Here are some other things not in my CV.  I grew up in East Harlem, New York City, where my grandfather, George ("Bill") W. Webber established and ran The East Harlem Protestant Parish, was President of The New York Theological Seminary and founder of Witness For Peace in Nicaragua and El Salvador.  My grandmother, Helen ("Dibby") Webber started the East Harlem Tutorial Program, an after-school reading and bilingual education program for East Harlem kids and teens.

 

I lived two floors down from my grandparents with my father, Thomas L. Webber, who was a community School Board member, educational consultant, and Director of the Edwin Gould Academy in Spring Valley, New York, a foster-care boarding school for kids through high school with behavioral problems.  Edwin Gould Academy is now an East Harlem program for youth and young adults leaving the NYC foster care system, and my father is the President of the Board of Directors for that new endeavor. In addition, he is the author of Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarters (W.W. Norton) and Flying Over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy (Scribner), an Innovation in Education award recipient, and a former opera singer with The Amato Opera Company. As of January, 2010, he is the Distinguished Lecturer and Director of the Hunter Center for Educational Leadership at Hunter College (CUNY) in midtown Manhattan. The Center hopes to train school leaders to work in inner-city schools. My mother, Dr. Andrea B. Webber, is an internist at Montefiore/North Central Bronx Hospital and a professor at the Einstein Institute.  She is a former cellist, a gardener, a water-color artist and a Henry James fanatic.  It may be that my interest in philosophy of art comes from her side of the family; her father (my grandfather, Angelo P. Bertocci) was a Literary Criticism professor at Boston University and the University of Iowa and his brother (Peter Bertocci) was a philosophy professor at B.U. and, at one time, the president of the American Philosophy Association.  

 

Most of my childhood was spent in ballet class, at School of American Ballet (the training school for The New York City Ballet), at Ballet Academy East, where I studied with Francis Patrelle (Director of The Berkshire Ballet and Dances Patrelle), and in private and group classes with Wilhelm Burmann, former NYCB soloist, at Ballet Arts in Carnegie Hall.  I also received private coaching from Dolores Kehr, formerly of Diaghilev's Ballet Russes, and took open, professional-level classes with Melissa Hayden, David Howard, Finis Jhung and Madame Darvash.  In high school I was a ballet major at New York's LaGuardia High School for Music and the Performing Arts where I spent half the day in ballet, modern, jazz and acting classes and the rest of the day in academics.  My professional ballet experience includes work as "Gypsy Girl" in The Amato Opera Company's production of Rigoletto and as a corps de ballet member of the Eglevsky Ballet in Long Island, NY.

 

My younger brother, Matt Webber, was also a dancer for a time, attending School of American Ballet, Ballet Academy East and then majoring in theatre at LaGuardia high school and Vassar College. As a child he was the "Little Prince" in NYCB's Nutcracker for two seasons.  He is now a musician, poet and the owner of The Soft Spot bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and The Narrows (1037 Flushing Ave. between Morgan and Vandervoort, L train to Morgan) in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

 

After a series of injuries ended my hopes for a ballet career I was accepted to Columbia University, where I majored in Philosophy and was fortunate to have Arthur Danto as my first philosophy teacher.  At Columbia I also had Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris for History of World Cinema and beat poet, Kenneth Koch, for Poetry.  After my first year at Columbia I received a Congressional Black Caucus Fellowship to work in the Office of Congressman Charles B. Rangel and during that time became interested in legal and political theory.  During the Christmas break of my sophomore year I joined Witness for Peace in Nicaragua, where we lived in war-torn villages and helped to dig trenches and build infrastructure.  When I returned to Columbia I wrote about my experiences there in The Columbia Spectator.  For my junior year abroad I went to King's College, University of London, where I studied Aesthetics with Anthony Savile, wrote for the Kings' College Student Newsletter and performed in a student production of Cabaret.  After a brief stint as a paralegal at the World Trade Center I enrolled at Georgetown University Law Center, where I took all the philosophy courses I could (History of Legal Philosophy, Law, Conscience and Nonviolence and Feminist Legal Theory) while serving as Notes Editor for the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, as a law student advocate for the Georgetown Family Poverty Clinic, volunteering for the American Arts Alliance and performing in the Georgetown Law Center Gilbert and Sullivan Society.

 

I'm currently a Philosophy doctorate student at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, where so far I have been fortunate to have Miriam Solomon, Carol Gould, Joseph Margolis, Gerald Vision, David Wolfsdorf, Jitendra Mohanty, Paul C. Taylor and Philip Alperson as professors.  Jitendra Mohanty has been a deeply inspiring source of calm, wisdom and enlightenment about what it is not to just read philosophy but to do philosophy.  Miriam Solomon, Carol Gould, Susan Feagin (editor of The Journal for Aesthetics and Art Criticism) and Paul Taylor have worked particularly hard to help me develop my philosophic thinking and writing skills and I am extremely thankful for their help.  Phil Alperson has impressed upon me the importance of always remembering to think about specific examples of art when we are theorizing about art and to let those examples teach us something new. I am also grateful for the many hours Joseph Margolis has spent answering my lengthy and detailed questions about his work. In addition, I was lucky to cross paths with Noel Carroll when he was at Temple and receive the benefit of his thoughts on how to write philosophy of dance.  I am glad to be under Temple's wing, and I look forward to beginning in-depth work on my dissertation, which will be advised by Margolis, with Alperson and Solomon as Committee members.  In the meantime, I have been enjoying the intelligence, freshness and vivacity of the Temple undergrads I have taught.

 

Finally, I still maintain Chicago as my home base, where I live with my husband, Art Bresnahan (a corporate and regulatory attorney), and my children, Isabel (age 12) and Arthur (age 10).