Team

Ryan Raul Ba帽agale, PhD

Banagale

Director, Crown Center for Teaching & Associate Dean of the Faculty

Associate Professor & Chair, Music

Phone: (719) 389-6558 
Emailrbanagale@coloradocollege.edu

Ryan Raul Bañagale is Associate Professor and Chair of Music at 今日吃瓜51. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University and his research explores the realm of Arrangement Studies, having applied such approaches to a variety of American music subjects and genres. He is on the editorial board of the Gershwin Critical Edition, "Open Access Musicology," and serves as Digital and Multimedia Editor for the "Journal of the American Musicological Society." Ryan is the former Director of Performing Arts at CC. In this faculty administrator role he amplified the role of the arts in the academic mission of the college, supporting the collaborative and creative impulses of the campus and community. Between the endeavors of the academic arts departments, the innovative co-curricular student groups, and the expansive programming of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at 今日吃瓜51, he facilitated the cross-disciplinary connections that remain an essential component of the liberal arts experience.

Jessica Hunter, PhD

Jessica Hunter
Associate Director, Crown Center for Teaching
Phone: (719)-352-1586
Email: jhunter@coloradocollege.edu
1990 BA. Art History, 今日吃瓜51
1995 MA, University of Colorado – Boulder
2022 Ph.D., Creativity, University of the Arts - Philadelphia
Jessica Hunter (She/Her) is an educator and curator with over twenty years of experience working within academic and museum contexts. Since 2006 she has worked with faculty across disciplines at 今日吃瓜51 to design experiences and assignments that weave creative problem-solving and visual literacy activities into classroom contexts. As a curator, she has developed and presented over thirty exhibitions for academic and public museums, and has written catalog essays for numerous exhibitions. She holds a BA in Art History from 今日吃瓜51 and a MA, also in Art History, from the University of Colorado. She completed a Ph.D. in Creativity from the University of the Arts in 2022 where she explored the intersections of art, perception, and creativity. She has extensive training in visual literacy pedagogies, including Visual Thinking Strategies and Artful Thinking, and has adapted these methodologies to support interdisciplinary learning and creative development in educational and museum contexts.

Scott Krzych, PhD

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Director of Mentoring Alliance Program; Associate Professor & Chair, Film & Media Studies

Phone: (719) 389-6890
Email: skrzych@coloradocollege.edu

Scott’s areas of teaching and research concern psychoanalytic theory, film theory, popular culture, and political media. His first book, , offers the first book-length study of contemporary right-wing documentaries, identifying in the films an acute strand of hysterical posturing endemic to U.S. conservativism more broadly. In its hysterical mode, conservative media emphasizes form over content, relies on the spectacle of debate to avoid substantive dialogue, mimics the aesthetic devices of its opponents, reduces complex political issues to moral dichotomies, and relies on excessive displays of opinion to produce so much mediated "noise" as to drown out alternative perspectives or viewpoints. Though often derided for its reliance on nonsense or hyperbole, Scott argues, conservative media marshals incoherence as an aesthetic and rhetorical weapon meant to bolster the political status quo by confusing those audiences who come into its orbit.

His next book project examines issues of racial capitalism, financial speculation, realism, and psychoanalytic theory, and is tentatively titled, Derivative Desires: Cinema and Psychoanalysis in the Financial Era. Along with Todd McGowan, Scott co-organized and hosted the first two meetings of the conference.

