Like many students, I have had my share of influential instructors: people who have exposed me to new ways of thinking, who have helped me shape my arguments and refine my artistic sensibility, and who have challenged me to do better. I strive to be one of those teachers for my own students. Below you’ll find descriptions of courses I’ve taught at Parsons, The New School, and Columbia University. For a full academic CV, contact me at danielwaitepenny (at) gmail.
Visual Culture
How is meaning embedded in the images, spaces, and artifacts that make up visual culture? How, in turn, are photographs, videos, illustrations, performances, graphic novels, sculptures, and technological innovations used to communicate an idea or position? And what might it mean to make something that doesn't fit into any one category as we know it? In this course, students are exposed to critical theories of visual culture in order to understand the relationship between images and larger systems of meaning, power, and historical circumstance that shape them. Course texts include Ways of Seeing, Bluets, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Ethnic Notions, and “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
Students engage in a variety of research processes in both studio and seminar. We learn how to develop productive research questions; work with primary and archival sources related to individual curiosities and interests; create an annotated bibliography, storyboards, and outlines; and the process of planning, revising, and completing a final research paper on a topic related to an area of interest in their studio practice.
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Workshop
This course seeks to introduce students to the craft of creative nonfiction, beginning with the question: What is Creative Nonfiction? Unlike poetry or fiction, nonfiction is defined by what it isn’t, and as a result, this mode of writing, while adhereing to some notion of “truth,” is also particularly expansive and complex.
In this class, students will read a wide variety of texts in multiple and sometimes overlapping sub-genres of the discipline of creative nonfiction including memoir, essay, criticism, and journalism. Course texts include selections from Montaigne’s Essays, Sei Shonogon’s Pillow Book, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Joseph Mitchell’s profiles, and more. We will also look at craft texts, like Phillip Lopate’s To Show and To Tell, and interviews with writers on their processes and working methods.
Together, these readings and craft texts model the wide variety of techniques and approaches writers take to the difficulties of making art from truth, with a particular emphasis on how each of them wrestles with that tension between “creative” and “nonfiction.” To learn the contours of the genre, groups of students complete assignments based on/in response to these readings. The course culminates in a portfolio consisting of at least two revised workshop submissions, in addition to any expanded or revised writing assignments, and a self-evaluation.
Writing for Artists
Writing is performance, design, and object. Visual artists, designers, musicians, writers, dancers, filmmakers, actors, artists of every kind come together in a supportive, interdisiplinary workshop environment to develop their writing skills. Students practice the skills of argumentation, research, and clarity of expression that benefit critical pieces as well as the kinds of writing they are likely to have to produce as professional artists or critics in the field.
In the first half of the class, students start with the basics of communicating about art through short-form critical reviews and by conducting an artist interview with a classmate. From there, students focus on the craft of critical writing, from the ground up—constructing one analytic essay engaging with a text written by another aritst or designer. The second part of the semester is devoted to putting these skills into professional practice, as students write artist statements, manifestos, and more. Students read top critics in their fields as well as writers from the canon particularly relevant to their own work.