This fall, the University of Arizona School of Theatre, Film & Television (TFTV) welcomes five new members to our community, each of whom brings a wealth of professional experience, creative expertise and fresh perspectives to the school. Their backgrounds span performance, stage management, film and media scholarship, teaching and academic administration, with work and scholarship ranging from intimacy direction and theatre for social justice to Indigenous filmmaking, professional stage management and supporting the day-to-day work of academic leadership.
We are pleased to welcome Matt Denney, Kristin Dowell, Ashley Martin, Julian Martinez, and Alexis Montoya to TFTV.
Matt Denney
Joins TFTV as an Assistant Professor of Practice, where he will be teaching General Education Theatre Courses, Acting, Intimacy Direction, among others, as well as coordinating the JustArts Fellowship and assisting with the new YouthArts initiative.
Matt Denney is a Filipino-American Certified Intimacy Director through Intimacy Professionals Education Collective. Matt was recently noted in American Theatre Magazine as one of the 6 Theatremakers to know in all of Arizona. He is the co-founder of Consent Creatives of Arizona which works towards safer rehearsal rooms across Arizona. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Higher Education, focusing on Theatre for Social Justice. He was previously a two-time award-winning Recruitment Coordinator for the College of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona, highlighting his work in Student Success. Artistically, Matt has a broad range of experience, having worked at various theaters across the country as an Intimacy Director, Director, and Teaching Artist. His work has been showcased at several notable institutions, including East West Players, Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre, Ottawa School of Theatre, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Additionally, Matt has presented his research at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), covering various aspects of his work. Beyond his academic and artistic contributions, he has also served as a Grant Committee Member for the National Endowment for the Arts. Matt is the proud recipient of grants from the FieldNYC, Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona, Confluencecenter for Creative Inquiry, and was recently was part of Howlround Theatre Commons’ Justice in the Rehearsal Room Cohort, further highlighting his commitment to advancing social justice through the arts.
Kristin Dowell, Ph.D
Joins TFTV as an Associate Professor in Film & Television Producing and Studies.
For over twenty-five years Kristin has engaged in collaborative, community-based research with Indigenous filmmakers on Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada). Her research investigates the active processes through which Indigenous filmmakers express and enact visual sovereignty through their on-screen aesthetics and off-screen production practices. She is the author of Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast (2013), the first monograph of Vancouver’s vibrant and distinctive Indigenous media world. She is completing her second book, Digital Sutures: Family and Cultural Memory in Indigenous Women’s Films, which analyzes how Indigenous women filmmakers re-define film genres, such as stop-motion animation, handmade cinema, and experimental documentary, to recuperate Indigenous family histories, ancestral knowledge, and cultural memory.
Public-facing engagement through curation, oral history projects, digital platforms, and museum practice is central to her work. She has worked for several Native film festivals including those sponsored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Her video production handbook was published with the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in 2021 and has been translated into Mandarin, Tibetan, and Irish. It is free and available for anyone to download and has been used for community media production and language revitalization projects around the world.
Professor Dowell is Irish American and a proud speaker of the Irish language. She curated the exhibition Talamh agus Teanga: Land and Language in Contemporary Irish Art at the FSU Museum of Fine Arts in 2024. She continues to develop research and curatorial projects on Irish language cinema and contemporary Irish art. In 2026 she was a Fulbright Scholar to Ireland hosted by University College Cork.
Ashley Martin
Joins TFTV as an Assistant Professor of Practice in Stage Management.
Ashley has held multiple arts leadership roles with the University of Pittsburgh, where she most recently served as Arts Administrative Officer for the Humanities Division, providing strategic leadership for the fiscal, administrative, and academic operations of the Dietrich School’s Arts unit.
Ashley brings an extensive career in professional stage management, having worked on classic and new works with Pittsburgh Public Theater, City Theatre Company, Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre, and Theatre South Carolina, among others. She held operations and production director roles within Pitt’s Department of Theatre Arts, managing facilities, staffing, and safety compliance for university productions, and has directed works including Morning Reckoning (2025) and Astronots (2023) with Pitt Stages. Her teaching experience spans stage management, English education, and student success courses at institutions including Point Park University, University of South Carolina, and the University of Pittsburgh.
An active voice on equity and accessibility in the performing arts, Ashley has presented at USITT conferences and served on Pitt’s Dietrich School Diversity Committee, in addition to her role as a board member of Texture Contemporary Ballet and Swissvale Economic Development Community Organization.
Ashley holds an M.Ed. in English Education and a B.A. in Theatre Arts from the University of Pittsburgh, along with a certificates in Organizational Leadership, Global Competencies, Mental Health First Aid, and Diversity and Inclusion.
Julian Martinez
Joins TFTV as an Assistant Professor of Practice for Live and Stage Performance.
Julian holds a BFA in theatre performance from Columbia College Chicago. He’s been teaching and directing for 14 years after pursuing an acting career in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York for 10 years. He’s trained at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Central Coast, CA; The Second City Conservatory in Chicago, IL and Steppenwolf School, also in Chicago, IL. Prior to UA, he was the Visual and Performing Arts Chair, theatre director and teacher at Tucson High Magnet School and Cholla Magnet High School.
He’s been married for 15 years, has a 26 year-old daughter, a 10 year-old son, a dog and two cats. He’s written a series of fiction books, The El Bronco Series, recently published on the Kindle universe.
Alexis Montoya
Joins TFTV as the new Assistant to the Director.
Alexis brings more than nine years of administrative experience within the University of Arizona. A native Tucsonan, Alexis earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology through Arizona Online in 2022. In her current role as Administrative Associate in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, she manages the Department Head’s calendar, coordinates travel, meetings and events, supports faculty and department leadership, and handles confidential communications and administrative processes. Previously, she served in administrative roles in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry. Outside of work, Alexis enjoys exploring Tucson and the outdoors with her two young sons, including fishing, hiking, swimming and going to the movies. She is excited to become part of the TFTV community!