Tawnya Pettiford-Wates | Department of Theatre and Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies
Known affectionately as “Dr. T,” she is a playwright, director, actor, poet and writer whose Broadway credits include the New York Shakespeare Festival’s landmark production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, in which she also performed in the first national and international touring companies. Her television, film and commercial credits are equally extensive, including featured voice talent for the video game Halo.
Since joining VCU in 2004, Dr. T built a body of work inseparable from the life of the community around it. Among her most celebrated directing projects are uncle tom: deconstructed for The Conciliation Project, Detroit ’67 and Passing Strange for Firehouse Theatre and A Raisin in the Sun, Fences and Primary Trust for Virginia Repertory Theatre. Since co-founding The Conciliation Project in 2001, Pettiford-Wates has served as its artistic director, building one of VCU’s most distinctive social justice theater programs. That sustained commitment helped secure a $5 million endowment for the Theatre Department to focus on social justice and applied theatre.
Her scholarship extended to the page as well, with contributions to the bestselling textbook Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, which offers alternatives to Euro-American performance styles, and to the 2019 anthology African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity, that explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future.
A visiting scholar with vast global reach, Dr. T served as visiting professor in performance studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, where she led students in creating a collectively authored performance piece that opened at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre on the Howard College campus. She took students to both the International Fringe Festival in Edinburgh and the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, South Africa.
Dr. T was the recipient of many awards and grants throughout her career—including recognition from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival and the VCU Presidential Award for Community Multicultural Enrichment. In 2023, she was the Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, and in 2024, she was named an eminent scholar at the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus.
Ken Wood | Department of Music
Wood served as voice area coordinator, director of VCU Opera and a teacher of applied voice, master classes and opera theatre. He was a finalist in both the International Opera Singers Competition in New York and the International Opera Competition of Wisconsin.
Wood also performed leading and supporting roles with some of the country’s most respected companies, including the Western Opera Theater in San Francisco, the Lyric Opera of Dallas, the Fort Worth Opera and the Austin Lyric Opera. He gave solo performances with the Texas Choral Artists, the Chamber Music Festival, the Austin Symphony and the Fort Worth Ballet, among others. Notably, Wood served as state governor for the Virginia/Maryland area of the National Opera Association.
Deidra Arrington | Department of Fashion Design and Merchandising
Arrington arrived at VCU School of the Arts in 2004, bringing the kind of industry experience that cannot be taught from a textbook. Before joining the faculty, she had risen to vice president and divisional merchandise manager at Stage Stores, overseeing a $41 million sales volume across 274 stores and developing a full range of merchandising, pricing and promotional strategies for the company’s Peebles Division. Arrington brought that deep expertise directly into the classroom and never stopped building on it.
Throughout her 22-year tenure, Arrington became one of the department’s most prolific scholars. She co-authored the textbook Fashionomics, which was later translated into Korean, and contributed chapters to books on topics ranging from luxury brand identity to the ethics of sustainable fashion. Her peer-reviewed articles appeared in Film, Fashion & Consumption and Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, and she presented her research at Oxford University’s Global Conference on Fashion for several years.
In 2012, Arrington created the Summer Luxury Program, taking students to New York City for immersive industry visits with designers, showrooms and fashion forecasters. She later developed the course “Survey of Luxury Fashion,” which she taught in Florence, Italy, through a partnership with the Santa Reparata International School of Art.
As a campus leader, she served on the Faculty Senate and University Council, chaired numerous search committees and served as assistant chair of the department for a year and served as chair for four years, from 2022-26. She was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2018.
Laura Chessin | Department of Graphic Design
Chessin joined VCUarts in 1997 and built a practice defined by rigorous craft, interdisciplinary curiosity and deep civic purpose. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and Cornell University, Chessin also maintained a private design studio in Richmond whose clients included the Children’s Museum of Richmond, the Richmond Symphony and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
Chessin’s documentary projects took her work far beyond the studio. Mangrove Angels connected Virginia middle schoolers with students in Panama’s Chame Bay to explore the ecological importance of mangrove forests. She collaborated with VCU biologists, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Panama Audubon on the project.
Another documentary, An Oral History of the Upper Mattaponi that was funded in part by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, preserved the story of Sharon Indian School. This public school was built exclusively for American Indians in King William County and operated from 1919 until federally enforced desegregation closed it in 1964. Her ongoing Labyrinth Dialogues series captures conversations between scientists and artists at the intersection of research and creative practice.
