The College of Fine Arts congratulates School of Music’s Associate Professor Jane Hatter and the Department of Art & Art History’s MFA student Pablo Cruz-Ayala for their awards and recognition through the J. Willard Marriott Library's Digital Matters program.
Jane Hatter was awarded one of our Spring 2025 faculty grants for her project, “Echoes of Women’s Musical Voices in Visual and Material Evidence from 1450-1550.”
Description: Echoes of Women’s Musical Voices is a digital humanities project that seeks to recover evidence of early modern female musicians by compiling, publicizing and synthesizing evidence of their musicality that exist in diverse forms of material culture—from their formal painted portraits as musicians to the wine-stained pages of the music manuscripts that they used on a regular basis. The long-term goal of this project is to make integrated databases of both visual and textual resources publicly available for consultation by other researchers and students interested in the topic, potentially opening if for crowdsourcing that would allow these databases to be expanded and improved. My data collection has been focused on Northern Italy, related to my current book project, but I looking to include material from other parts of Europe and collaborate with or integrate into other digital humanities projects that curate information on women’s live in the Renaissance.
Pablo Cruz-Ayala was named one of the Spring 2025 Graduate Student Fellows in Residence for his project, “Undocumented Stories Told through Virtual Reality: Virtual Gallery Praxis of Art, Research, and Narrative.”
Description: As a first-generation immigrant, I know firsthand the challenges and resilience of navigating life as undocumented. This project is deeply personal—it’s a conversation utilizing the in-between borders of Virtual Reality (VR) to experience and amplify the voices of undocumented immigrants who live within our Salt Lake Valley. The VR gallery I’m designing will feature immersive artworks inspired by real stories from the undocumented community, gathered oral narrations and histories, and reimagined visual folklore. Utilizing 3D scanning, VR programming, and multimedia platforms, I hope to invite anyone to walk through a digital space and connect the past with the present. I want this project to be as inclusive as possible, with Spanish translations and accessible design. Sharing a platform for artists, community members, and researchers alike to learn the utility and practicalities of art, research, and technology.