Arts and Entertainment

College of Arts and Architecture honors scholarship recipients

College of Arts and Architecture Alumni Society Scholarship recipients, from left: Brandon Rittenhouse, Jana Bontrager, Casey Saline, Jessica Fleischman and Katharine Carpenter Credit: Alex Bush / Penn State. Creative Commons

The College of Arts and Architecture recognized Alumni Society Scholarship and Golumbic Scholarship recipients at its annual spring awards ceremony on Friday, April 15.

Alumni Society Scholarship

The Alumni Society Scholarship was established in 1998 with the financial support of members and friends of the College of Arts and Architecture Alumni Society, to recognize undergraduate students maintaining a high level of academic achievement while exhibiting outstanding leadership or service in extracurricular activities, community work, and/or employment. It is now awarded annually to seven students entering their final year or semester of study at Penn State.

Torin Miner, of Perkasie, Pennsylvania, is a fourth-year architecture student, currently studying abroad in Rome. He will graduate in May 2017 with a bachelor of architecture degree and a minor in entrepreneurship and innovation. Miner and a group of his fellow students wanted to put their design skills to use for a real world cause, and learned to 3-D print a prosthetic hand. After learning that a normal prosthetic could cost upwards of $10,000, they found that with the skills and machines available, one could be produced for about $50. This is how the club DigiDigits was born, with Torin as one of its co-founders. The group has crowd-funded over $16,000 and purchased its own 3-D printers. While studying abroad in Rome this semester, Miner had the opportunity to deliver a 3-D printed prosthetic to a 27-year-old Nigerian refugee.

Brandon Rittenhouse is studying graphic design with a planned concurrent major in visual arts, with an emphasis on photography. His expected graduation is in May 2017. Rittenhouse has been extensively engaged as a student, serving in leadership roles for Homecoming, as editor-in-chief of the 2016-17 Student Handbook, and as an active member of Lion’s Paw Senior Honor Society. He is also a committee member on the Stand for State Bystander Intervention Program. Recently, he has helped establish the Arts and Architecture Presidents’ Council alongside other student leaders within the college.

Casey Saline entered the College of Arts and Architecture as an art education student, but later changed her major to integrative arts, which allowed her to take the psychology courses necessary to fulfill graduate school requirements for a master of art therapy degree. She then decided to take on a double major in psychology and integrative arts. An Arts and Architecture Student Ambassador, Saline founded a fundraiser that collects art supplies and distributes them to children’s hospitals. She will spend this summer abroad in Ireland, and after her graduation from Penn State she hopes to earn a master’s degree in creative arts therapies with a focus in trauma therapies with service members and their families.

Katharine Carpenter is pursuing a double degree in vocal performance and music education and will complete a master’s degree in musicology next year through the Integrated Undergraduate-Graduate (IUG) degree program in the School of Music. She has competed on the Penn State Club Gymnastics team for three years and is a manager for the Women’s Varsity Gymnastics team. She has served as a resident assistant for the past two years, and has been involved in THON and other community service projects. She has sought out every opportunity to perform, touring with Concert Choir, singing the National Anthem for home varsity gymnastics meets, and this past summer, singing backup for the Rolling Stones with a select group of Penn State students.

Jessica Fleischman is a junior, double majoring in theater stage management and telecommunications, with a focus on production and management. She been involved with a dozen School of Theatre productions so far, learning the skills of problem solving, time management, effective communication and organization. This coming summer she will join the stage management team at "Wicked the Musical" on Broadway for a five-week internship. Fleischman has found that her major fields complement each other well and give her a diverse platform of communication and knowledge.

Jana Bontrager will graduate in December 2016 as a Schreyer Honors Scholar with dual bachelor of arts degrees in photography and Italian studies. In addition to photography, she has been able to take multiple business management courses at Penn State, to aid in her understanding of how to run a small business. She has been a part of the Penn State Concert Choir, and has served as a teaching assistant for five photography courses. After graduation, she plans to pursue a master of fine arts degree in photography, with the hope of teaching at the collegiate level. Outside of her academic pursuits, Bontrager invests much of her time and energy in her own personal photography business.

Andrea Leigh McCullough, or ALM, is a 12th-semester landscape architecture and Schreyer Honors student, currently studying abroad in Hong Kong with plans to graduate from Penn State in December 2016. ALM calls itself a designer, seamstress, and iconoclast, although it has been called many other things in its time. Growing up in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, just outside the walls of Longwood Gardens and the frames of Andrew Wyeth paintings, ALM found itself in the perfect niche to be grown, loving botany, mycology, art, and above all, the eternal strangeness of human beings. ALM dedicates its research to Deleuze/Guattari, herbalism, and wild edible plants/fungi, and especially the weeds. John Cage once wrote, “And is there any greater hero than the least plant that grows?” As a vegan, ALM looks forward to sharing its life with plants—but also the amazing scholars, friends, and teachers it has met in State College, Philadelphia, and Hong Kong.

Golumbic Scholarship

The College of Arts and Architecture’s Reuben and Gladys Golumbic Scholarship is awarded annually to three students in the areas of performance achievement, design achievement and humanistic achievement. Faculty members nominate students to apply for the scholarship, which was established in 1978 by Ed Eckl, a Penn State chemistry alumnus, in memory of his adoptive parents.

Humanistic Achievement

Andrea Leigh McCullough (see bio above)

Design Achievement

Stephen Zimmerer is an eighth-semester landscape architecture and Schreyer Honors student with a minor in economics. He is currently participating in a landscape architecture student exchange at Hong Kong University and will graduate from Penn State in December 2016. He will culminate his degree and his honors thesis with work that includes ad hoc, performance-based landscape experiences through machines and furniture. He will exhibit work at the forthcoming Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture conference in Salt Lake City, and has also exhibited and installed work at the Stuckeman School, the Barcelona Architecture Center, the Penn State Arboretum, and the Pittsburgh Zoo. His work is featured in the forthcoming Routledge Press publication "Representing Landscapes: Hybrid," edited by Nadia Amoroso. He was one of a four-person team to submit the Heroes’ Green competition scheme for the World War I memorial in Washington, D.C. The entry was chosen as one of five finalists from more than 350 international professional entries. After graduation, Stephen will seek employment at a design studio that critically examines the potential for landscape to generate transformative human experience.

Performance Achievement

Kyle McKay is a junior music education major who is passionate about teaching and performing in the field of percussion. He was the recipient of the Eleanor Beene Award in both his freshman and sophomore years. This year he received the Atherton Scholarship Award and most recently was the winner of the School of Music Symphonic Wind Ensemble Concerto Competition. McKay has also experienced success in the marching arts community. He was the center marimba and section leader for the Reading Buccaneers, who won the 2014 Drum Corps Associates World Championship. In 2015, he spent his summer on a national tour performing with 10-time DCI champions, the Cadets. The experiences he has gained through the marching arts have had an impact on his life and musicianship. After student teaching in spring 2017, McKay plans to attend graduate school to pursue his master’s degree in percussion performance. He hopes to teach music in an elementary school setting while maintaining an active career as a performance and percussion teacher.

Last Updated May 3, 2016