Introducing 2025-26 Stieren Arts Enrichment Series

From theatre productions to musical ensembles, Trinity University’s 2025-26 Stieren Arts Enrichment Series offers an exciting lineup for all to enjoy. 

Each year, this series brings to campus a diverse array of leaders in the arts and humanities who share their expertise and works with the Trinity and local community. All events are free and open to the public. For more information, visit Trinity’s events calendar.  

The Stieren Arts Enrichment Series is made possible by an endowment gift from Jane and the late Arthur Stieren of San Antonio.

Meet the artists included in this year's lineup. 

Lyyra

Tuesday, October 14, 2025 | 7:30 p.m. | Parker Chapel

Join Lyyra for a choral performance that reflects the astonishing capabilities within the full spectrum of women’s singing.

Lyyra is an all-women’s vocal ensemble from The VOCES8 Foundation seeking to redefine the genre of upper-voice music in the choral landscape. The group’s talented members specialize in classical, jazz, pop, and folk music from diverse traditions and backgrounds.

Reflective of music, harmony, and the night sky, Lyyra takes its name from the constellation that represents Orpheus’ famed lyre. Lyyra’s creative director is Erik Jacobson, and the group is made up of singers Anna Crumley, MaryRuth Miller, Elizabeth Tait, Aryssa Leigh Burrs, Ingrid Johnson, and Cecille Elliott. 

Lyyra gave its debut performances throughout the USA in 2024, including for the American Choral Directors’ Association, and released its debut EP More Love on the VOCES8 Records label. In 2025, the ensemble made its debut European tour with concerts and recordings in the UK, France, and Germany. Lyyra is passionate about music education and is part of The VOCES8 Foundation’s mission to actively promote Music Education For All. Engaging in a broad range of work, collaborating with schools, universities, and community organizations, the VOCES8 Foundation reaches up to 40,000 people each year.

Peter Hessler

Wednesday, November 12, 2025 | 7 p.m. | Chapman 152

Award-winning writer and journalist Peter Hessler will host a public lecture open to the broader San Antonio community. He will also hold a brief talk and Q&A with students in the First-Year Experience course, "Being Young in Asia."

A New Yorker magazine staff writer and a MacArthur Fellow, Hessler has published six books, including New York Times bestsellers China Trilogy: Watertown (2001), Oracle Bones (2006), and Country Driving (2010).  His book River Town won the Kiriyama Prize, and Oracle Bones was a finalist for the National Book Award. These books are based on Hessler’s experience living in China as a Peace Corps English teacher in a small-town college in the 1990s (River Town) and as a New Yorker foreign correspondent in the early 2000s (Country Driving).

Hessler’s writing is based on lived experience, rooted in original, meticulous reporting, and rich in vivid, nuanced details. In addition to first-hand observations and interviews, he conducts extensive research on historical background, public records, and related academic studies to give his books incredible originality, depth, and scope.

As a writer and journalist, Hessler excels at conveying people’s mundane yet vivid lives by highlighting remarkable details of the microcosm of their daily activities. At the same time, he delves into the historic, social transition at a macro level, be it Egypt’s political upheaval or China’s massive urbanization and industrialization. 

Christa Noel Robbins, Ph.D. & David M Woody

David M Woody

Neidorff exhibition: Thursday, February 26 to Saturday, April 4, 2026

Christa Noel Robbins, Ph.D. & David M Woody

Public lecture and exhibition reception: Thursday, March 19, 2026

From Thursday, February 26 to Saturday, April 4, 2026, the Neidorff Gallery will host an exhibition of recent work made by Woody in Northern California. Foregrounding the significance of history and place for artistic engagement, Woody’s subtle photographic prints will be shown in conjunction with prints drawn from Special Collections at Coates Library.

In addition to the exhibition, Woody and Robbins will each deliver a lecture on Thursday, March 19, 2026, followed by a reception for the exhibition. Students will have the opportunity to visit with Woody and Robbins during class visits and critiques.

Dave Woody is an artist working with photography. His work is held in numerous collections, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the University of Virginia Art Museum, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. In 2009, Woody was the winner of the prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. His photographs have appeared in the New York Times’ The Sunday Magazine, PORTER Magazine, Elle Decor, and M Le magazine du Monde. He has held teaching positions at Colorado State University, the University of Virginia, and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt.

Christa Noel Robbins is an associate professor of 20th- and 21st-century art and criticism at the University of Virginia and the 2024-25 Getty Scholar for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. In 2021, she published Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting with the University of Chicago Press. Her essays and reviews can be found in several journals, including American Art, The Oxford Art Journal, Criticism, Art in America, Art History, Art Journal, and Critical Inquiry. She was the advisory editor of North American modernism for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and is currently a book reviews editor for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. She is currently writing a book on the abstract painter William T. Williams.

Sherri Irvin, Ph.D.

Wednesday, April 22, 2026 | 7:30 p.m. | Location TBD

Sherri Irvin, Ph.D., is a Presidential Research Professor of Philosophy and interim chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Irvin will give a public lecture on aesthetics and a colloquium presentation of her current research on appearance-based compliments and gender. The colloquium presentation will be integrated with a course scheduled for Spring 2026, PHIL 3454: "Philosophy of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality."

Irvin has written extensively on philosophical issues raised by contemporary artistic practices and on aesthetic experience in everyday life. In her book Immaterial: The Rules of Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press, 2022), she argues that contemporary artworks are partly constituted by rules and discusses the relevance of this for art appreciation and value. Her edited collection Body Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2016) is a multi-authored collection that treats the aesthetics of the body in relation to social justice, art, evolutionary theory, race, gender, disability, sexuality, and sport. Irvin’s current research focuses on the intersection of aesthetics and justice.

Rude Mechs

Wednesday, April 22 to Sunday, April 26, 2026

Rude Mechs, an ensemble-based theatre company that operates with a full company of 33 members, is reviving a 2018 production of Not Every Mountain to be performed at Trinity. Not Every Mountain is a mellow meditation on change, permanence, and our place in the natural world. It is a presentation of the life cycle of mountains and the processes by which they are born and eventually laid to rest, an invocation of tectonic force and geologic time. Witness a reimagination of the play using string, cardboard, and magnets that invites the audience to watch the collective effort of making and unmaking a series of interlocking mountain ranges.

Rude Mechs will also conduct a three-day workshop in late January or early February (exact date to be determined) with Trinity theatre students, where they will learn and participate in the “factory” of creating the polyhedron set pieces for the mountains in the production and explore how the material can be used to make a performance. During phase two of the project in February, the Rude Mechs will rehearse the play in Austin with additional Texas Performing Arts support. Trinity students are invited to attend rehearsals in Austin.

Rude Mechs create original plays that are produced in Austin, Texas. They have received more than 200 local and national awards and nominations for their work. Rude Mechs have enjoyed four Off-Broadway premieres and toured to top national venues such as The Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis; The Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio; and and Woolly Mammoth in Washington D.C.

Rude Mechs seeks to participate in the international community of artists by contributing to festivals such as Austria’s SommerSzene, the Galway Arts Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (where it won the Total Theatre Award for Best New Play by an Ensemble), the Kiasma Festival, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, and the Under the Radar Festival in New York City.