Arts & Culture

A new series of classes is added to this year’s offering of Chinese language programs from the Confucius Institute at MTSU.

For the first time, the institute will provide courses for children of Chinese heritage who speak Chinese as their first or second language on Saturdays beginning Jan. 19. Other students with compatible levels of proficiency are welcome. Elementary Chinese for Children, Level A, will run from 10 a.m. to noon. The Level B elementary class will go from 10:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.

A $100,000 donation by retired MTSU photography professor and Murfreesboro resident Harold L. Baldwin will support plans to develop a new photography gallery in MTSU’s Bragg Mass Communication Building.

The renovated space, to be dedicated in 2013, will become the new permanent home of MTSU’s photography archive — a million-dollar-plus collection that Baldwin, who created MTSU’s photography program in the 1960s, pieced together over decades of service to MTSU. 

MTSU students played a part in a recent arts performance that will soon be on exhibit across Tennessee and will ultimately travel to Athens, Greece, for an international arts education exchange.

Students from MTSU instructor Lori Kissinger’s Raider’s Learning Communities Speech Class provided the narration for “The Golden Ratio Project,” a Dec. 5 event at Nashville’s Parthenon presented by Tennessee students with disabilities. 

A local writer/director is looking for actors and actresses to star in his latest short film.

A casting call for “Happy New Year, Mr. Kates” is slated for 6 to 10 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 12, at The Center for the Arts, 110 W. College St. in Murfreesboro.

Dr. Bob Pondillo, a professor of electronic media communication at MTSU, wrote the comedy/drama screenplay, which won “Best Movie Script (Short)” honors at Chicago’s prestigious American International Film Festival last month.

Remnants of American history from a World War I battle involving Sgt. Alvin C. York are on exhibit at the Tennessee State Museum, thanks to a retired MTSU professor and his research colleagues.

Dr. Tom Nolan, former director of the Center for Spatial Technology at MTSU and a retired geography professor, organized expeditions in France’s Argonne forest to locate the site of York’s historic October 1918 struggle as a dissertation project between 2006 and 2009.