UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State College of Arts and Architecture graduate students Alivia Cross and Isabella Scotti are among the recipients of the 2025 Professional Master’s Excellence Award, sponsored by the Office of the President and administered by the Fox Graduate School.
The award honors graduate students with good academic standing in their final year of study based on the quality and impact of the student’s culminating experience, including creative works, performances and projects conducted in a professional setting.
Cross, a master of fine arts student in theatre, studies scenic design with an emphasis on sustainability. She was recognized for her “eco-scenography,” an interdisciplinary effort to merge ecological stewardship with scenography and theatre production as a whole.
“If you look at the very beginnings of theatre, it’s about storytelling,” Cross said. “When you get into big theatres and commercial theatres in academia, where we have the privilege to do these big sets, a lot of the time after opening night they just go in the dumpster, which is such an incredible privilege to be able to design a new set every single time. But I don’t think we need to be doing that.”
For her capstone project, Cross designed the set for the Penn State Centre Stage fall 2024 production of “Sweeney Todd,” focusing her efforts on incorporating re-used materials and found objects with modern automation technologies to lessen both physical waste and human labor.
“I think, a lot of times, the arts tend to get overshadowed by the big research,” Cross said about being recognized for her work. “Everyone at Penn State is doing such wonderful things, but I think this [award] acknowledges that we’re doing things within our sphere that are not only tangible and impressive, but also have scholarship to it.”
Cross will graduate in May and then serve as resident scenic designer at the Mac-Hayden Theatre in Chatham, New York, over the summer. In fall 2025, she’ll return to Penn State to start doctoral studies in art education, where she hopes to help create a more sustainable and eco-scenography-focused arts curriculum.
Scotti, a master of music student in music performance, was recognized with the Professional Master’s Excellence Award for a master’s recital of percussion solo and chamber ensemble repertoire centering around electronic music and video game themes, titled “Ready, Player One.”
She said she was excited to be one of the first musicians to fuse modern and pop culture music with a formal performance setting on a Penn State recital hall stage. She was dedicated to diversity by including an array of percussion instruments – marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, snare drum, timpani and more – and selecting a broad range of compositions by electronic music producers. Those selections included pieces that reflected characteristics of electronic music and pieces that directly referenced video games or included real video game music.
“I like to rock the boat a little bit,” Scotti said about preparing her recital. “I’ve taken a little bit of a different approach than I think most people would or that has been conventionally done, especially in the classical music realm.”
Besides combining traditionally separate genres of music, Scotti said arts advocacy and making concert music accessible to everyone was an important part of her recital goal.
“I’ve always been painfully aware of how the arts as a whole are not respected as they should be in general society, even though they literally make the world go round,” she said. “In designing my program, I really wanted to know if my program would have the capacity to get somebody interested in learning more about what we do and facilitating those conversations and continuing to move the Sisyphus rock of supporting the arts in this country.”
After graduation in May, Scotti plans to continue her music education in a doctorate program at the University of Texas at Austin.