About

Dru and Terry

Imagining Venice: The Semiotics of La Serenissima is an art/communication travel course being offered in Spring 2011, and perhaps every two years thereafter, at California Lutheran University. This website is dedicated to following its development (how we plan it, what decisions we make, what works and what doesn’t); recording any interesting information or images we find during our research for the class; displaying student work when appropriate; mapping out interesting itineraries; journaling the trip itself; and discussing the various pedagogical insights or challenges we face along the way.

We hope this site will be useful to students going on the trip; parents interested in what their students are doing; and other artists and/or academics interested in using this course as a model for their own, either to Venice or any other semiotically rich locale.

Terry Spehar-Fahey has visited Venice and Florence on her own “Grand Tour” and has returned to Europe many times to live and seek out her art heroes. She has stood in awe in the presence of William Joseph Mallory Turner’s oils at the Tate in London and painted in Monet’s garden at Giverny with her children at her side. To return to Venice and paint in the footsteps of Sargent, Turner and Monet in pilgrimage with students will be a highlight of her artistic life’s journey.

Spehar-Fahey is an award-winning artist who has held various teaching and corporate positions in the arts and in business over the last 35 years. She currently teaches at California Lutheran University and her work can now be seen regularly at High Studio Art Gallery in Moorpark, CA. Her courses include drawing, watercolor, and Visual Arts in Education in which she inspires her students with the joy of making art that reflects their unique self. She is interested in the study of creativity, art and neuroscience and in the role that the arts can play in mental health. Her latest work is derived from that interest as well as portrait painting, figure painting and a renewed interest in the light-filled landscapes of northern Italy.

Spehar-Fahey received her BA in Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts from UCLA and her Master of Business Administration from Loyola-Marymount University.

Dru Pagliassotti has visited Venice multiple times, first while she was living in Naples, Italy, during high school and most recently in 2006, when she spent several months living in Canareggio while on sabbatical. Venice captured her imagination from the first day she visited, and she is resigned to the fact that it will keep drawing her back through the years.

Pagliassotti is a professor of communication at California Lutheran University, where she teaches journalism, various digital publishing courses, and film theory.  Her research addresses the rise of female-authored male/male romance fiction in the West. She has herself published a number of short stories and two novels, the steampunk romance Clockwork Heart and the contemporary horror An Agreement with Hell.  She owns The Harrow Press, which publishes horror anthologies, and she was publisher and editor of The Harrow literary magazine from 1998-2009. She recently co-edited Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre.

Pagliassotti received her BAs in Communication and Sociology from UC Santa Barbara and her MA and PhD in Communication Theory and Research from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. She also holds a graduate certificate in Gender Studies from USC.

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