Employee Directory

Adrian Lowry

Instructor - Music

Johnson Fine Arts Center 124

Grant Manhart

Professor of Music, Trumpet/Jazz

Johnson Fine Arts Center 123

Audrey Miller

Professor of Clarinet, Director of Bands, Music Department Chair

Johnson Fine Arts Center 122

Brian Omland

Theatre and Production Manager

Johnson Fine Arts Center 119A

B.A., Northern State University

Brian Omland serves as the production manager for the School of Fine Arts. He continues to expand his knowledge and experience in set construction, lighting design, and special effects for the stage. He worked on the Northern productions of Sondheim on Sondheim, Man of La Mancha, Silent Sky, Fun Home, The Brain From Planet X, She Kills Monsters, Lasso of Truth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, God of Carnage, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, among others.

Nadya Preszler

Instructor of Art

Dacotah Hall 208A

Tim Rickett

Assistant Professor of 3D Media/Art Galleries Director

Spafford Hall 209D

M.F.A., East Carolina University

B.A., Hastings College

Tim Rickett, an artist and educator based in Aberdeen in northeastern South Dakota, employs the practice of bricolage to create work that explores ideas of nostalgia, politics, history, and the Anthropocene. He graduated from Hastings College in 2016 with a BFA in sculpture and completed his MFA at East Carolina University in 2019. He is assistant professor of 3D media and gallery director at Northern State University.

Rickett co-curates exhibitions in the collective MidwestNice Art with Epiphany Knedler. His work has been exhibited at the Washington Pavilion, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Del Mar College Annual National Drawing and Small Sculpture Show, Contemporary Arts Museum Raleigh, and a collaborative exhibition at the University of South Dakota. 

At Northern, Rickett teaches four levels of sculpture and ceramics, 2D and 3D design, senior capstone, and the graduate MSED art residency course in the summer. As gallery director, Rickett facilitates multiple visiting artists each year, bringing contemporary art to our Great Plains region while maintaining Northern's permanent collection, working with students and artists to display their artwork in Northern's many galleries, and serving on campus committees.

Michael Skyles

Instructor of Voice, Director, Musical Theatre

Spafford Hall 301A

B.M.E. University of Illinois

M.M. Cleveland Institute of Music

D.M.A. North Dakota (currently)

Tenor Michael Skyles joined the music faculty at Northern State University in Aberdeen, SD, in 2009. Mr. Skyles received a bachelor's degree in music education from the University of Illinois in 1992, and obtained his master's of music in vocal performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1996. A certified vocologist, he specializes in voice lessons, vocal pedagogy, and diction for singers, and is music director for theatre at Northern.

Born and raised in the Chicago area, he previously maintained a private voice studio and taught voice at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn. In recent years, his students have advanced to compete at the national level. In 2009, one of his students was selected to be a finalist with the NFAA YoungArts program in classical voice, an honor bestowed on only 12 students from across the country, and was the first finalist in any discipline ever from North Dakota. In 2010, another of Mr. Skyles' students was selected to be an NFAA Young Arts finalist in musical theater. Following this student's performance at the finals, he was invited for further competition and workshops in New York and was selected to be a Presidential Scholar.

More recently, many of Mr. Skyles' students have won or placed in competitions hosted by the Metropolitan Opera National Council, National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS), and Music Teachers National Association (MTNA). Not only have his students competed well, but many of his students are attending high-profile graduate programs, and are performing on Broadway and in regional musical theater and operas.

As a performer, Mr. Skyles has been featured with a number of opera companies across the United States, including Lyric Opera Cleveland, Natchez Opera in Mississippi, Florida State Opera, and Brevard Opera in North Carolina. In recent engagements, Mr. Skyles has performed the roles of Nemoriono in Sounds of South Dakota's L'elisir d'amore, Pong in South Dakota Symphony's production of Turandot, Remendado in Fargo Moorhead Opera's production of Carmen, Mr. Erlanson in Muddy River Opera's production of A Little Night Music, Ferrando in CandleOpera's production of Cosi fan tutte, Rodolfo in N.O.V.A.'s production of La boheme, Arturo in Bowen Park Opera's production of Lucia di Lammermoor, and Larry/Matt in Face on the Barroom Floor with Fargo Moorhead Opera.

