Courses
In The Studio
Instructor(s)
- Paul Lebel
- Nikki Rice
- Brad Taylor
- Daniel Goody
- J. Gordon
- Meg McLynn
- Nicole Beerman
- Winnie Westergard
- BC Campbell
- Charles Sheaffer
- Dan Shafer
- David Taft
- Ellen Forney
- Geof Alm
- Ian Bond
- Jessica Jobaris
- Leanna Keith
- Maja Sereda
- Matt Sircely
- Robynne Raye
- Sarah Lavin
- Tory Franklin
- Zoe Crago
- Alia Swersky
- Brian Miller
- Chelsea Cook
- David Taylor Gomes
- Diana Trotter
- Jeff Brice
- Jenna Spinei
- Jimmy Shields
- Kyungjin Kim (KJ)
- Lana Sundberg
- Lauren Boilini
- Lily Hotchkiss
- Lucie Baker
- Peter Vogt
- Ruthie Dornfeld
- Sage Casias-Abplanalp
- Samar Abulhassan
- Sarah Bixler
- Sarah Comer
- Soo Hong
Street Dance Forms
Improvisational Practices
Alia Swersky
Alia Swersky is a movement artist, performer and educator deeply engaged in dance improvisation, durational time-based art, film, site-specific work, and environmental installation. She is an artist and an educator with degrees from Cornish College of the Arts and an MFA in dance from the University of Washington.
Her artistic path over the last two decades has been shaped by this yearning for deep and meaningful connections with people and places. As a co-creator, ritual maker, and a “horizontal” director, Alia seeks to touch others through dance, somatic presence, vulnerability, and fierceness. Her work ranges from full audience participation to intimate acts of One-to-One performances, site-specific dances for film and live performance, as well as durational time-based art that includes physical acts of endurance, repetition, stillness, subtlety, singing, soft energetic grace, abstraction, caricature, and a deconstruction of clichés such as extreme high femme expressions. Her teaching and art-making seek to create practices that embrace endurance on stage and in life as acts of resistance, resilience, release, and beauty.
As a performer, Alia has also toured nationally and internationally as a member of the LeGendre Performance Group and has performed in the works with many Seattle artists, some of which include The Maureen Whiting Company, Khambatta Dance Company, Jurg Koch, KT Niehoff, and Salt Horse.
As an educator, she has taught at Cornish College of the Arts for sixteen years and in the Seattle community at Velocity’s Strictly Seattle Festival, and the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation (SFDI). She was a long time Co-artistic director of Dance Art Group (DAG), a non-profit organization that promotes the practice and appreciation of dance and somatic education in the Seattle area, including the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation.
Composition for Film, Games & TV
BC Campbell
Illustration to Animation
Zoe Crago
Zoe Crago is the co-founder of Duo Design + Media. A partnership of two creatives specializing in graphic design, social media, and video production for individuals and businesses/organizations looking to expand their visual presence. As the lead graphic designer and illustrator, Zoe's project list includes (but is not limited to) the 2023 Festival Design for NFFTY (National Film Festival for Talented Youth), illustrator for The Rise Book Project, event campaigns for TEDxSpokane, and social media marketing for Washington Filmworks and Seattle Creates! Her love for illustration and hand-lettering often finds its way into her regular projects creating a beautiful hybrid of traditional and digital art.
After 6 years in the design world, Zoe hopes that her work, collaborations, and community involvement will ultimately impact those who want to grow and succeed in the creative industry!
Costume Design
Chelsea Cook
Chelsea Cook is a freelance costume designer, educator, and business owner. Her work has been seen at Kentucky Opera, Seattle Shakespeare Company, Seattle Opera, Village Theatre, Tacoma Opera, George Street Playhouse, ArtsEmerson, and more. Select favorite designs include Ernest Shackleton Loves Me (Off-Broadway Alliance Award, Second Stage Theatre); O+E (Seattle Opera) She’s Come Undone (Gregory Award Nomination, Book-It); What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Book-It Repertory); and Medea (Seattle Shakespeare Co.). She has a B.A. from Cornish College of the Arts.
