Author: Walker, Quoron

UConn SFA Professor Oscar Guerra Wins Big at Emmy Awards

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University of Connecticut’s School of Fine Arts professor Oscar Guerra was a winner at the 42nd Annual NewsOscar Guerra and Documentary Emmy Awards Tuesday night. He won Best Story in a Newsmagazine for his documentary film, Love, Life, & the Virus, which tells the story of a local immigrant Guatemalan family and the impact COVID-19 had on their lives.

The film aired on PBS Frontline, which also won two additional awards for its programming. Univision also aired the film in Spanish.

“It was already an honor the be nominated in two different categories, but the win feels amazing! Love, Life & the Virus is simultaneously a story of uncertainty and hope, darkness and light, but above all, what happens when people come together and support each other. Miracles do happen!” said Guerra. “And I am grateful to share this win with my family, my Frontline team, and UConn.”

“All of us at UConn are very proud of Oscar and his achievement,” said Dr. Carl Lejuez, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs. “This transformational film makes an important statement about an immigrant family’s experience in the Covid era, giving a voice to those who are marginalized in our society and disproportionately affected by the pandemic. It’s also a great example of why community engaged scholarship and creative work among our faculty is so important to our role as a research University for the State of Connecticut.”

In Love, Life, & the Virus, Guerra follows the family as mother, Zully, is admitted to the hospital due to her COVID-19 diagnosis and pregnancy with her second child. Her husband, Marvin, and son, Junior, also contract the virus. With the entire family ill and unable to care for the baby, they turn to Junior’s teacher who agrees to care for the newborn.  Cameras follow the family through every step of their lives as the Stamford community rallies around the family until they eventually reunite.

Guerra Productions Team“Oscar’s Emmy win is huge and comes at a wonderful moment for our young Digital Film/Video Production major. Just last year, we announced a new Human Rights Film and Digital Media Initiative, partnering with our Human Rights Institute at UConn, and this is evidence of the quality of our program and the kind of impact we intend to have on the medium – and in society,” said DMD Department Head, Heather Elliott-Famularo. “Oscar’s dedication to human rights filmmaking and our ongoing partnership with PBS Frontline are integral to this future.”

Guerra and his team are currently working on their next film which focuses on the aftermath of the Trump Administration’s Zero Tolerance immigration policy and family separation. This is a collaboration between UConn, Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and PBS Frontline.

 

As seen on Broadway World.

Dr. Stefanie Acevedo Named Assistant Professor of Music Theory

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Following an extensive national search, the UConn Department of Music is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Stefanie Acevedo as Assistant Professor of Music Theory.

Dr. Stefanie Acevedo

Dr. Acevedo (she/her) specializes in music psychology and popular music studies; her main research interests include musical expectation, the analysis and cognition of musical form, cognitive underpinnings for musical categorization and segmentation, and music theory pedagogy. Her work encompasses the analysis and cognition of common-practice, avant-garde, popular, and non-Western musics.

Dr. Acevedo received her PhD in music theory from Yale University, a master’s degree in psychology from the University at Buffalo, a master’s degree in music theory in from Bowling Green State University, and a bachelor of music in composition from the University of Florida. Before coming to the University of Connecticut, she taught at the University of Dayton, where she and her colleague (Dr. Toby Rush) redesigned the four-semester music theory curriculum to better serve the needs of twenty-first-century music majors.

She has presented and published her work in Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the Society for Music Theory (SMT) annual conference, the European Music Analysis Conference (EuroMac), the Society for Music Perception and Cognition Conference, and the International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition, among others. She has two upcoming co-authored articles in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies and is currently working on a Spanish translation of Tan, Pfordresher, and Harre's Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance with Dr. Julian Cespedes-Guevara.

As a Latina immigrant, Dr. Acevedo is committed to diversifying the field of music theory and as such has served in various capacities including on the Society for Music Theory's Committee on the Status of Women (2013-2016) and as board member for the International Alliance for Women in Music (2009-2015). She currently also serves on SMT's SMT-Pod editorial board, SMT's Networking committee, and as SMPC's networking and communications chair.

When not teaching theory, Dr. Acevedo plays trombone, participates in her local gamelan ensemble, and has recently resumed her interest in carillon playing.