U-M Creative Currents

Penny Stamps Speaker Series: Chrisstina Hamilton

• Arts Initiative • Season 4 • Episode 1

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In this episode of U-M Creative Currents, join host Mark Clague as he interviews Chrisstina Hamilton, producer and director of the University of Michigan's prestigious Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series and Roman Witt Visiting Artist Program. This special episode is part of a U-M Creative Currents' podcast series building excitement for the inaugural Michigan Arts Festival (September 25 - October 26, 2025).

Before joining the Stamps School of Art & Design, Chrisstina directed the Ann Arbor Film Festival and has extensive experience with film and media projects both nationally and internationally. She brings an impressive lineup of thought leaders and inspiring artistic voices to campus across visual art, design, music, theater, and dance, with a fantastic lineup planned for the Michigan Arts Festival.

Featured Speakers include:

*Production Note: This episode is part of U-M Creative Currents' special Michigan Arts Festival podcast series which kicks off on September 25, 2025 and is produced by Jessica Jenks and edited by Sly Pup Productions.


Season 4 ep 1: Chrisstina Hamilton


Mark Clague: 0:06
 Welcome to Creative Currents, the Michigan Arts podcast where we explore the power of collaborative creativity and the ways that the arts inspire dialogue and connection. I'm your host, Mark Clague. I'm very excited that the University of Michigan is hosting its first ever campus Arts Festival from September 25th to October 26th. This annual event kicks off in 2025, and we're continuing a special Creative Currents sub-series spotlighting the people and the events that will animate the Michigan Arts Festival this year.

Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Chrisstina Hamilton, the producer and director of our prestigious Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series on campus, as well as the Roman Witt Visiting Artist Program. Both programs come out of our University of Michigan's Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design. Chrisstina brings a stunning lineup of thought leaders and inspiring artistic voices to campus in visual art, design, music, theater, dance, fashion—really anything that you can imagine and that can challenge us to stretch our comfort zone and expand our personal creativity.

Before joining the Stamps School, she directed the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and she has worked in all sorts of film and media projects nationally and internationally. This is going to be a super fun conversation, I'm sure. Chrisstina, welcome to Creative Currents.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 1:27
 Well, thank you so much, Mark. It's such a pleasure to be here.

Mark Clague: 1:29
 So tell us about the Stamps Speaker Series. Like, what is it and what makes it really special?

Chrisstina Hamilton: 1:35
 The Penny Stamps Series is a weekly program that focuses on the creative process. It's sort of based in art and design. And, you know, it was born out of the School of Art & Design. It's named for one of our alums, Penny Stamps, who was—she was actually an interior designer herself who studied here. And she wanted to find a way to give back to her alma mater. And she thought that the School of Art & Design and students really needed some way to connect with real practitioners in art and design out in the world beyond the walls of the academy, you know, that had made their way. And for students to also learn to, you know, create a network and begin to have connections out in the world with people that were really successful and learn from all their different stories of how they found their own latitude in the world.

And then as we started embarking and working on this, we also realized that it was also about building this network beyond the school itself within the university, but then also beyond the university within the larger community. And so the series happens every Thursday at the Michigan Theater off campus.

Mark Clague: 2:48
 Is it always at 5:30 or just—

Chrisstina Hamilton: 2:50
 It is. It's pretty much the regular part of the series is Thursdays at 5:30.

Mark Clague: 2:59
 So anybody can come?

Chrisstina Hamilton: 3:01
 Anybody can come. Students, faculty, staff, and people that are completely unaffiliated with the university can even come. And it's usually Thursday at 5:30 at the Michigan Theater. You can depend on that.

We also, however, do special programs quite often that don't fit into that framework where it might be something at the Museum of Art or it might be at Rackham or we might do something in Detroit or we might go to Grand Rapids. So you have to look for those special events. But there's always a Thursday 5:30 at the Michigan Theater, and you can just show up. There's no tickets. You don't have to register and give out your personal details. You just walk in the door and find a seat.

Mark Clague: 3:41
 Yeah, and these have been some of the most amazing experiences, you know, that are my experience on campus. I remember having Philip Glass, you know, Wynton Marsalis. I mean, a lot of musicians, and of course I come from the music world. But one of the interesting things to me about Stamps and about your series is that—I mean, you say it's mainly art and design, but it's so many other things too. I mean, and there's—I think that's really the fascinating thing about the Stamps School is that it's sort of all forms of creativity mixed together. And students don't just study painting or ceramics or sculpture. They study creativity and sort of realizing their vision and realizing their dreams. And the people you bring in, I think, are so inspiring in terms of just taking some of the most provocative, innovative people around the world and bringing them to our campus.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 4:25
 Well, we try very hard to do that. Yeah, it's interesting that you say that. It is true. We don't always just host artists and designers because one of the things, too, is the idea that within the creative process, you're responding to something in the world, right? And as artists, designers, musicians, dancers, theater folks, students that are studying and interested in those fields, you know, they have to understand the world that's around them and what are the issues of the day and what is it that we need to be processing and responding to in our world. Because artists and designers at the end of the day are those people that help us think through those processes and can help us change the world, you know, and how our perspective of thinking.

