dancEnsemble Features a Collection of Dances Choreographed By Students

To kick off the 2018-19 Faith and Works lecture series, Joe Ostraff shares how his faith in spiritual relationships has influenced his art to be a collaborative experience

Brendon French, Megan Holbrook, Dayne Joyner and Sarah Broyles share their experiences serving and performing in historic Nauvoo.

Out of more than 1,000 entries, BYU students and faculty won top award for their performing arts posters at the University and College Designers Association Competition

Brown’s solo exhibition is currently featured in the A Gallery

“It started with fear,” says Ryan W. Moffett (MA ’05). “Everybody I knew with MS was in a wheelchair.” Moffett, a ceramics teacher at Murray High School, stands in his art studio next to one of his sculptures—a large, ceramic torso and head with minimal details. It’s one of a series that he created in the wake of learning he had multiple sclerosis in 2013. Moffett titled the sculpture Demyelination, after the nervous system–eroding process that occurs with MS. The sculpture is inspired by Bronze Age statues made by island dwellers in the Aegean Sea, but it also departs from the traditional: the top left chunk of the head is cleanly cut away where the brain should be, and a frayed electrical cord protrudes from the right half. Read more here.

Hands shaky and sweaty, BYU senior Catherine Boyack cleared her dry mouth. She lifted her flute and played. She had been working for months to polish her piece, but she knew it wasn’t her best performance. She left the stage of the convention hall defeated, believing she wouldn’t make it to the final round of the biggest competition of her career.

Vai Sikahema discusses his journey from rejection to the Alumni Achievement Award in the School of Communications.

“Forever, women have been expected to be a certain way, look a certain way. I know for me … I was never the girly-girl. When I first started touring, I didn’t even wear makeup — I wore jeans. … And then I started being told I needed to look different because I was going to be on TV. … All of that starts getting put in your head and if you don’t have a strong enough sense of what you believe or who you are, you can easily get worried by it — I was for a certain amount of time.” That was just one of many topics Caillat addressed during the hourlong conversation at BYU's Harris Fine Arts Center. The singer touched on a variety of subjects ranging from working with Jason Mraz to overcoming stage fright to her surprising — and initially unwanted — rise to fame. As Caillat puts it, finding success was “accidental.” For starters, not many people can write a hit song in 20 minutes. But the words came out fast, and when her friend posted a demo recording of 'Bubbly' and a few other songs to MySpace — a platform Caillat had never even heard of — popularity came almost as fast. Caillat was offered a record deal, and those demos became her debut album in 2007. Read more at Deseret News’ website. Photo Credit: Alyssa Lyman.

BYU art professor Joe Ostraff shares his presentation “We Breathe the Same Air” at the November Faith and Works Lecture Series.

Martha Graham Intensive Offers Both Professional and Creative Boosts to Dancers

It’s a good year for BYU’s Center for Animation: in May BYU animation students won E3’s College Game Competition, and now BYU tops the Animation Career Review’s ranking of animation schools with Bachelor of Science programs. BYU’s animation program is comprised of students in both the animation track (BFA) and the computer science animation emphasis (BS). Before they graduate, students work either on the animated film or the video game that is produced each year. The animation students typically focus on design, while the computer science students focus on special effects. Read the rest of the story on news.byu.edu.