Staff Spotlight

Name: Jodi Salter Title: Student services director, Department of Art What do you do as student services director? I like to joke that I do everything but the toilets. I advise students, schedule courses in the department, and work with faculty in art and other departments to develop new courses. I also help to coordinate guest speakers, promote the art department to the University and outside community, and recruit high school students to the art department—I was just in the Upstate and will be heading to Atlanta and Charlotte later this month. See, it really is everything but the toilets! How long have you been at USC? I started in 1991 while I was working on a degree in English (I’m still working on it). I started out in distance education, then worked for the College of Pharmacy, then in the environmental health sciences department of the Arnold School of Public Health, and, finally, on to the art department. What do you most enjoy about working with art students? I absolutely love art, and it’s amazing to walk in McMaster every day and see what our students have created. We have 800 students in four different majors, and many of them are unbelievably talented. In fact, Saluda’s Restaurant in Five Points is remodeling this month and will redecorate exclusively with our faculty and student art. It’s not been at all difficult to recruit students to USC. We bring in some incredible guest artists that smaller colleges can’t, and we offer some interesting courses in conjunction with other academic disciplines on campus. We’re talking about new courses geared toward the arts. As the merger between Liberal Arts and Science and Mathematics comes together, we want to do more collaboration with other departments like chemistry where art students could learn the science of emulsions, dyes, and glazes. You mentioned that you have a 13-year-old daughter—does she enjoy art? Gracee has won all kinds of contests, mostly in drawing and three-dimensional pieces. In fact, we have several of her pieces displayed in our home. What do you do for fun? My husband, Jeff, who works for the Arnold School of Public Health as a media consultant, and I like to cook foods from different regions and listen to music from those cultures. Which reminds me—we’re exploring opportunities to collaborate with Bert Ligon in music on the connections between jazz and modern art. But back to fun—we like to travel to New York and Atlanta and any place that has good museums and good jazz. 11/04