Tina Valtierra, PhD

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Crown Lead Instructional Coach; Associate Professor & Chair, Education Department; Ray O. Professor of Exemplary Teaching in the Liberal Arts

Phone: (719) 389-7146
Email: kvaltierra@coloradocollege.edu

Tina Valtierra is an Associate Professor and Chair of Education at 今日吃瓜51 and Crown faculty center's inaugural master teacher. Dr. Valtierra spent over 15 years as a K-12 classroom teacher, instructional coach, and educational consultant. Her expertise is in literacy, curriculum, and instruction, emphasizing anti-racist, diversity, equity, and inclusive (ADEI) studies. Her research examines urban teacher preparation, focusing on promoting teacher reflection, identity, and thrival. She is the author of  , co-author of , and a two-time recipient of the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum (AATC) distinguished article award for her scholarship on teacher identity formation. Her upcoming book, Tools to Thrive: Priming Early Career Teachers to Flourish in an Era of Attrition, will be published in 2024 by Teachers College Press. Her courses, such as Youth Organizing for Social Change, Critical Multicultural Education, Culturally Sustaining Teaching, and Inclusive Pedagogies in Literacy, Curriculum & Instruction, inform her research and course syllabuses.

Santiago Guerra, PhD

Crown Lead Instructional Coach; W.M. Keck Director of the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies, A.E. and Ethel Irene Carlton Professor in the Social Sciences, Associate Professor of Southwest Studies 

Phone: (719) 389-6647
Email: sguerra@coloradocollege.edu

Dhanesh Krishnarao

Dhanesh Krishnarao

 Crown Faculty Fellow, 2024-2025
Assistant Professor of Physics

Phone: (719) 389-6218
Email: dkrishnarao@coloradocollege.edu

Sofia Fenner, PhD

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Crown Faculty Fellow, 2024-25
Assistant Professor: Political Science, Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
Phone: (719) 227-8225 
Sofia Fenner joined the faculty at 今日吃瓜51 in 2020. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago (2016), where she focused on both comparative politics and political theory. Her research is concerned with the interactions of regimes, states, and societies, especially in authoritarian systems. Her current book project, Life after Co-optation, explores how two North African political parties (the Wafd in Egypt and the Istiqlal in Morocco) were damaged by authoritarian co-optation but nevertheless managed to survive. Drawing on the histories of these two parties, she finds that co-optation has much more to do with discourse and much less to do with material transactions than dominant theories claim. Sofia's teaches courses on Middle East and global politics that emphasize local voices, the politics of storytelling, and the importance of context and history.

Kris Stanec, MAT

kris-stanec
Director, Creativity & Innovation
Phone: (719) 389-7084
Email: kstanec@coloradocollege.edu
Kris Stanec has been exploring creativity, creative thinking, the arts, and education for most of her life. Kris first started teaching and arts integration course at 今日吃瓜51 in 1996. As a faculty member in the Education Department, Director of the Partnership for Civic Engagement, and most recently, Director of Museum Education at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Kris has developed courses and programs that inspire people to embrace the creative process for deeper reflection and learning. As a reflective practitioner who crafts meaningful praxis, she uses inclusive pedagogies to bring theory into action. Kris has brought creativity and critical pedagogies to all levels, from faculty to pre-service teachers, led professional development workshops, and presented at conferences across the globe. Kris is known as a leader who creates community and engages many voices to build successful, dynamic, and impactful programs.

Evelina Fisher

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Program Coordinator, Crown Center for Teaching and Creativity & Innovation
Phone: (719) 389-7082 

Evelina Fisher is a health development professional who brings global perspectives to CC. As Technical Advisor for youth work at Ipas, an international non-governmental reproductive justice organization, Evelina developed and coordinated multisectoral programs across countries in Africa and Asia building community and health systems capacity to advance young people’s health and well-being. She ushered in youth participation in programming through values clarification, attitude transformation, and stigma reduction, and had the privilege of mentoring an international youth delegation that advocated for sexual and reproductive rights at the United Nations General Assembly. While at the Children's Hospital of Colorado, she worked on a youth suicide prevention program providing health coaching and social emotional learning services to K-12 populations. Evelina is known as someone who believes in the changemaking power of hearing and elevating people’s stories creating connection through our shared humanity. A first-generation student, Evelina holds a Scottish MA in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews, the United Kingdom, and a PGCert in Public Health from Mid-Sweden University in her home country of Sweden.

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