The Center's Studio Podcast

A landmark exhibition spanning the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints marks a milestone in the culture's artistic output and appreciation. The 121-work exhibition, Work and Wonder: 200 Years of Latter-day Saint Art, is curated by Heather Belnap, Ashlee Whitaker Evans, and Brontë Hebdon. They join in this wide-ranging conversation about the show's five years of dev...

The publication of Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader is a landmark event, the first comprehensive critical examination of Mormon Art. In this interview, co-editors Mason Kamana Allred and Amanda Beardsley introduce the chapters with insights into the reasons why each is indispensable. Then, the authors of this 664-page book from Oxford University Press submitted questions for the podcast abo...

The publication of Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader is a landmark event, the first comprehensive critical examination of Mormon Art. In this interview, co-editors Mason Kamana Allred and Amanda Beardsley introduce the chapters with insights into the reasons why each is indispensable. Then, the authors of this 664-page book from Oxford University Press submitted questions for the podcast abo...

The young nonprofit organization, Inspired Arts League, is the focus of this interview with its founder Brittany Scott and executive producer Ellen Wheeler. It’s a fascinating model: invite global artists who are already accomplished to be members and give them as a group, through workshops and collaboration, tools to more effectively tell stories and inspire hope in the world through art. Scott a...

In this interview with Rachel Helps, Wikipedian-in-Residence at the BYU Library, researcher and author Helps explains her work refining, creating, correcting, and researching Wikipedia pages that relate to the unrivaled collection of Mormon Studies volumes at the Harold B Lee Library at Brigham Young University. The conversation includes interesting finds and experiences covering eight years of wo...

Brett Peterson is Director, Exhibition Media and Interactives at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which is at the forefront of engaging audiences and making exhibitions memorable by the creation of accompanying original, responsive digital media. In this episode Peterson describes the shifting expectation of visitors regarding technology. He tries  to find new ways to evoke emot...

Artist Collin Bradford makes video, sound, photography, sculpture, and other media. In this interview, the incoming art department chair at Brigham Young University discusses his work, how art speaks directly to the brain through the senses, and his work as a reflection of concerns about the future. His video installation, A Burning Hope (2021) is part of the museum exhibition, Materializing Mormo...

This episode with composer S. Andrew Lloyd celebrates the world premiere of his song cycle, Amaranthine, which was written for and performed by international opera star Rachel Willis-Sørensen at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, April 9, 2024. The composer discusses how he came to write the prize-winning work and his emotional response to hearing it for the first time. Amaranthine is the first com...

The winner of the 2024 Prize of The Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts is Mia Black. In this interview, Black introduces herself and her winning project, which will be a collection of American Folk Music aimed at elementary school-age classrooms. The breakthrough idea here is Black's plan to organize the collection using waves of immigrants and their songs to tell t...

Brad Pelo, President and Executive Producer of The Chosen discusses the series' global ambition to provide all episodes in 600 languages. The vast challenges of dubbing and subtitling the series about Jesus while maintaining the writer's unique contemporary dialogue and tone are discussed in this interview alongside the powerful experiences Pelo has witnessed riding the wave of this one-...

Many arts audiences go to performances and exhibitions without thinking much about the institutional leadership that makes these events possible. In this episode, Richard Bushman, chairman of the board of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts and Mykal Urbina, the Center's executive director, announce a chairman-elect, Stanley Hainsworth. The trio talk about their favorite art forms and progra...

In preparation for the 2024 Prize of The Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts that will sponsor a new music program, singer and music education Jamie Peterson and intellectual property attorney Patrick Perkins discuss with passion the urgency for more music education in public schools. With the deadline for submissions fast approaching for submissions of new music ideas fo...

This show-and-tell episode features Erin Eastmond and Glen Nelson discussing holiday gift ideas by LDS creatives that are featured in the Center's Christmas Gift Guide. They include children's books, music, art, religious books, scholarly works, food, poetry, family activities, and a few items offered as benefit art works for the Center. Erin and Glen read excepts from the books and talk...