Voice for Musical Theater
David Taylor Gomes
David Taylor Gomes (he/they) is a composer, music director, and actor, best known for writing Boxed Up: The Musical and Ranked, featured in the HBO Documentary “My So-Called High School Rank”. David was selected as a semi-finalist in the 2023 Eugene O’Neill National Music Theatre Conference for his new musical in development The Way. David also co-founded UproarTheatrics.com, a theatrical licensing company. In Seattle David has worked with Village Theatre, The 5th Avenue Theatre, Taproot Theatre, Showtunes, Artswest, and Seattle Children's Theatre. He has also performed at Sacramento Theatre Company, Capital Stage, and the iconic Birdland Jazz Club in NYC. In addition to performing, David coaches singers, songwriters, and pianists at his music studio in Seattle. His students have performed on Broadway, national tours, The Disney Channel, and many regional theatres across the US.
Technical Theater
Daniel Goody
Daniel Goody has been working in the performing arts field since 2001 starting in the UK as a sound engineer. Presently working as the Head of Audio at the Playhouse in Seattle for Cornish College of the Arts, his work has spanned many disciplines over the years including audio, light and video design. His primary collaboration since 2015 has been with the Danish immersive theatre group Sisters Hope.
Following a decade in Sweden as the Technical Director at the culture house Inkonst Malmö, Daniel formed artistic partnerships with a number of performance, dance and theatre groups based throughout the Nordic and European regions. These collaborations, with groups such as; Institutet, White On White, Jon & Juli and Lucie Tuma explored the family, critical whiteness and the relationship to the body on a wholly radical level.
Practical Piano for Musicians
Screendance
Social Dance Forms
Lucie Baker
Lucie Baker is a dance artist, educator, and expressive arts facilitator based in Seattle, Washington. Her parents met in a community folk dance group so social dancing is in her bones. She loves social dance for its joy, community, and expansive self-expression. As a teacher, she strives to create a supportive environment where students can connect and explore. Her classes integrate her background in western concert dance and social dance with her love of somatics and anatomy. From a young age she was surrounded by a diversity of dance styles including swing, ballet, modern, balkan folk dance, and more. Her curiosity for movement led her to pursue a career as a professional performer and choreographer in New York City and abroad working with many notable artists including Jane Comfort, Tamar Rogoff, Erica Essner, Phantom Limb and Seattle Opera. In her training, she earned a BFA from the Juilliard School and an MFA from the University of Washington. After many years of performing, creating, and teaching, she became interested in the intersection of dance and mental health and received her expressive arts therapy training at the Tamalpa Institute, founded by Anna and Daria Halprin. She continues to develop her artistic practice alongside while also serving as a faculty member at Cornish College of the Arts, University of Washington and Century Ballroom.
Not Just Jazz
Songwriting Workshop
Analogue Printmaking
Brad Taylor
Bradley Taylor is a Seattle based artist, and printmaker. He is currently working at Cornish College of the Arts as the Printmaking Studio Technician. Proficient in all forms of printmaking Bradley specializes in woodblock prints. His work has been shown in numerous galleries in the Seattle area. He has also work collaboratively with many notable Seattle Artists.
Dance Intensive
Art & Design Intensive + Portfolio Development
Lily Hotchkiss
I have been making art my whole life in one form or another. I fell endlessly in love, over and over, with the process of making. This led to my role as a teacher, first with young children and later with teens. More facilitator and guide than anything else, being able to participate and witness someone’s creative journey and awakening is an awesome gift. It demands that I remain nimble and bring all my best to working with youth and helping them discover and share their voices. I am both an arts educator and a working artist. As a member of Side Rail Collective, I co-curate shows throughout the year and participate in exhibits. My work as an artist is based in storytelling. I work in a variety of mediums, including clay, found materials, wood, fiber, as well as 2D mediums. The story informs the material.
