics, and community building. She is the founder of Dramability Works!, a unique arts-infused theater program for young adults with cognitive disabilities. Fogel also has been a teaching artist with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for the past five years, leading the Neighborhood Bridges storytelling curriculum in the School District of Lancaster.
• Caitlin Downs joins the College as the Director of the Writing Center and Liberal Arts faculty member. Downs has been a mainstay of the Foundations of Verbal Communication and creative writing programs at the College since 2014 and has developed many of PCA&D’s literature courses, including Fantasy Literature, Science Fiction & Horror Literature, and Diverse Voices in Literature. Her dual master’s degrees in Creative Writing and English combined with her experience tutoring and teaching developmental writing, rhetoric, creative writing, and communication courses at multiple colleges over the past decade have positioned her well to take the helm of PCA&D’s new Writing Center, which she helped to launch as co-director in 2020. Her MFA thesis was a collection of visual poetry based on a historic grimoire cataloging regionally specific healing remedies. She received a Saltire Scholarship to study and present her work on spoken word poetry at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. She also has a visual arts certificate in photography, which has led her to explore cross-disciplinary studies. Her particular interest is work in which images and language intersect, such as concrete or visual poetry.

The College is also pleased to announce that Todd Ulrich, Laura Korzon, David Spolum, and Angie Kost, have been promoted to part-time status. Kost and Spolum are veteran PCA&D adjunct professors teaching art history, visual culture, general humanities, and communication courses in the Liberal Arts Department; Korzon and Ulrich are veteran PCA&D adjunct professors in studio art.

• Ulrich is a 2014 alumnus of the College’s Illustration program and has been teaching at PCA&D as an adjunct professor for PCA&D since 2016.  His broad experience in digital illustration media has been important in developing students’ ability to paint digitally as well as 3D modeling.  He has extensive professional experience as well, working for Skullduggery Press, Braine Games, ClearHorizon Miniatures, and Loud Ninja Studio since he graduated in 2014.
• Korzon has taught at the College as an adjunct professor since 2018.  During Korzon’s first two years she spearheaded three new courses and brought real-world clients, like Vans, into her projects. Connections like these have assisted in putting PCA&D Illustration on national industry radars, essential to the mission of the department. Her College service work also goes above and beyond, through her role as faculty secretary and minute-taker for the Committee of the Whole to her support for pan-institutional events such as Designathon.
• Spolum has been teaching at PCA&D as an adjunct professor for 18 years and is a Master Lecturer at the University of the Arts. His teaching and research areas of expertise are in film and English literature, particularly the cutting-edge documentary film work of Stephen and Timothy Quay. His classes at PCA&D have included Mythology and Constructing Secondary Worlds, as well as film course offerings such as Cult Cinema and Painting with Light: Cinema and the Visual Arts.
• Kost has been teaching art history, visual culture, and communication courses for the College as an adjunct professor since 2015. Her educational and professional background in art education and years of experience teaching and developing art history and art education curricula at several colleges has piqued her interest in pursuing a second master’s degree in Art History with a concentration in Modern Art with a focus on gender studies (2022).

The College also has announced Departmental Chair changes:

• William Mammarella, assistant professor and former Chair of Fine Art, will chair the Foundation department. Mammarella began teaching at PCA&D in 1997 and has been a full-time faculty member since 2015.
• Becky Blosser, assistant professor of Fine Art, will serve as Chair of Fine Art.  She has been with PCA&D full time since 2018, having started as a part-time instructor in 2014.
• Robert Young, who joined PCA&D in 2019 as an assistant professor of Illustration, will now chair the Illustration department.
• Jon Di Venti, assistant professor and Chair of the Animation & Game Art, will transition to full-time teaching in the Illustration department.