Mark Clague: 5:12
 That makes so much sense.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 5:14
 Sometimes we might have a journalist and people are like—I remember one of the first journalists that we had, I had Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! come in. And I had, at the time I was talking to Charles Eisendrath at the Knight Wallace House. And he said, why are you doing this? He said, this isn't art and design. And I said, well, actually, it is. I mean, Amy Goodman is a creative. She's created this other network. She's created a whole other way for people to get information. And he kind of loved that. It was a light bulb for him.

Mark Clague: 5:48
 Yeah, that's exciting. So our festival kicks off on September 25th, and that is not an inconsequential day because that is when Rhiannon Giddens, who's our University of Michigan artist-in-residence, gives a Penny Stamps talk. So, do you have any sense of what Rhiannon's going to do? I mean, she's an amazing musician, but also a scholar, and she's here working on a book project as well as various artistic projects.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 6:14
 Yes, I am so excited to be able to have this event in the Speaker Series and to partner with the Arts Initiative on it, and I love this artist-in-residence that you're embarking on. And she is just such a stellar person to begin with. I do know that she is going to be talking about the underclass of people in this country helping, you know, through their music to build who we are. I'm hoping she's going to perform a little something for us.

Mark Clague: 6:48
 I have never seen her talk without her banjo. I'm pretty sure that she's going to sing and play.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 6:54
 I think we did have some discussion of that, and I always love it at Penny Stamps when there's a performative moment on the stage. So I think folks can look forward to that. And just, you know, in my own experience, having seen this woman—wow, can she talk. She is a really great communicator.

Mark Clague: 7:12
 Well, she's so human. I mean, she's very direct and honest and has incredible sort of, I think, experience and integrity that she brings that really connects music making, which sometimes people can feel is like this really otherworldly thing, but she makes it really present and real and so that's going to be great. And she's working on a book called When the World's on Fire, which is about the contribution of working class people to American popular music. And so we tend to forget it's not just Hollywood, it's not just the coasts and the big cities, but it's the people of the Appalachian Mountains and a lot of the music that she's recovered.

And part of what she's recovered too is that American folk music is not just owned by one group of people—that it's all sorts of people who have made up American history. So African-Americans, Latin Americans, all sorts of people have heard of that folk voice. And so when we talk about music, we have to really expand our notion of who the folk are. So I'm really looking forward to that talk. But that kicks off really a whole month of amazing things. So Gary Graham—you know, I think one of the amazing things you have to do is learn how to pronounce all these names correctly.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 8:21
 That's always a trick.

Mark Clague: 8:24
 So I can do Jacob Collier and Mario Moore, but is it Emily Monet?

Chrisstina Hamilton: 8:29
 Yes, you got it.

Mark Clague: 8:30
 So tell us a little bit about this whole month of the festival. You have an event every Thursday, and you have one of those special events.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 8:36
 Every Thursday, yes. And, you know, it's kind of a great opportunity for us with this festival. I actually love it that it's bookended, with the Rhiannon Giddens being at the beginning and Jacob Collier, another music event, at the end.

Mark Clague: 8:52
 For those who don't know Jacob Collier, who is he?

Chrisstina Hamilton: 8:54
 Jacob Collier is an incredibly inspired and inspiring young man from the UK who, during the pandemic, shut up in his bedroom. I mean, this young man—he's sort of the man on fire. He just couldn't help but—

Mark Clague: 9:13
 He does everything, too. He sings and keyboards, percussion—

Chrisstina Hamilton: 9:17
 And guitar. I mean, he plays acoustic instruments, but he also does digital, wild digital stuff. And during the pandemic, he had to have an outlet and started posting all this music that he was creating online and developed this huge following. And then our good old, now deceased, but wonderful and amazing Quincy Jones found him and said, hey, I want to really help you and produce your music. And he did. And wow, he's just taken Jacob to the next level.

Mark Clague: 9:54
 One of those moments in internet culture when connections that you would never imagine shoot someone to stardom.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 10:00
 One of the positives of COVID, you know.

Mark Clague: 10:03
 And he'll be performing with our Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, a community ensemble here—professional ensemble—a lot of School of Music, Theatre & Dance students and faculty play with that group.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 10:11
 We're very excited about this because it's our first time doing a partnership with the Ann Arbor Symphony. And, you know, as the Penny Stamps Series, we love to partner all the time with everybody. And I'm actually surprised it's taken us this long. This will be our first partnership with the Ann Arbor Symphony.

