Howard L. Gilman '44 Director
Hopkins Center for the Arts
Dartmouth College
mary.lou.aleskie@dartmouth.edu

Mary Lou Aleskie assumed her role at Dartmouth College in April 2017. She is charged with leading the advancement of the Hopkins Center for the Arts and arts and creativity at Dartmouth. The hallmark of her efforts will build on interdisciplinary projects linking the arts with humanities and STEM initiatives across campus and overseeing the evolution of the Hopkins Center into a 21st century state-of-the-art facility. She came to Dartmouth from New Haven, CT, where, since 2005, she was the director of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

Caroline M. Street Professor of Graphic Design
Yale School of Art
sheila.debretteville@yale.edu

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is the first tenured woman at the Yale University School of Art where she is the Caroline M. Street Professor, a title she accepted because city streets are where her site-specific installations have taken place, among these permanent site-specific pieces are: Biddy Mason: Time & Place in downtown Los Angeles, Omoide noShotokyo in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo; Search: Literature in Flushing’s Main Library, At the start… At long last… in the terminus of New York’s A train; Path of Worker Stars in downtown New Haven, Take a break…Out to lunch… Back to work… for the Department of Labor and Training in Rhode Island; … 所以 … at Hong Kong Design Institute: Step(pe) in downtown Yekaterinburg, Russia, and Special Events at the new LAFC Banc of California Soccer Stadium in downtown Los Angeles.

Sheila’s work is permanently on display in the Umea Museum Sweden, and in the special collections of libraries and museums among them, Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Her work has been frequently exhibited in museums such as the California: Designing Freedom, at the London Design Museum, and Graphic Design in America and Hippie Modernism: The Search for Utopia at the Walker Museum, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at the Hammer Museum and MOMA NY, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and P.S. 1 in New York, and Nasty Women at the New Haven Institute Library. During the past two years, her print work from the 1970s regarding participation and gender have been exhibited in a half dozen different galleries in Austria, Poland, and Germany.

Sheila was designated a Distinguished Alumna by Barnard College where she received her BA degree in the History of Art, Design Legend by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, awarded honorary doctorates from five American Universities of Art and Design on both coasts of the United States and given a Lifetime Achievement award from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts.

Professor in the Practice, Theater Management
Chair, Theater Management Program
Yale School of Drama
joan.channick@yale.edu

Joan Channick, Professor in the Practice of Theater Management, is Chair of the Theater Management department. She served as Associate Dean of Yale School of Drama from 2009 to 2017. She worked previously as Managing Director of New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre and as Managing Director of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), a national service organization for the not-for-profit professional theater field, in which capacity she also served as Director of the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. Other positions she has held include Associate Managing Director of Center Stage in Baltimore and Marketing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre. Preceding her theater career, she practiced securities litigation with the Boston law firm of Gaston Snow & Ely Bartlett. Channick previously chaired the Yale Summer Cabaret Advisory Board and the Yale Cabaret Board, and has served on the boards of the Yale-China Association, Foundry Theatre, National Corporate Theatre Fund, League of Professional Theatre Women, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, American Theatre Exchange Initiative, and Chase Brexton Health Services, an LGBTQ community health care center. She has also been a member of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, the International Theatre Institute executive council, and the League of Resident Theatres executive committee.She has written for American Theatre magazine and is the author of “The Changing Legal Environment for the Arts,” a chapter in the book The Art of Governance, published by TCG. Channick taught for six years in Goucher College’s graduate arts administration program, has been a guest lecturer at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing and other universities, and is a fellow of Yale’s Benjamin Franklin College. She is a graduate of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Yale School of Drama.

Producer
International Festival of Arts & Ideas
mhuber@artidea.org

Melissa Huber has been with the Festival since 2003. Her duties include building and managing the programming budget; liaising between speakers and artists’ production and personnel needs and the Festival’s resources; and programming a number of regionally based artists. As the Festival takes over the theaters, open spaces, lecture halls, and courtyards in and around New Haven, Melissa manages the transfer of artistic and programmatic ideas into on-the-ground performances, coordinating performance venues, equipment, schedules, and personnel.