Sarah Bixler
Sarah Bixler is a painter and educator living and working in Seattle Washington. She began her artistic studies focusing on the figure and observation, at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle Washington. There she was able to deepen her understanding of the human body through intensive focus on long-form sculpture, anatomy and drawing from direct observation. In 2011, Sarah received a BFA from the University of Washington where she studied contemporary drawing and painting, with a focus on paint language, form and color.
Lauren Boilini
Lauren Boilini has served as an artist-in-residence at several institutions across the U.S. and in Italy, Ireland, and Spain. She has served as faculty at a number of schools in the Baltimore/DC area as well as Evergreen State College, Pacific Lutheran University, and Cornish. She has completed several public art projects along with many temporary public installations and solo exhibitions across the country. In 2016 she was awarded an Artist Trust grant to publish a book of drawings and spent this past summer as an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA working on the sequel. Lauren is also a long-distance open water swimmer and loves to call Seattle home.
Winnie Westergard
Winifred Westergard is a Seattle based fine art and commercial photographer with degrees from the University of Washington and Cornish College of the Arts in Creative Writing, Journalism and Art. Her art making foundation is rooted in the early processes of photography, fully embracing the slow processes of 19th century photography. She is a visual creator with a strong base on human emotion and storytelling. She has managed the photography studio at Cornish College of the Arts since 1999 and has taught Photography and Portfolio Development through Summer@Cornish since 2003.
Illustrator's Sketchbook
Maja Sereda
Maja Sereda is an environmental artist, teacher and coach. Born in Poland, Maja has dedicated her life to transcribing and sharing her experiences in nature. Working with pen, graphite, color pencils, charcoal and mixed media, her highly detailed drawings explore the myriad connections between human beings and the natural world. Her drawings have been shown throughout the US, Europe, and South Africa.
After studying graphic design at University of Pretoria and working as an art director in advertising agencies, both in South Africa and Ireland, Maja became an award-winning book illustrator. She has illustrated more than 20 books with many major publishers including Penguin Random House, Maskew Miller Longman, Oskar Editeur, Tafelberg & Lapa Publishers. Amongst others, she won the Crystal Kite award in 2011 and the Katrine Harries Award for best illustration for 2010. In 2012, she was also invited to illustrate a book with a French author, Yves Pinguilly titled La Grande Fleur (The Big Flower), followed by an invitation to Salon du Livre fair in Paris, France and La Reunion, where she showcased her books and led art workshops for children.
Now based in Seattle, Maja is a teaching artist and coach. With the outbreak of COVID, she began teaching drawing classes online. By investing deeply in her students’ work through highly individualized feedback, research and demonstrations, she nurtures an online community of over 250 artists.
With a deep passion for nature, drawing and community, Maja operates Guardians of the Jungle, a creative project which aims to save endangered wildlife and protect precarious ecosystems.
Mandolin Skill Development
Matt Sircely
Matt Sircely is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist living in Port Townsend. He has provided adjunct mandolin instruction at Cornish also teaching annually at workshops and classes over the years in places like Washington, Idaho, British Colombia and Louisiana, and the Mandolin Symposium in California. Over the years, Matt has introduced hundreds of mandolin students to their first swing tunes on mandolin. A founding member of the string swing ensemble Hot Club Sandwich, Matt appears on the most recent Hot Club Sandwich album alongside mandolin master David Grisman on half of the tracks.
As an instrumentalist, Matt Sircely has performed extensively in a breadth of stylistic contexts such as folk, blues, Tejano roots music, klezmer and other Jewish music, country bands and bluegrass outfits, everything from the old-time square dance community to the Seattle jazz scene. His musical interests extend to the many folk styles from around the world. Most recently, he has been cultivating a deep passion for fiddle tunes related to his ancestral roots in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
In 2008, Sircely co-founded a roots fusion band with a Cornish student at the time, the late great Joseph Mascorella on drums and vocals. Together, they worked for years striving to reach new heights in composition and improvisation. Matt has also performed in duo format with many artists, including songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Danny Barnes, who also produced his first album of all original songs. Sircely and Barnes also released an album recorded live in California which included several of Matt’s own songs.
