School for Designing a Society

Full Time Instructors

Susan Parenti - Composition, Language, and Performance

Susan Parenti composes and writes as means towards social change.

Parenti received her Bachelor's degree in composition at Northwestern University; 2 year study of composition/orchestration at l'Accademia di SantaCecilia in Rome Italy with composer Goffredo Petrassi; Master's and Doctorate in composition at the University of Illinois with composer and activist Herbert Brün.

With Herbert and other conspirators she has founded the Performers' Workshop Ensemble, House Theater, and School for Designing a Society.

Her current interests: to teach English as a second language to Americans, as a part of self-care and self-defense efforts in public health programs; to take experimental composing out of music schools and into the field of Communication, where it will valiantly hold its own amidst and against its dubious colleagues: public relations, advertising, propaganda, violence, power-over and other legally protected forms of communication. Parenti is co-writing a book with Patch Adams, MD: The Politics of Care.

Selected Publications
     Parenti, S. (2008.) Redesigning the U.S. Health Care System: Think Universally, Design Locally. Alternative Voice 6(1): 36-42.
     Parenti, S. (2007.) Re-Designing the Character of the 'Care Actor' (.pdf)
     Parenti, S. (2006.) Re-Designing the US Health Care System: The Third (4th, 5th, 6th) Category (.pdf)
     Parenti, S. (2001.) I and My Mouth and Their Irresistible Life in Language. Non Sequitur Press: Champaign, Illinois.
     Parenti, S. (2000.) The Politics of the Adjective "Political" and other Plays. Non Sequitur Press: Champaign, Illinois.

Rob Scott - Cybernetics and Ecological Design

Rob Scott escaped the world of compulsory education to join the School for Designing a Society as a student in 1998. Rob was a skilled complainer, but his life was changed by the School's challenges to "say what you want" and "make a proposal". In 2000, Rob co-founded the Urbana Permaculture Project, a non-profit dedicated to using ecological design for social change. He studied Permaculture with mIEKAL aND at Dreamtime Village and Peter Bane of Earthaven Ecovillage.

Rob is Director of the School for Designing a Society, and is a PhD Student in Social Foundations of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Recent Publications
     Scott, R. and W.C. Sullivan. (2008.) Ecology of Fermented Foods. Human Ecology Review 15(1): 25-31.
     Scott, R. and W.C. Sullivan. (2007.) A Review of Suitable Companion Crops for Black Walnut. Agroforestry Systems 71(3): 185-193.
     Scott, R. and R.M. Skirvin. (2007.) Black chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa Michx.): A semi-edible fruit with no pests. Journal of the American Pomological Society 61(3): 135-7.
     Scott, R. (2005.) Illinois Permaculture Handbook, Unpublished Masters' Thesis. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences.
     Scott, R. (2004.) Legitimate Questions. Permaculture Activist 54: 57-58.

Mark Enslin - Composer, Performer, Actor, Activist, Organizer, Teacher

He studied music at Webster College and has a doctorate in music composition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied primarily with Herbert Brün. Also at UIUC, Enslin taught in Unit One, a living/learning program--such courses as Music in Protest and the Art of Acting as Audience--and in the Campus Honors Program with the Performers Workshop Ensemble. As an actor he has had lead roles in Pirandello's The Vice and Brecht's Puntilla. Enslin has held teaching residencies at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil and the Youth Factory for Alternative Culture in Seoul, South Korea.

Selected Publications
     Coming soon: poems in Cannot Exist 2008.
     Enslin, M. (1995.) Teaching Composition: Facing the Power of the Respondent. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. School of Music.
     Parenti, S., M. Enslin, and H. Brün. (1995.) Recontextualizing the Production of "New Music" In Sakolsky, Ron & Fred Wei-han Ho, Eds. Sounding Off! Music as Subversion/Resistence/Revolution. Autonomedia: Brooklyn, New York, 226-233.
     Brün, H., et al. (1980.) To One of Those Who Do In Deed Leave Traces. Perspectives of New Music 18: 107-133.
     Enslin, M. (1980.) poems in ALLOS: Other Writing (pp. 85-91). La Jolla, CA: Lingua Press.

Danielle Chynoweth - Composition and Social Change

Danielle Chynoweth is a City Council Member and Mayor Pro Tem in Urbana, Illinois. She holds a masters degree in politics from the New School for Social Research, NYC and degrees in sculpture and politics from New College in Sarasota, Florida.

Co-founder of the Urbana-Champaign Indepedent Media Center, she helped the group purchase the downtown Urbana post office building. It now serves as a Community Media and Arts Center with a radio station, performance venue, art gallery and studios, newspaper, bike coop, and books to prisoners program. She helps illicit the social producer "inside" the socially-produced consumer by offering tools through which we think about and make the society we want to live in.

Danielle is a social change artist, currently interested in activating the edge between public and private domains, both by making art and designing a Public Arts Program for the city of Urbana. She explores how humans do and can coordinate their desires through organizations and decision making structures (like a city). On city council she helped bring about a Civilian Review Board of Police, a model energy efficient affordable neighborhood, a domestic partner registry, a living wage ordinance, fairer hiring practices, and two local anti-war resolutions.

She is currently working on a two year project to document parallel systems of justice in Champaign County based on race, learning about non profit legal structures (by accident), and considering becoming a single mother by choice.

Jeff Glassman - Experimental Theater

Jeff Glassman is a practitioner of experimental theater. He studied mime with Claude Kipnis and Kabuki with Shozo Sato, composition with Herbert Brün and cybernetics with Heinz von Foerster. He was a founding member of the United Mime Workers experimental theatre collective ('71-'86), a member of the Performers' Workshop Ensemble experimental theatre and music group ('88-'96), a performer in works by, with, and in collaboration with poet Michael Holloway. The focus of his work currently since ‘91 has been composing and performing as a duo with Lisa Fay, an innovator of movement-based theatre. Since 1971 he has toured extensively in the US, and several times in Europe, Mexico and Cuba. He received a Choreography Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for work with the UMW, and two Choreography Fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council together with Lisa Fay. He has twice been Visiting Faculty at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and has taught courses at the University of Illinois. He was a member of Alliance for Cultural Democracy, and is currently a member of Network of Ensemble Theatres.

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