A Calling to Compassion: 2026-2027 4D Compassion Lab Faculty Wayfinder Fellows

Joey Brink, University Carillonist, Assistant Professor
Lamont School of Music & Theatre (College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences)

I’m the University Carillonist here at DU, which means I play the bell tower. You may not have heard of me, but you’ve probably heard me! I play the bells every day at lunch time, and also at convocations, events, hockey games, and more. I like to think of myself as the campus DJ; you kind of have to listen to me, whether you want to or not. I don’t take that responsibility lightly, and make every effort to offer a variety of music for all to enjoy, from Bach to Bruno Mars and everything in between. I love sharing the tower and teaching others how to play, to both lifelong musicians and those just starting out on their musical journey. Bells have been symbols of peace and unity and compassion for thousands of years. And in a polarized digital age that constantly has us battling for attention, I hope that a medieval bell tower can remind us all of our collective humanity.

Stephanie Kang, Assistant Professor
School of Art & Art History and Ethnic Studies (College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences)

As an art historian, artist, and curator, my work explores how art can deconstruct hegemonic systems and help imagine liberatory futures. Under oppressive conditions that can make hope difficult to sustain, my research considers how radical imagination can reorient our relationship to the past, transform the present, and open possibilities for the future. I understand art as a powerful vehicle for cultivating these possibilities through compassion, care, and community, awakening public consciousness and mobilizing collective action. As a Wayfinder Fellow, I work with students and colleagues to develop critical methods for engaging the world around us through a politics of compassion. During the COMPASSion Immersive Experience, I help students to develop skills in visual analysis and media literacy as we examine how images can elicit compassion for some while withholding or discouraging it for others. Together, we critique these visual languages and consider how they might be transformed through interventionist practices that enable liberatory forms of worldmaking. I look forward to deepening this work and expanding opportunities for collaboration in the year ahead.

Daniel McIntosh, Professor, Dean Emeritus 
Psychology (College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences)

My teaching and research focus on emotions, coping, and the psychology of religion. I teach classes on The Psychology of Thriving and The Psychology of Religious and Spiritual Practices. I am Co-PI on a Templeton World Charities Foundation project studying labyrinth walking. Labyrinth walking is an embodied meditation in which participants follow a nonlinear path into and out of the center of a pattern. It is ancient, multi-cultural, and its use is expanding in religious and secular contexts. Throughout my research and teaching, compassion emerges as a practice critical to individual and social thriving. I hope students in my courses and all those who participate in the COMPASSion Immersive Experience learn about the value of compassion in their personal, social, and community lives. Further, I hope their direct experiences with compassion-focused practices provide them with tools to develop and apply compassion. In my classes and in the COMPASSion Immersive Experience, students have shared with me powerful experiences and insights they have had while walking a labyrinth. They often find compassion for themselves and others, and they leave supported, reflective, energized, and more prepared to engage their lives and the world in positive ways.

Sarah Morelli, Professor 
Ethnomusicology, Lamont School of Music & Theatre (College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences)

I’m an ethnomusicologist and much of my work centers on kathak, a music-intensive form of classical dance from South Asia. As an artist-scholar, I work at the intersection of embodied learning and intellectual inquiry. I invite students in my classes to engage with ideas through movement, listening, creative practice, reading, and analysis, exploring how intellectual and artistic modes of knowing can inform and shape one another. The Compassion Lab gives me a chance to explore how these intertwined ways of knowing might deepen our capacity for compassion. My hope is that, through experiential learning and reflection, students might become more attentive to their own experiences and more open to perspectives beyond their own, cultivating both individual growth and a deeper sense of connection, care, and responsibility toward one another.

Julie Morris, Teaching Professor
Biological Sciences (College of Natural Sciences and Mathamatics)

Although I was conventionally trained as an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, I am currently most interested in helping people find their connection to nature through biology education and outreach. My current research explores ways to enhance engagement and learning in large introductory and non-major biology courses, and I am actively involved in sustainability and nature education initiatives on campus and in our surrounding community.
 

I am called to my work as a Compassion Lab Wayfinder Fellow by a deep belief that meaningful connections with nature can nurture compassion, well-being, and a greater sense of belonging. I want students to discover inspiration in the natural world, appreciate its contributions to their health and wellness, and develop the capacity to extend compassion to themselves, others, and the world around them. Ultimately, I hope that students carry these habits of awareness and care beyond the classroom and into their careers and everyday lives. The most meaningful part of the COMPASS experience so far has been learning alongside a community of Wayfinder Fellows whose care, collegiality, and generosity continually inspire my own teaching and practice of compassion.