As a music writer on assignment for the Fretboard Journal and other music magazines, Sircely has researched and written articles about legendary artists including Andy Statman, Wade Mainer, Juan Reynoso, Radim Zenkl, Hamilton de Holanda, Lee Stripling, Calvin Vollrath, Buell Neidlinger, Danny Barnes, and the founding of the David Grisman Quintet.
At his home on the Olympic Peninsula, Matt Sircely is always writing songs and producing new recordings. He enjoys spending time in his vegetable garden and programming the music lineups at his local farmers markets.
Abstract Painting Intensive
Soo Hong
Soo Hong is a visual artist whose work explores issues surrounding cultural identity. Having lived and exhibited in places around the world, including, London, Shanghai, her native South Korea, and now the U.S., her experience of varying cultural norms and expectations has precipitated her observational practice. Her paintings represent an unbound freedom of expression released of any formal adherence to a determined identity.
Her work has been shown in galleries around the world, and she has been awarded grants from D&AD (London), GAP (Seattle), Bellevue Arts Program (Bellevue) and was a finalist for the Neddy Awards (Seattle). She had her solo shows in Seattle at Linda Hodges Gallery and AMcE Creative Arts gallery. Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the city of Bellevue, and the city of Portland. She created public art installations for Redmond Lights, Odessa Children's Hospital (Seattle), and The Vera Project (Seattle).
Workshop: Dance as Pleasure
Jessica Jobaris
Jessica Jobaris is a Seattle-based choreographer whose dance-theatre works warp perception, guiding audiences to reconsider what is sacred and what is profane. In 2010, she launched Jessica Jobaris & General Magic, a dance-theatre company dedicated to nurturing artistic risk and community connection through dance. Jessica has taught nationally and internationally, receiving funding for her works from city, state, and corporate organizations. Jessical also holds a MA in Counseling Psychology (LMHCA) from The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, and runs a private practice in Seattle.
Auditioning for Musical Theatre Dance: Adult
Nicole Beerman
Nicole is an actor, singer, dancer, choreographer, teacher, visual artist, wife to Josh and mother to Max and Huxley. Nicole has lived and worked on both coasts, loves to create, garden, and do construction! On screen, Nicole has been seen in Nike, LG, and T-Mobile commercials. On stage in Adrift (Sam French Festival), Big Effing Deal! (Duet with Reggie Watts), Cabaret (Gregory Award Nominee), Mary Poppins, Annie, Bye Bye Birdie, How to Succeed, Once Upon A Time in New Jersey and many Village Originals (Village Theatre), The Constant Wife (Seattle Rep), Cabaret (5th Ave, AMTSJ, Ordway Center), Wonderful Town (5th Ave), Ming the Rude (Empty Space), Elephant and Piggie, Fire Station 7, Sleeping Beauty (SCT), Tapestry (Oregon Cabaret Theatre), and many more. As a choreographer and dancer Nicole had the honor of working with Sonya Tayeh and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with running the dance call for the original production of Head Over Heals. In New York, Nicole’s work has been seen at the HERE Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, Astoria Performing Arts, The Management and Acting Manitou. In Seattle, at KIDSTAGE, Cornish, Oregon Cabaret Theatre, The Triple Door, Café Nordo, Seattle Children’s Theatre, Fantastic Z, and Art Institute of Seattle. Nicole is currently teaching at Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle Film institute, and Westlake Dance Center. She has also taught at UW, Art Institute of Seattle, Hunter College High School, VAM Studios, 5th Avenue, Century Ballroom, McCarter Theatre Company, Jersey City Dance Academy, and The Studios. Nicole holds a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, is a certified Simonson Technique teacher and a member of Actors’ Equity.