Chessin also forged a significant research partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History, cataloging the American Typefounders Archives, a collection of source drawings for historical typefaces, and presenting her findings at ATypI Paris in 2023. Her typeface design practice, developed through the Type@Cooper program and ongoing since 2020, reflects the same precision and depth of attention she brought to every aspect of her work at VCU.
Among her many honors, Chessin held a residency at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and served as artist in residence at VCU’s Rice Rivers Center.
Pamela Turner | Department of Kinetic Imaging
A double VCU alumna, Turner spent her 29-year faculty career giving back to the university that educated her. She joined the Department of Communication Arts and Design in 1997, transitioned to Kinetic Imaging in 2003 and served as department chair for eight years. In that role, she built the department into an internationally connected program, establishing exchange partnerships with the Bristol School of Animation in the U.K. and the Korea National University of the Arts. The latter is where she launched VCUarts’ first summer study abroad program in animation and created an internship infrastructure that linked students with studios and creative industry professionals.
Turner’s monograph Infinite Animation: The Life and Work of Adam Beckett, rooted in years of archival research at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, established her as a leading authority on experimental American animation, The work was introduced at a celebrated screening at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In addition, she has presented at the Society for Animation Studies conferences in Toronto, Melbourne and Edinburgh and delivered the opening lecture for the Visual Music series at SIGGRAPH.
More recently, Turner’s practice has turned toward place and ecology through her “Animating Place” courses along the James River and her ongoing work as a Richmond Cemetery Collaboratory Fellow, using animation as a form of witness to the histories embedded in the landscape around us.
Turner’s animated films have been screened at festivals across the country, including the Brooklyn Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival in California, the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films and the Nashville Independent Film Festival.
E. Gaynell Sherrod | Department of Dance and Choreography
A Fulbright-Hays Program Scholar in African diasporic dance, Sherrod arrived at VCU in 2014 after an illustrious career. She performed with the Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO!) and Urban Bush Women in New York City. Sherrod served as the first Director of Dance for the New York City Department of Education’s Office of Arts and Special Projects, directing dance education initiatives across all five boroughs. She also taught at Florida A&M University and New York University.
At VCU, she served as chair of the Department of Dance and Choreography and was promoted to full professor in 2022. She organized and implemented the VCUarts Friends of Dance initiative to provide discretionary funding to support student success. Sherrod developed an Arts Management course that helped launch students’ careers in arts administration and development at organizations including the Richmond Ballet, the University of Richmond and Dance/USA. She also secured thousands of dollars in scholarship support for students to attend summer intensives in the United States and abroad.
Sherrod’s scholarly work culminated in The Dance Griots: Reading the Invisible Script, published 2022, rooted in the dance pedagogy of Katherine Dunham and the traditions of African diasporic dance that grew from her doctoral dissertation at Temple University.
Her choreographic work earned equal recognition. TWINE, an original work exploring group identity and embodied practice, earned her a Sage and John Cowles Visiting Artist Scholar residency at the University of Minnesota. A Katherine Dunham Certified Master Teacher Candidate, she has presented her research at Duke University, the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance and numerous international conferences.
Sherrod amassed a strong record of leadership and service. A TEDxRVA speaker in 2016 and inductee of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, she served in the VCU Faculty Senate as Recording Secretary and was appointed Faculty Fellow for Faculty Affairs under Senior Vice President Mangala Subramaniam. Sherrod also served on the Executive Board of the International Association of Blacks in Dance.
In 2019, as interim executive director of PHILADANCO!, she secured more than $450,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Trust and the William Penn Foundation.
Most recently, she collaborated with VCUarts faculty and alumni to create the soundtrack for 350,000. This cinematic meditation focused on the more than 350,000 enslaved men, women and children who were sold from Richmond’s auction blocks between 1830 and 1860, and is part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ acclaimed Dawoud Bey: Elegy exhibition. The exhibition earned wide acclaim.
Dean Higginbotham closed the evening with words that spoke for the entire community:
“VCUarts is a richer, more vibrant institution because of your presence here, and that will remain true long after tonight. We are deeply grateful, and we wish you all the very best in everything that lies ahead.”
For alumni who were shaped by these faculty members in classrooms, rehearsal halls, studios and critique sessions, the feeling is mutual. Their influence, like the best of what VCUarts produces, extends far beyond our campus.