Brian Pertl, Director
Lamont School of Music & Theatre (College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences)

I am the Director of the Lamont School of Music and Theatre at the University of Denver and the President of the College Music Society. When I’m not leading cool organizations, I am a trombonist, ethnomusicologist, didjeridu player, Deep Listener, and an advocate for music and arts education at all levels. I believe that creating  educational cultures of true belonging that uplift compassion, diversity, wellness, collaboration, creativity, curiosity, and play are key to developing the artists and entrepreneurs who will best overcome obstacles and capitalize on the opportunities of today’s rapidly changing world. I am proud that DU is a place that fearlessly uplifts compassion, mindfulness, mental health, and physical health through the well-being dimension of the 4D Experience. If you want to read more about my approach to culture building, check out my book, Creating the Radically Responsive Music School: Leading Change through Culture-Building, from Routledge.

T. Carlis Roberts, Assistant Professor
Lamont School of Music & Theatre and Ethnic Studies (College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences)

I’m a composer, designer, performer, and scholar devoted to exploring sound as a tool for liberation (tcarlisroberts.com). My work centers on African diasporic drum/dance traditions in the Americas, most notably Afro-Puerto Rican bomba and African American ring shout. Studying and teaching these forms is an ongoing laboratory through which I explore the ways embodied practice can transmit cultural knowledge, document history, and build new worlds. As a Wayfinder Fellow, I hope to explore the ways singing, playing, and dancing together can amplify the potential for compassion among humans and between humans and more-than-humans. In particular, I’d like to investigate with students and colleagues how traditions forged in the horrific conditions of enslavement might offer portals to empathy, listening, self-examination, and reparation.

Kristin Taavola, Associate Professor 
Music Theory, Lamont School of Music & Theatre (College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences)

As a music theorist, my research engages musical structure and its relationship to learning, performing, and experiencing music. Making music requires a combination of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, timbre, articulation, instrumentation, and myriad other musical elements, and in introductory courses, I teach the skills required to understand those elements. But as musicians and listeners, the daily experience of listening also embodies emotional and psychological responses: joy, curiosity, wonder, frustration, boredom, elation, desire, and aversion, to name a few.

My course “Music and Spirituality” focuses on our responses to religious and spiritual genres from across the world. We explore how listening attitudes can shape our gut responses and opinions about different songs and compositions. The listening skills built in the class dovetail beautifully into the COMPASSion Immersive Experience—the self-reflection we’ve done as music listeners builds a foundation for more present human conversation. I am excited to dive deeper with my brilliant COMPASS colleagues and students as we explore compassion in a year-long journey!

Kate Willink, Professor
Communication & Media Arts (College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences)

As an art historian, artist, and curator, my work explores how art can deconstruct hegemonic systems and help imagine liberatory futures. Under oppressive conditions that can make hope difficult to sustain, my research considers how radical imagination can reorient our relationship to the past, transform the present, and open possibilities for the future. I understand art as a powerful vehicle for cultivating these possibilities through compassion, care, and community, awakening public consciousness and mobilizing collective action. As a Wayfinder Fellow, I work with students and colleagues to develop critical methods for engaging the world around us through a politics of compassion. During the COMPASSion Immersive Experience, I help students to develop skills in visual analysis and media literacy as we examine how images can elicit compassion for some while withholding or discouraging it for others. Together, we critique these visual languages and consider how they might be transformed through interventionist practices that enable liberatory forms of worldmaking. I look forward to deepening this work and expanding opportunities for collaboration in the year ahead.

I'm an ethnographer and intercultural communication scholar who studies food and education as the places where people learn to live with difference. My research takes me into working kitchens: the Rome Sustainable Food Project, where cooks build the day's menu from what the garden gave them that morning, and a small counter restaurant in Kyoto. Cooking and eating together, like teaching and learning together, ask people to attend closely to a place, a season, and one another.

I study atmospheres. A chef mists mountain water over a red maple leaf, sets it on the plate, and the season arrives in the room before anyone speaks. Classrooms work the same way. In my First-Year Seminar (FSEM), The Art of Slowness, students arrive hungry for a different relationship with time and build one. They read slowly, sit in silence, and grow fluent in Ma, the Japanese aesthetic of purposeful emptiness that makes room for something to happen.

I joined the Wayfinder Fellowship because it takes compassion seriously as a condition of communication. I hope students in the COMPASSion Immersive Experience learn to attune to another person when it is hardest, and to carry that capacity into their workplaces, neighborhoods, and families.

The 4D Compassion Lab Wayfinders Fellowship is supported by a Capacity-Building Grant, received from the Educating Character Initiative, a project of The Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University.

If you are interested in serving as a Compassion Lab Faculty Wayfinder Fellow, please email erin.anderson-camenzind@du.edu.