Faculty
The Faculty of the PIMA program is comprised of members from the graduate Theater, Music, Film, Television, Radio & Emerging Media, Art and Computer and Information Science departments.
David Grubbs
Program Director
David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) as well as the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press) and Projectile (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City). Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou.
Jennifer McCoy
Faculty Member
The work of the American artists team Jennifer and Kevin McCoy has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, P.S.1, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. International exhibitions… include projects at the Pompidou Center, the British Film Institute, ZKM, the Hanover Kunstverien, the Bonn Kunstverein, and F.A.C.T. (Liverpool, UK). Grants include a 2002 Creative Capital Grant for Emerging Fields, a 2005 Wired Rave Award, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. Articles about their work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, Art News, The New York Times, and Newsweek. Residencies include work at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Their work is represented in New York by Postmasters Gallery and Gallerie Guy Bartschi, Geneva and can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and MUDAM in Luxembourg.
André M. Zachery
Adjunct Lecturer
André M. Zachery is a Chicago bred and now Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, scholar and technologist with a BFA from Ailey/Fordham University and MFA in Performance & Interactive Media Arts from CUNY/Brooklyn College. As the artistic director of Renegade Performance Group his practice, research and community engagement artistically focuses on merging of choreography, technology and Black cultural practices through multimedia work. André is a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Gregory Millard Fellow in Choreography and 2019 Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Choreography. His works through RPG have been presented domestically and internationally, receiving support through several residencies, awards, commissions. These have included the CUNY Dance Initiative, Performance Project Residency at University Settlement, ChoreoQuest Residency at Restoration Arts Brooklyn, 3LD Art & Technology Center, HarvestWorks and a Jerome supported Movement Research AIR. Awarded grants have been from the Brooklyn Arts Council, Harlem Stage Fund for New Work and a Slate Property SPACE Award. Commissions have come from the Brooklyn Museum, Five Myles/BRIC Biennial and Danspace Project.
Erwin Maas
Faculty Member
Erwin Maas is a New York based theatermaker, educator and international arts advocate from the Netherlands. He has worked extensively in Australia, Europe, South Africa, South Korea and USA. In New York, he directs numerous productions Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway as well as Site Specific. Maas is the Co-Founding Director of the Pan-African Creative Exchange (PACE), Artistic Associate & Director of the Fellowship Program for the International Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY), and the Programming Director for the Off Broadway Origin Theatre Company. He is a frequently invited director, facilitator, educator, and speaker for international cultural organizations, festivals, universities, congresses and think tanks. From 2016 to 2020, Maas was the Artistic/Creative Director of the International Society for Performing Arts (ISPA), and from 2010 to 2014, he was the Director of Performing Arts for the Cultural Department of the Royal Netherlands Embassy & Consulates in the USA. He currently teaches as Adjunct Professor at CUNY Brooklyn College’s M.F.A. Performance & Interactive Media Arts Program (PIMA). Erwin is a core-member of Theater Without Borders, a member of Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics and of the Netherland-America Foundation Cultural Committee. He also serves on the Artistic Advisory Board of the ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn, the First Nation Spiderwoman Theater, and DecadesOut, an organization at the intersection of Arts, Science & Policy. Maas was a Fulbright Scholar for his MFA in Theatre Directing at Columbia University School of the Arts in NYC. He also holds a M.A. in Drama Teaching from the Academy of Dramatic Arts Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and a M.A. in Media Arts and Production/Documentary Filmmaking from the University of Technology Sydney – Australia.
Justine Williams
Adjunct Lecturer
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Justine is an interdisciplinary artist and performer interested in art as social practice. From 2002-2012, Justine was co-artistic director of The Glass Contraption, an ensemble-based company that presented original works of performance and film, led artist training and carried out collaborative art projects with communities locally and abroad. Current projects include a performance/media piece created with senior artists from the Westbeth for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Media Lab and the David Lunch Movie Truck, a cinema-cum-theater housed inside a box truck. Education: Brown University (B.A.), New School (M.A. in International Affairs/Media & Culture). Faculty: Yale School of Drama.
Briggan Krauss
Adjunct Lecturer
Briggan Krauss in an internationally recognized saxophonist, composer and sound artist who has been a strong presence on the New York creative music scene since 1994. He is a founding member of the band Sexmob, has played on Grammy Award winning and nominated recordings, and leads several of his own projects as well as collaborating with many other improvisers and composers in New York City and around the world. He has recently earned an M.F.A. from Brooklyn College’s Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) program.