But yes, Jacob will be actually doing the Penny Stamps Series event. This is a special, and it's on a Monday at the Michigan Theater, also at 5:30. And then he will also be performing on Tuesday with the Ann Arbor Symphony at Hill Auditorium.

Mark Clague: 10:42
 That's right. And students should really check that out. Everybody should check it out. Everybody should check all of that out. It's definitely meant to be a student-centric experience. So we hope students will—

Chrisstina Hamilton: 10:51
 Yes. Yes. I think they will, because he's just so exciting.

Mark Clague: 10:56
 So the Thursday before, Mario Moore is here, and they are represented as an artist, painter, and time traveler. So I want to know—

Chrisstina Hamilton: 11:04
 Yes. Mario Moore is—he is a Detroit artist and a very, very good Detroit artist at that. He is—his medium, he mostly works in painting, and he connects—I think the time traveler, I love it that he put that as one of his monikers—you know, he's connecting sort of traditional and classical painting techniques with now and also with subject matter that was not traditionally seen in classical painting.

But he's such a talent, and he's also another person who can speak very well. One of the things I've certainly learned over the years in doing the series is you can have an incredibly talented artist—

Mark Clague: 12:21
 Yeah, so how do you put together a season like this? I mean, you get these amazing people together. I imagine it's quite a jigsaw puzzle to pull this off.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 12:25
 It is such a jigsaw puzzle. It's a big soft puzzle to pull it off every time. I mean, there's a lot of different entry points. I'm always trying to connect as much as possible back to what else is happening in the community, on campus. What are the issues of the day that we want to be talking about, that we need to be thinking about as a community? And what other people are doing so that we can partner on things and bring deeper experiences.

Like partnering with you on Rhiannon when she's here doing this other work, or like with the Ann Arbor Symphony on Jacob where people can come and hear his story and hear him talk and then go see him perform and do what he does. Yeah, absolutely.

And then there's also the different communities I'm trying to connect with. There's the students, where we're trying to think about where they're at and meeting them there and what's going on with the curriculum. But then, also in the larger community, what's happening in the community. So, there's all those different kinds of constituents that you're trying to pull together.

And then also wanting to bring many, many different perspectives to the table. You know, we don't want to have—I've never done something where it was like, all of a sudden the whole season is just painters or just designers or just this. We want to make sure that there's all different stuff mixed up in there: subject matter wise, media wise, discipline wise.

Because another thing about it is, for students at the university, they're trying to figure out their life. They're trying to—you know, and a lot of young people maybe don't even know what they want to do, and that's okay. And one of the things that you can really gain by coming to the series all the time is insights from all these really wildly different ways of approaching that, that people have—taken these different creative journeys in their life.

Mark Clague: 14:16
 Yeah, that's so powerful.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 14:18
 Finding their own latitude. So I hope that that really—you know, I always say to the students at the beginning of the year, you're not going to like all of these. And isn't that—sometimes it's handy to figure out what you don't like to set you on your path to figure out what you do like. But I always say there's going to be one that really turns you on.

Mark Clague: 14:35
 Yeah. So one of the cool programs that the Arts Initiative is doing now is an Arts Honors Cord where undergraduate students, master’s students, actually any student, can really literally wear as part of their commencement regalia their arts identity and really celebrate the fact that 75% of our students see themselves as creative artists. So they have to earn points in order to do this, like get involved in the arts. Can they earn points and like actually take the Penny Stamps Speaker Series for credit? Is that a possible—

Chrisstina Hamilton: 15:07
 I love it that you're bringing this up, Mark. Yes, absolutely. The Penny Stamps Series, beyond being a public program, is also offered as a one-credit course every semester. And it's just a pass/fail, easy one-credit course where basically you just have to show up.

And, you know, I always say it's one of the courses that you can get the most out of and engage with it a lot and stay after and meet people, or you can just show up and do nothing and you still get the credit. But yes, we would love for non-majors to join us. And if they want to take the credit, that would be wonderful.

And shouldn't everybody want to have that beautiful Arts Honors Cord when they graduate? I think it's a wonderful thing. And so yes, would love it. All you non-majors out there—this is another way that you can get that Arts Cord and be part of the series. And, you know, you can not just show up. You can also get credit for showing up.

Mark Clague: 16:05
 I know. We want people to do more than just show up. But I think it's a little extra inspiration to show up. Yes. And I do think, you know, as you were saying, like being there in person makes all the difference. And so I'm so excited that this is part of the Honors Cord program.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 16:19
 Yay. Me too. There's going to be one that really turns you on.