In addition to her work with the Festival, Melissa is a founding member and managing director of Prospect Theater Company in New York City, a company dedicated to reinterpreting classic plays and musicals to collaboratively create new works. Melissa holds an AB in history from Princeton University and an MFA in theater management from the Yale School of Drama, where she received The Morris J. Kaplan Award. Prior to joining the Festival, she worked at the Guthrie Theatre in Minnesota, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Magic Theatre in San Francisco, Yale Repertory Theatre, and Ensemble Theatre Company of Santa Barbara.

Adviser, Yale-China Arts Advisory Committee
2015-2017 HKETO-NY Arts Fellow

Phoebe HUI is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher primarily working in the relationship between language, sound, and technology. Most recently, Phoebe was a lecturer in the Visual Arts and Culture program at the Hong Kong Design Institute. She is the recipient of a number of grants and awards, including the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Young Artist Award (Media Art), Asian Cultural Council Altius Fellowship, Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award, Solo Show Grant from Watermans to coincide with 2012 Olympics Games in London, Hong Kong Arts Development Council Art Scholarship, and the Hong Kong Design Association Design Student Scholarship. She has presented her research-based art practice and papers in different places such as ISEA, MIT Media Lab, Asian Contemporary Art Week, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Phoebe received her M.F.A. from the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, her M.A. in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and her B.A. in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong.

Art Historian
Former Chair Professor of Fine Arts
Former Director of the Art Museum
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Professor Kao Mayching is a distinguished scholar and a career advocate and champion of the arts, humanities, and education. Professor Kao has dedicated her life to the advancement of Hong Kong arts education and to the cultivation of young artists and art historians. She began her career as a professor in the Department of Fine Arts at New Asia College at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Her leadership was quickly recognized and she became Chairperson of the Department, during which time she established the Master of Philosophy, Doctor of Philosophy, and Master of Fine Arts programs – a milestone achievement in the Department’s planning and development. Professor Kao concurrently served an 18-year tenure as the Director of the Art Museum of the Institute of Chinese Studies at CUHK, where she spearheaded the Museum’s development and the expansion of its collection, exhibition, and research of artwork. Professor Kao has also served as the Dean of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at the Open University of Hong Kong, where she worked industriously to promote education in humanities and the arts for the public and society as a whole.

She has served on many advisory committees, including the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University, and public agencies. Professor Kao has been recognized for her scholarship and achievements through numerous accolades, scholarships (including a Yale-China Scholarship to study in the United States), and special funds named after her. Professor Kao is a graduate of New Asia College at CUHK in 1967 where she studied Fine Arts. She received her Master’s degree in Western Art History from the University of New Mexico in 1969, followed by her PhD in Asian Art History from Stanford University in 1972.

Professor; Founding Director of the Urban Design Workshop

Alan Plattus began teaching at Yale in 1986 after serving on the faculty of Princeton University for seven years. He is the current director of the School’s Ph.D. program and the Yale Urban Design Workshop and Center for Urban Design Research (YUDW), which he founded in 1992 and which undertakes research and design studies for communities throughout Connecticut and the metropolitan region. Current YUDW projects include planning for a Heritage Park along the Thames River between New London and Groton, Connecticut, and resiliency planning for Bridgeport and the Connecticut coast funded by HUD’s Rebuild by Design program. Plattus also directs the School’s China Studio, a collaboration between Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Yale School of Architecture, and recently led a Yale and international team to develop plans for a Peace Park along the Jordan River on the Israeli-Jordanian border. He has served on the boards of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the National Architectural Accrediting Board, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Architectural Research Quarterly, as well as the Connecticut Main Street Center and the New Haven Preservation Trust. Plattus received a B.A. from Yale University and an M.Arch. from Princeton University.

Co-Founder, Atelier Cho Thompson
Chair, Arts Advisory Committee, Yale-China
Former Yale-China Fellow

Ming Thompson is co-founder of Atelier Cho Thompson, a New Haven- and San Francisco-based multidisciplinary practice working between architecture, interiors, graphics, and strategy. ACT's work frequently blurs the boundaries between typologies, as they draw inspiration from their work in schools, offices, restaurants, and homes around the world. Ming was a recipient of the AIA Young Architect Award in 2020, and her firm has been the recipient of numerous national and regional design awards. ACT’s work has been published in Architect, Contract, Arch Daily, and Design Milk, among others. Educated at Yale College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Ming has taught at the California College of the Arts and has served on design juries around the U.S. Ming is a first-year advisor at Yale.