Staff

Living-Learning Center staff

Lara Kriegel

Lara Kriegel

Director

Director Lara Kriegel oversees the LLC, including academics, programming, and budgets. She works with various student groups and officers, helping to coordinate visiting alumni, scholars, and artists. She works closely with the Board of Educational Programming (BOEP) to choose Collins seminars every semester as well as to arrange fireside chats, professor dinners, and similar events.

Professor Kriegel is an interdisciplinary scholar with a joint appointment in the History and English Departments.  She specializes in Victorian Studies, and has published widely on museums and exhibitions, and on warfare and empire. She teaches classes on these themes, and on such subjects as diaries, food, and entrepreneurship. Professor Kriegel is currently finishing a book on the Crimean War and its aftermath, which traces the lives and legacies of Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole, and the Light Brigade, among others.  At the LLC, Professor Kriegel brings together her own academic interests with a broader concern for the value of learning communities.  This conviction, like her intellectual expertise, is the fruit of her own higher education.  As an undergraduate at Emory University, a master's student at the University of York (UK), and a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University, residence life, student leadership, and volunteerism were all mainstays of her experiences, inside and beyond the classroom.

Yara Clüver

Yara Clüver

Associate Director

Associate Director Yara Clüver has a background in the arts (MFA in photography) and years of experience in student affairs, having been at Collins for over 20 years. She enjoys interacting with our residents and helping them integrate their living experience to their curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular plans and career paths. She oversees the day-to-day operations at Collins, mentors our Arts Council student group, and prepares the Collins Q instructors to teach Q199 to our incoming students (our gateway to Collins course).

Together with the Collins Director, Yara coordinates the Collins International Diversity and Inclusion Scholar (CIDIS) program, which brings emerging and established artists as well as scholars from across continents to live and teach at Collins. She can help with questions about academics at Collins, student programming, and is a good source of information about the campus and local arts community.

She teaches a variety of courses at Collins, including “Discovering the Artist's Book” (a hands-on studio course), a service-learning course called “Art and Community” (where IU students engage with children in public schools in self-directed art projects), and most recently “Food Photography” (which combines practice with history and theory on the topic).

Clüver exhibits her work and gives talks on art nationally and internationally. She grew up in three continents in a multicultural home and in addition to English, speaks German and Portuguese fluently.

Leigh Suggs

Leigh Suggs

Assistant Director

Assistant Director Leigh Suggs handles admissions and housing for the LLC, alumni relations, oversees Collins LLC budgets and program development, and works with several student groups (Board of Programmers, Cheshire Café, Philanthropy and Action Council, E-Force, Marketing Committee). Leigh spent all four of her years in undergrad living at Collins and worked as the Collins Student Services Assistant for the 14 years that followed that, so she can answer a variety of weird Collins questions and has a long-standing connection to several classes of Collins alumni.

Leigh graduated from IU with a B.A. in History in 2008 and a Master’s degree in Information and Library Science in 2015. In her free time, she plays board games and rpgs, salsa dances, and dips her toes into various craft projects.

Heather Holmes

Heather Holmes

Student Services Coordinator

Student Services Coordinator (SSC) Heather Holmes staffs the public office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. In addition to giving tours and assisting seminar instructors, she can answer questions about the LLC, get your free Ryder Film Series tickets (two per week per resident), help you sign up for field trips and ticket reimbursement programs (Collins often subsidizes tickets to campus and community events for residents), and check out equipment to you (such as still and video cameras). She also helps manage the official Collins Facebook Page and Twitter and can help you plan and implement programming within Collins.

Tanjimul Alam

Tanjimul Alam

Co-Director of SustainCollins and Sustainability Program Assistant at the Office of Sustainability

Tanjimul works as both a part of Sustain IU and the LLC / SustainCollins leadership team at Indiana University. Co-directing SustainCollins alongside his counterpart Elspeth and wonderful student leaders, Tanjimul helps connect students to campus sustainability efforts and programming open to floor members and Collins residents alike.

As IU Office of Sustainability staff, his team’s role is to evaluate, report, and collaboratively improve the university’s sustainability performance. This includes looking at the efficiency / longevity of our resource use and determining IU’s operational environmental and human health impacts – both entail the goal to improve and prepare for the future. As the Sustainability Programs Assistant, Tanjimul takes on a jack-of-all trades role as the seasonal projects and administrative arm of the staff. You can find him at his office at the E-House between the main quad and Hillcrest most days. Tanjimul received an O’Neill BSPA in Sustainability in 2018 and he loves watching the skies (clouds, stars, aviation, and more!), learning about the world, and trying new makerspace/design skills in his free time. 

Elspeth Hayden

Elspeth Hayden

Co-Director of SustainCollins and Associate Director of the Integrated Program in the Environment

Elspeth co-directs SustainCollins with fantastic colleague Tanjimul and additionally oversees admissions, recruitment, and programming for prospective and current IU students on sustainability and the environment with an interdisciplinary focus through the Integrated Program in the Environment. Send her an email or stop by SPEA 239 to learn more about degree options in environmental & sustainability studies and environmental science, as well as a variety of minors from environmental management and recreation & the outdoors to environmental health, biology, water management, geography, and more!

Elspeth’s career and service background is in higher ed student support, the environment, and arts & nonprofit management. She is passionate about public libraries, local farm and food systems, and recreating outdoors – on most evenings and weekends you can find her managing invasive plants in local greenspaces or training for a variety of triathlons and road races on the trail and pavement around town and county. 

Jennifer Goodlander

Jennifer Goodlander

Director of the ACT Humanities Program

  • jgoodlan@indiana.edu

Jennifer Goodlander is excited to be the inaugural director for the ACT-Humanities Program. For ACT she fosters the partnership between Collins LLC, the Cook Center for the Public Arts and Humanities, and the Arts and Humanities Council which offers innovative workshops, internships, and travel opportunities that relate to student’s careers and interests. She also will teach the spring ACT Seminar that focuses on how arts and humanities can impact communities and improve the world we live in.

Her teaching and research in arts and culture is informed by her own experience as a working artist. In New York City and regionally Prof. Goodlander worked extensively as a director and teacher with a special emphasis on new plays, feminist theatre, and physically based performance, combining Asian theatre into innovative productions of The Ghost Sonata, The Bacchae, and others.  She was a member of the 2005 Lincoln Center Director’s Lab that focused on new play development and working in collaboration.  She often shares her research through performances and lectures at theatres, civic groups, and universities and has performed wayang kulit (Balinese shadow puppetry) both nationally and internationally.

Currently, Dr. Goodlander is an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature where she teaches classes on Indonesian and global theatre, queer literature, Asian and Asian American performance, and interdisciplinary arts. Jennifer has published numerous articles and two books: Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali (Ohio University Press, 2016) and Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018). Her current research and creative practice look at transnational Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance, literature, and art. Outside of work, Jennifer lives in Brown County with her wife and dog and loves exploring the local art and nature. She also plays roller derby with Circle City Roller Derby in Indianapolis.

Residential Programs & Services staff

Stephanie Dana Ely

Stephanie Dana Ely

Residence Life Coordinator - Student Development

  • sdana@iu.edu
Kim Dunning

Kim Dunning

Residence Life Coordinator - Operations

  • kidunnin@iu.edu