Mark Clague: 16:25
 Yeah. You know, so we're all going to be there. One thing I know that students are interested in—

Chrisstina Hamilton: 16:36
 —is fashion. You have Gary Graham, fashion designer. One of the things he said when we invited him is, you know, if I'm going to talk about my creative process, wouldn't it be cool if I could make an early visit to Ann Arbor and sort of explore the lay of the land? He's especially excited about the Michigan Theater, and he wants to create a textile specific to the space.

And then he can unpack his process and show how he did it.

Mark Clague: 17:19
 That is really cool.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 17:20
 Yeah. So he's actually here on the ground today in Ann Arbor.

Mark Clague: 17:23
 And then on October 9th, Emily Monet—

Chrisstina Hamilton: 17:25
 Emily Monet, yes. This is exciting. She is a Canadian, Indigenous, First Nations artist. And this is a partnership with UMS. She's also going to be performing—she has a show at UMS. And she’s one of these artists, like you were talking about, where she's got so many different facets to her work.

Mark Clague: 17:47
 So this is Nigamon/Taniminan, the immersive theater work?

Chrisstina Hamilton: 17:49
 Yes, exactly.

Mark Clague: 17:50
 Okay. Yeah, that's going to be at the Power Center.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 17:52
 Yes. And it lines up with Climate Week. And I know it has a lot to do about song and Indigenous knowledge.

Mark Clague: 17:58
 Right. As I recall, we talked to our friends over at UMS a couple of days ago, and they're putting a theater within the Power Center—like there's a theater on the stage.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 18:06
 Right.

Mark Clague: 18:07
 It's very intimate with the audience, the environment.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 18:09
 Yes. Well, that's exciting.

Mark Clague: 18:10
 So you can not only experience the show, but you can talk to the artist about their creative process.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 18:14
 Yes.

Mark Clague: 18:15
 Well, that's fantastic. And, you know, one of the things we're hoping with the Michigan Arts Festival is that people catch the bug of what's amazing about the arts in Ann Arbor. And they really start to see Michigan as a place that—yeah, we have an amazing medical center, an amazing engineering school, amazing athletics department—but also amazing artistic resources.

We really do: Michigan Engineering, Michigan Athletics, Michigan Arts.

So maybe to close, just what do you hope people really get out of being part of the Penny Stamps Series? And I'm particularly thinking about, like, if you come week after week—if you do what I should be doing, which is just reserve 5:30 every Thursday to make sure I'm at the Michigan Theater, which is what I think everybody listening to this podcast would be wise to do—how does that affect people over time, and what do you hope this series does for people?

Chrisstina Hamilton: 19:16
 Well, I think it can do a lot of different things, and I think people come looking for different things. I think it can be an inspiration to people in their own creative life and what they're doing.

Like I said, I think it can be a beacon for students who are sorting out and seeking their own path and sort of learning from different journeys that other people have taken in the creative world.

I think it also is this opportunity as a community for us to have something that happens less and less—this idea that we're all together in a time and space and having a common cultural experience together. And that really is powerful, I think, in building community.

And it also gives us this common experience, this thread where we then can talk about it together. Right?

I mean, I know I hear some local community members tell me they come to this series on Thursdays because then they meet friends or their partner or whatever, and they meet at the series, and then they go to dinner afterwards. And they have a conversation about whatever it is. It's conversation fodder.

And I think it's also an opportunity for people to meet other people that are like-minded, people that maybe they befriend.

And I also always say to the students at the beginning of the year: building your network, it's not only just about, oh, this person that's visiting on the stage is wonderful and you should stay for the Q&A and try to talk to them afterwards. But look around the theater, because there are amazing people in that theater. You never know who you're sitting next to or who you're bumping into in the lobby.

Say hello, strike up a conversation, because I've had students who have gone on to meet someone who had an art gallery in Chelsea, and all of a sudden when they graduated, they had a show there. Or they went to work for someone. Or they—you just never know. It's like taking that moment to be there in person and meet other people.

Mark Clague: 21:29
 It’s powerful, but it actually starts right away—students getting to know their peers. And those are the people who are going to be your collaborators and your artistic inspiration in the future. So that is so cool.

Anyway, I'm so excited about this year, the Stamps Speaker Series. Thanks for all you do on our campus.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 22:13
 Oh, my pleasure.

Mark Clague: 22:14
 I hope that many, many people will take advantage of the series, and I look forward to future collaborations with the Stamps Series on the Arts Initiative.

Chrisstina Hamilton: 22:21
 Thank you so much, Mark. We value so much your partnership, and the Arts Initiative coming to campus has just been phenomenal. I'm thrilled about the Arts Festival this fall and more great things to come.

Mark Clague: 22:36
 Yeah, well, let's go make some art. Yay!

Creative Currents is a project of the University of Michigan's Arts Initiative. Please visit our website at arts.umich.edu. Thanks for listening and for being part of the Michigan arts community that makes our campus so fabulous. So until next time, stay curious, stay inspired, and keep your creative currents flowing.