Teaching & Mentorship
At UNI, Jenn has taught classes for the departmental core, design & production core, as well as classes for non-majors, including:
Stagecraft: Costumes, Design Elements, Design I: Aesthetics, Foundations of Theatre, Advanced Costume Techniques, Theatrical Arts & Society, as well an independent studies with design and production students.
Jenn’s teaching expands beyond the classroom, supervising and mentoring students through various assignments on productions. She also offers workshops in digital rendering, rendering techniques & media, fabric manipulation, and portfolio building.
When appropriate to the design, Jenn loves to collaborate with other designers integrating technology into costumes, and introducing those new techniques and technologies to students.
To Touch the Moon
This was a devised production for young audiences on the Autism Spectrum. We costumed both the actors and the 15-member audiences for this immersive experience about NASA and the Moon Landing. The costumes were designed inclusively, taking the audience’s various sizes, comfort and mobility into consideration.
Spelling Bee
For The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Jenn and the lighting designer built an LED light-up shoe for Barfé. Disguised as polka dot sneakers, the LEDS were attached to a WonderFlex inner lining and lit up during the song Magic Foot.
Design I: Aesthetics
A sample assignment from Design I, which exercised the students in the Elements & Principles of Design, research, and their aesthetics. This project engaged them with repetition, adjusting elements or principles to create a different impact within a given rendering, and analyzing their choice making.
Stagecraft: Costumes
This Design-A-Toy project is the stitching final for the course. Given basic pattern shapes, each student creates their own creature and successfully translates their ideas into something 3D and stuffed.
This project was accepted by the USITT Teaching Archive for the Costume Commission.
jennsheshko@gmail.com
Copyright © 2021 Jennifer Sheshko Wood