In this episode, the Center celebrates with composer Steven L. Ricks the upcoming premiere of his multimedia chamber opera, Baucis and Philemon (BAH-sis and Phi-LEE-mon), which was commissioned by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts in 2019. The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphosis. It is a fable about a couple who ask the gods to be turned into trees at the bank of a lake after their death...

Robert Raleigh and Andrew Hall, the two editors of the book, The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction, gather to talk about the process of creating a new collection of fiction in this panel discussion that also includes Jennifer Quist, one of the book's authors and the fiction editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought . The chat includes observations about the evolution of the Mormon...

Three authors from the new collection, The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction, gather to talk about their stories, lives, and works in this lively panel discussion. The authors are Todd Robert Peterson, Ryan McIlvain, and Heidi Naylor. All three authors are also university teachers, and a question about responses to each other's stories turns into an impromptu literary critics' circ...

Emerging painter Madeline Rupard discusses her paintings of the American landscape that include truck stops, gas stations, fast food, and stores that connect the suburban and the sublime. In atmospheric works that recall the stylistic approach of the Ashcan painters Henri, Sloan, Glackens, and Shinn of the turn of the 20th century, Rupard finds kinship with them and additional resonance of paintin...

Historian and author Claudia Lauper Bushman discusses in this episode the writing of her autobiography in progress, I, Claudia , and the value of keeping records. In her frequent letters to family, Wellesley College newsletters, and her own daily journaling, she celebrates written communications, the foundation of civilization. She is joined in the discussion about undertaking projects grand and m...

The Dominican Jazz Project is a group of elite Caribbean musical artists whose band leader is Stephen Anderson, Professor of Composition and Jazz Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. In this interview, Anderson reminisces about his tender relationship with the musicians of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, their much decorated recordings and performances, and the j...

It was a dark and stormy night.... Barrett Burgin discusses his first feature film, Cryo , and then makes compelling connections between LDS lore, history, and belief within the context of the genre of horror films and fiction. Mormon Horror is a trending thing--LDS artists are increasingly drawn to explore elements of horror in their work.  Liked this episode? Send us a text.

Pianist, BYU associate professor, scholar, and social advocate Jihea Hong-Park speaks about her experience as a Korean American female pianist of faith and how anti-racism efforts extend into the world of classical music. Music for the episode is by Steven Ricks, including an excerpt from the premiere performance of Overlapping Voices with Jihea Hong Park at the piano. Liked this episode? Send us...

In this episode, The Center for Latter-day Saint Arts announces an inaugural program, The Artists Residency at the Center. It will bring 6-8 LDS artists to New York City to reside together and work for a week in October 2023. The Residency is hosted by Stanley Hainsworth, who joins us on this podcast and discusses his own journey from a fledgling actor in New York through global creative designer...

Director/screenwriter Aaron Toronto and screenwriter/actress Nha Uyen Ly Nguyen discuss their film, The Brilliant Darkness! , which won the highest award, The Golden Kite (the Vietnamese equivalent of an  Oscar) this year, for best film, best screenplay, and best actress. The dramatic film is about a family imploding, precipitated by the death of a wealthy grandfather and his son's gambling d...

Young LDS filmmaker Luis Fernando Puente discusses the premiere of his short film, I Have No Tears, and I Must Cry , at the  Sundance Film Festival 2023. It is a personal film based on his own experience as an immigrant to the U.S. from Mexico. Music for the episode is taken from the short film score, composed by Jorge Murcia. Liked this episode? Send us a text.

Author and Mormon literature influencer William Morris talks about his new book, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories , and describes his approach to writing fiction with examples from his collection of short stories published by By Common Consent Press. Morris is also the incoming president of The Association for Mormon Letters. In the podcast he outlines some of his plans and priorities reg...