Mr. Skyles' concert performances have included the Beethoven 9th Symphony (tenor soloist) with the South Dakota Symphony, An Afternoon of Opera with the Huron Symphony Orchestra, Schütz Musikalische Exequien with Early Music Chicago, Bach's Magnificat with Urban Baroque in Chicago, Schubert's Mass in G, countless performances as tenor soloist in Handel's Messiah, and other varied concert works around the country. He also has performed as a professional member of the Chicago Symphony Chorus and the Grant Park Symphony Chorus.

Christopher Stanichar

Associate Professor of Music/Director, Aberdeen University-Civic Symphony

Johnson Fine Arts Center 120

D.M.A., M.M., Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music

B.M., Central Washington University

“It was as though he were telling a story with his hands.”   — Pravda Cevera (Russia)

“One of the best musical conductors to appear in Latin America”— Diario Xalapa (Mexico)

"The ever-smiling and extremely animated (Stanichar) guided the Everett Symphony through a superb performance filled with wit and charm… It was the kind of charismatic interaction with the audience and orchestra that showed the brilliance of Stanichar's directorial methods."

—Mukilteo Beacon (Seattle)

Christopher Stanichar (b. 1969) is an active conductor, composer, and educator. He is a popular conductor, having directed some of the finest orchestras in Europe, Russia, Mexico, and the United States. Stanichar is skilled at conducting all styles of music, whether it is the classical repertoire, new music, or pops repertoire. 

He has collaborated with a wide variety of artists, including members of St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, The Texas Tenors, Mark O’Connor, the rock band Kansas, members, and many other world-class musicians. 

He is also at home as an educator, working with ensembles of all ages, and using his passion for music as a catalyst to get the best out of the orchestras he conducts.

The Northwest Iowa Review noted: “ … We were impressed with Stanichar’s obvious energy, great joy of directing and outright enthusiasm.” 

Stanichar is assistant professor at Northern State University, where he serves as the director of the Aberdeen University/Civic Symphony. Celebrating its 102nd season, the orchestra is the oldest continuous orchestra in the state of South Dakota, and attracts musicians from Minnesota, North Dakota, and Iowa, as well as the surrounding area. Dr. Stanichar is the 17th conductor of the orchestra, and proud to carry on the tradition of great orchestral music in the Hub City of Aberdeen.

Stanichar is an active professional conductor throughout the Midwest, serving as music director of the Worthington Area Symphony Orchestra in Southwest Minnesota (since 2010)—a recipient of several regional grants, and broadcast regionally in a holiday special with the native American band, Brulé, on Pioneer Television (Minnesota PBS).

Stanichar earned his Doctorate of Musical Arts in conducting at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where he was a student of Gerhard Samuel. He has participated in master classes with Ilya Musin, Daniel Lewis, Gerard Schwartz, Ken Keisler, and Bystrík Režucha, among others. 

Stanichar was conducting assistant for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, working closely with maestros Jesus Lopez-Cobos and Erich Kunzel. He also received a Fulbright Scholarship to the Slovak Republic, allowing him to study and conduct professional orchestras in the homeland of his ancestors.

He has been music director to several exceptional orchestras: Seven Hills Sinfonietta (Cincinnati), Orchestra Omaha, Heartland Philharmonic Orchestra (Omaha), the Tri-City Symphony Youth Orchestra, Northwest Iowa Symphony Orchestra, and is founding music director of the South Dakota Symphony Youth Orchestra.

Stanichar is an active composer whose works have been commissioned and performed throughout the world. His original work, Trisagion, was used in Ric Burns’ PBS documentary on Andy Warhol. 

More recent projects include a full-length cantata, St. Mark Passion, written for the 150th anniversary of Augustana University as part of a Granskou grant. TrevCo-Varner Music publishes several of his works for English horn. 

His composition, Tales of Hans Christian Anderson, is the first concerto for nyckelharpa, a Swedish folk instrument, which premiered with the Hastings Symphony Orchestra in Nebraska. This work was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. 

In 2020, he was commissioned to compose the song cycle, She Loves, for colleagues Audrey Miller and Darci Bultema as part of a South Dakota Arts Council grant. In 2022, he received the prestigious Nora Staael Evert grant to write orchestral accompaniments for the band Brulé, which will debut in 2025. 

Most recently, his composition Pink Ribbon for Susan, written for his friend Susan Hill as a tribute to her battle with breast cancer, was published by Edizioni Musicali Eufonia as his first European publication.

In his free time, Stanichar’s interests outside of music include Russian icons, foreign languages, and biking, and he is an avid pinball player. The most important thing to him is his family, and his children are active in the arts. 

Timothy Woods

Professor of Music, Director of Choral Activities/Music History

Spafford Hall 317A