College of Fine Arts

Wendy Arons joined the faculty of the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University in 2007. She teaches courses in dramatic literature and dramaturgy, as well as advising undergraduate dramaturgy students in production work. She currently serves as Option Coordinator for Dramaturgy.

Her research interests include performance and ecology, 18th- and 19th-century theatre history, feminist theatre, and performance and ethnography. She is author of Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Woman's Writing: The Impossible Act (Palgrave Macmillan 2006), and co-editor, with Theresa J. May, of Readings in Performance and Ecology (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). She is also co-translator, with Sara Figal, of a new edition of G. E. Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy, edited by Natalya Baldyga, which received the 2018 ATHE/ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship (Routledge 2018; also available online). In addition, Arons has published articles in Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, The German Quarterly, Communications from the International Brecht Society, 1650-1850, Text and Presentation, Theatre Journal, and Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, as well as chapters in a number of anthologies, including “Brecht and U.S. Actor Training” in Bertolt Brecht in Context (ed. Stephen Brockmann); “Ecodramaturgy in/and Contemporary Women’s Plays” (co-authored with Theresa J. May, and published in Contemporary Women’s Playwriting, ed. Penny Farfan & Leslie Ferris); and “Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide: Challenges from Ecocriticism and Evolutionary Biology for Theatre Historiograpy” in Theatre Historiography: Critical Questions (ed. Henry Bial & Scott Magelssen). She is currently a co-series editor for the forthcoming multi-volume Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury).
Prof. Arons has worked as a professional dramaturg with a number of leading directors, including Anne Bogart and Robert Falls, and has translated a number of plays from German into English, including The Good Person of Sezuan in collaboration with Tony Kushner. She has served on the Editorial Boards of Theatre Annual and Theatre Topics and on the Advisory Board for the CMU Center for the Arts and Society and for Hiawatha Project. She was curator and artistic director of the “Earth Matters on Stage Festival & Symposium” in Pittsburgh PA in 2012. And in her spare time, she authors a blog on local theatre and culture, “The Pittsburgh Tatler.”

Erica Cochran Hameen, Ph.D., NOMA, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP is an architectural designer and Assistant Professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture. In 2021, she was named the school’s first Director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). She also serves as the Co-Director of the Center for Building Performance & Diagnostics (CBPD) and as Track Chair of the Doctor of Design (DDes) program.

Erica serves as an instructor for multiple graduate and undergraduate courses and recently developed a new course focused on energy efficient and healthy retrofits. Formerly, she was Program Director for the UDream program at CMU, which from 2009-2016 worked to increase diversity in the urban design profession nationally, and in the Pittsburgh region specifically, by offering opportunities for permanent employment in Pittsburgh to recent college graduates.

Erica has served as a studio critic at multiple universities. Her architectural experience includes over 50 educational, media and broadcast, residential, community, and transportation facilities. She is also an active member of several community service and non-profit organizations.

Erica has received numerous honors for her research and architectural design project participation including awards from the AIA, NY Landmarks Conservancy, Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, Faculty and Graduate Student Awards, and most recently Best Proposal in a Department of Energy (DOE) Competition presented at the White House Conference Room.

Erica holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech, and a Master of Science in Sustainable Design and a Ph.D. in Building Performance & Diagnostics from CMU. Erica’s doctoral research investigated the impact of school building and neighborhood physical and environmental characteristics on student and teacher health and performance. She is also a contributing researcher for a Sustainable Engineering textbook and served as one of the Principal Investigators for the Consortium for Building Energy Innovation (CBEI), formally the EEB Hub, established by the DOE as an Energy-Regional Innovation Cluster.