Nancy Uscher, dean of UNLV's College of Fine Arts, is pleased to announce Jean Rohe as the winner of the Pamela Phillips Oland Excellence in the Art of Writing Lyrics Award. Rohe receives a $5,000 award and will be invited to UNLV during the fall 2023 semester to work with CFA students and for an event celebrating her award.
“This competition seeks to develop and promote the craft of songwriting across the disciplines of music, theater, and dance. We are so pleased to steward this worthwhile endeavor within the College of Fine Arts, and we are so thrilled for Jean whose talent and creativity was much-deserving of this award," said Uscher.
Brooklyn-based Rohe writes one-of-a-kind narrative songs, concerned as much with the interior lives of her narrators as with the wider world outside them. Jean recently won the 2022 Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk songwriting contest with her deeply personal and timely song “Animal”. Her latest full-length record as a bandleader, Sisterly, produced by longtime collaborator Liam Robinson, won best Adult Contemporary Album at the Independent Music Awards in 2019.
Her writing and performance styles are the product of 20 years of experimentation and practice, learning on her feet as a side-person and bandleader in New York's wide-ranging music communities. “I grew up in a household where music-making and storytelling – far from a rarified vocation for prodigies and professionals – was an act woven into the social life of our family and friends, ” she says. “I carry that spirit with me into the music I make today.”
About the UNLV College of Fine Arts
The UNLV College of Fine Arts, one of the nation's largest fine arts colleges, boldly launches visionaries who transform the global community through collaboration, scholarship, and innovation. Established in 1992, the UNLV CFA encompasses the departments of art, dance, film, theatre, the School of Music, School of Architecture, Entertainment Engineering & Design, and is home to the Performing Arts Center, Nevada Conservatory Theatre, and Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art.
We illuminate the power of the arts amidst breathtaking advancements in science and technology. In doing so, we are creating a global destination at the forefront of transforming arts and design. To accomplish this we encourage agency, inventiveness, problem-solving, and big-idea thinking in our students, faculty, and staff. We make education relevant through evolving curriculum and effective learning outcomes.
