(l-r) President Chip Edmonds, Gunderson, Sánchez, Provost Sandra Kingery
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Lycoming College recognized two members of faculty at its annual Honors Convocation on for excellence in teaching.
Plankenhorn Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence
The 2026 Plankenhorn Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence was presented to Amanda Horn Gunderson, D.M.A., associate professor of music at Lycoming College. She teaches courses in applied piano and music theory.
Gunderson’s diverse research interests include biomechanics (especially for small-handed pianists) and asymmetrical meter in pedagogical repertoire. She has presented research and lecture recitals at state conferences for Pennsylvania Music Teachers Association (PMTA) and published in American Music Teacher, the bimonthly journal of Music Teachers National Association. Her most recent article, entitled “The Well-Crafted Question: Inspiring Students to Connect, Create, and Think Critically,” earned the 2017 Article of the Year Award from Music Teachers National Association.
Her performances range widely from solos in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall (2008) to chamber music performances at the Beijing National Library (2015). She is the recipient of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery’s Emerging Interfaces Award, a UW-Madison Graduate Student Mentor Award, and first prize in the Irving Shain Duo Competition. In 2017, she was named Teacher of the Year by (PMTA). Her primary teachers include Jessica Johnson, Timothy Shafer, and Christopher Taylor.
Gunderson earned a bachelor’s degree and two masters’ degrees from Pennsylvania State University, and a doctoral degree in musical arts from The University of Wisconsin – Madison, where she attended as a University Fellow.
Junior Faculty Teaching Award
Marisa C. Sánchez, Ph.D., assistant professor of art history, was awarded the 2026 Junior Faculty Teaching Award. Director of the art history program at Lycoming College, her teaching and research interests focus on modern and contemporary art, feminist art histories, art historical and curatorial methodologies, museum culture, and the artist interview.
For Lycoming College Art Gallery, Sánchez curated Nina Elder: All Actions Have a Past and a Future, an exhibit coinciding with the Environmental Justice Symposium she co-organized for the campus and local community this semester. In 2024, she received the inaugural Mary Sieminski Endowed Humanities Research Award at the College.
Sánchez completed a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Colby College Museum of Art, where she researched the permanent collection and the museum’s history, curated the exhibition Time and Tide Flow Wide: The Collection in Context, 1959–1973, and taught art history.
She has presented papers on her dissertation, The Beckett Effect: The Work of Stan Douglas, Paul Chan, and Tania Bruguera, at conferences including College Art Association, Samuel Beckett Society, and Modern Language Association. Sánchez has published on her topic including “Foucault’s Beckett” in Michel Foucault: les arts & les letters/arts & humanities in the 21st Century and her interview with artist Stan Douglas appeared in Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art.
She currently serves on the College Art Association’s Education Committee, and has served as an advisor to second shelf, a collaborative book acquisition project originating at the Royal Academy of Art in Antwerp. She has taught art history at University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Sánchez earned a bachelor’s degree from Villanova University, a master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her doctorate from University of British Columbia.