UpLift Ball State

"From Muncie to the Forbidden City: The Struggle to Create Beautiful 21st Century Buildings and Cities"

Throughout his 35 years as a Partner in Charge of Design for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, one of the world’s largest and most influential multidisciplinary architecture, engineering, and design firms, Craig Hartman has focused his energies and passion on the design of buildings, spaces, and cities that inspire.

His award-winning work ranges from landmark architecture, such as the US Embassy in Beijing, Los Angeles’ new Federal Courthouse, San Francisco’s International Terminal at SFO, and the Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, to human-centric interior spaces and entire urban districts which bring together nature and urban life, such as Beijing’s Finance Street and Treasure Island in San Francisco’s Bay.

In this image-rich talk, Hartman will describe the thinking and creative process in achieving this work – especially the struggle to create architecture that inspires delight while responding meaningfully to a myriad of unprecedented 21st century challenges and opportunities.

"Show Me the Money: College Athletics in the N-I-L Era"

Emmy^® award winning sports reporter Betsy M. Ross, '72, is president of Game Day Communications, a sports and entertainment communications firm based in Cincinnati and founded in 2002.

As one of the first women to break into national sports news, Ross most recently worked as an anchor at ESPN for five years. Before anchoring SportsCenter and ESPNews, Ross worked at NBC News Channel and Cincinnati’s NBC affiliate, WLWT‐TV, for seven years, where she covered the 1996 presidential election and inauguration and the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games and Olympic trials, and as evening news anchor at WTHR-TV in Indianapolis.

She continues to be involved in sports broadcasting as play‐by‐play anchor for women’s and men’s college basketball for ESPN, Fox Sports, and other national and regional outlets, and as a sports reporter for Cincinnati’s FOX 19. She won a regional Emmy^® for her work on the broadcast of the Lauren Hill Mt. St. Joseph-Hilliard College basketball game at Xavier University in November 2014. She is also part of the crew for Junglevision during Cincinnati Bengals’ home games and handles the public address announcing for University of Cincinnati women’s basketball, soccer, and lacrosse.

In October of 2010, her first book titled Playing Ball with the Boys: The Rise of Women in Men’s Sports was released to a national audience.

She teaches a master’s level course, Sports and PR, at Xavier University and most recently taught a Sports Journalism course in the Media School at Indiana University. A native of Connersville, Indiana, she earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ball State (where she was a member of Alpha Sigma Tau sorority), and a master’s in communication arts at the University of Notre Dame.

"Creating 'We Are Cardinals': Behind the Scenes on the Making of 'We Are Cardinals'"

Edgar de Santiago, '21, is a working actor and renovator. Edgar has been working between Indianapolis and Chicago, and will soon be heading to Los Angeles to continue his career in film and television. Edgar is an avid writer and proud Ball State alum.

"The Game of the Prank: The Anatomy of What Makes a Good Prank and What Is Possible to Get People to Believe and Do"

Dave Storrs, '97, is an actor, writer, and producer living in Los Angeles. He currently performs all three of those jobs on Netflix’s Prank Encounters. Also—spoiler alert—his beloved character Andy-Roo in Thunder Force gets killed off. Dying, in what some would call a hero’s death. Others (read: most) just call it a regular, run-of-the-mill death.