When Liza Kelly, director of WKU Opera Theatre and an associate professor of Music, announced that David Johnson and his classmates would be spending the 2018 spring semester learning puppetry, Johnson was a bit skeptical but ready to try something new.
“When she proposed this idea in the fall, we thought, ‘OK — this could have value,’” Johnson says. “I’ve always trusted Dr. Kelly with anything career-, music- and performance-related. She’s one of the best people in our department and so incredibly intelligent.”
That winter, Johnson, a music major now in his senior year at WKU, found himself at Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts, part of a learning experience made possible by WKU’s Faculty-Undergraduate Student Engagement (FUSE) grants, which support undergraduate students engaged in faculty-mentored research.
