Nancy Buchanan, Film/Video faculty at CalArts, addresses social issues in much of her art production. She took part in Artrole, an artists’ group visiting Kurdistan and will screen a brief excerpt of video from the trips.
Kathy Carbone is the performing arts librarian (music, theater and dance) at CalArts and the founding director/ librarian for CalArts’ sister library, The Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center Library in Kigali, Rwanda. She is also a modern dancer, instructor, choroegrpaher and improviser. She has a MLIS from Kent State University, an MA in Music and Dance, and a BFA in Dance, both from Ohio University.
Omar Chakaki (a.k.a. Offendum) is an Architect/Hip-Hop artist, born in the Middle East and raised in Washington DC . A graduate of the University of Virginia , he is currently a designer at OTJ Architects, where he has helped the firm secure several AIA & IIDA awards during the past 4 years. A founding member of the Syrian/Sudanese-American hip-hop group The N.O.M.A.D.S., he has performed in venues across the globe; from the House of Blues in Hollywood , California to The Citadel in Amman , Jordan . He co-produced the critically-acclaimed Free the P mixtape along with Ragtop of the Philistines, and has been featured on several major media outlets including Yahoo-News, ABC-online, Aljazeera, & Reuters.
Marissa Chibas is a performer, writer, and educational administrator who has worked in a wide variety of theatrical forms for over two decades. As an actor Marissa was last seen in the Center for New Performance at CalArts and INTAR production of her solo performance piece Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary at the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles and the Daryl Roth Theater in NYC. She played Pilar in the West Coast premiere of Sonia Flew at The Laguna Playhouse. She recently starred in the American premiere of The Keening , a one woman play by Columbian playwright Umberto Dorado at the American Repertory Theater in Boston. At the Mark Taper Forum she performed in The Floating Island Plays by Eduardo Machado and The House of Bernarda Alba directed by Lisa Peterson. Marissa played Edgar in the Center For New Performance at CalArts’ inaugural production of King Lear, directed by Travis Preston, at the Brewery in Downtown Los Angeles and at the Frictions festival 03 in Dijon, France. Her American premieres include: The Predator’s Ball at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Democracy in America at the Yale Rep, and Two sisters and a Piano at the McCarter. On Broadway, Marissa played opposite Sam Waterston in Abe Lincoln in Illinois directed by Gerry Gutierrez and was Nora in Brighton Beach Memoirs directed by Gene Saks. Her New York premieres include Eric Overmeyer’s Dark Rapture at New York Stage and Film, A.R. Gurney’s Another Antigone and Overtime at Playwright’s Horizons and Manhattan Theater Club respectively, Total Eclipse at Westside Arts Theater, Major Crimes at the Actors Studio’s Raw Space, South with Target Margin Theater at HERE, and Hurricane at Classic Stage Company. Her resident theater credits include Danton’s Death directed by Robert Wilson at the Alley Theater in Houston. In addition to the credits listed above Marissa has worked extensively in the resident theater such as; Arena Stage, The Old Globe, Baltimore Center Stage, the Actors Theater of Louisville, and at the Coconut Grove Theater where she starred in Seascape written and directed by Edward Albee. Marissa has been seen on television in Law and Order and FEDS. On film she appeared in Lewis Klahr’s The Speed of Turqoise, Getting Away with Murder with Dan Ackroyd, and Henry Fool directed by Hal Hartley.
Marissa participated in the Sundance Theater Labs of 1997, 1998 and 2004. Among her roles there she played Eva Luna in the bi-lingual version of the Stories of Eva Luna directed and choreographed by Della Davidson. She has participated in the Latino Playwrights Festival at South Coast Rep, and the Playwrights Lab at The Mark Taper Forum
Marissa was an active participant as a director and actor with the 52nd Street Project, an organization devoted to uniting professional artists with inner city kids in the New York area in order to create theater. Other educational experience includes teaching acting at the Harvard Summer Program, and at NYU Playwrights Horizons Theater School for 5 years. Marissa has performed and worked with Junior and High School students in both the Manhattan Theater Club’s and Manhattan Class Company’s youth initiatives. She has conducted workshops at Interlochen High School for the Arts, the ART actor training program, and CENART in Mexico City among others. She has served on panels at the Mark Taper Forum and at CalArts and served on the 2007 MAP Fund panel. Marissa is on the board of Trans Arts, Blank the Dog Theater, and the Loz Feliz Charter School for the Arts where she helped create the Theater Arts curriculum.
Marissa is Head of the Acting Program at California Institute of the Arts, undergraduate and graduate programs. At CalArts she adapted and directed The Writer on her Work based on the compilation of essays by women writers edited by Janet Sternburg.
Abigail Disney is a filmmaker, Her first film, a feature-length documentary called Pray the Devil Back to Hell tells the inspirational story of the women of Liberia and their efforts to bring peace to their broken nation after decades of destructive civil war. It is currently playing in theaters. She is also involved in producing a number of other documentaries with social themes, and is developing a four-hour project for WNET/Wide Angle called Women, War & Peace.
Along with her husband, Pierre Hauser, Abigail is co-Founder and co-President of the Daphne Foundation, a progressive, social change foundation that makes grants to grassroots, community-based organizations working with low-income communities in New York City. Since 1991, the Daphne Foundation has made millions of dollars in grants in areas ranging from women’s rights to AIDS advocacy, children’s health, labor conditions, incarceration and community organizing. The Foundation provides ongoing general operating support to its grantees, along with grants for technical assistance, infrastructure improvement and resource development.
Abigail has spoken internationally to a wide variety of audiences on the changing face of philanthropy, women’s leadership and the importance of living a life of engaged and intelligent volunteerism.
Over the years Abigail has played a critical role in a number of different social and political organizations, including the New York Women’s Foundation, and The Association to Benefit Children. She currently serves on the boards of the Roy Disney Family Foundation, the White House Project, the Global Fund for Women, and the Fund for the City of New York, as well as the advisory boards of a broad range of organizations working in the areas of poverty, women’s issues, education and environment. And when the groundbreaking periodical Ms. Magazine was in danger of extinction, she worked with Gloria Steinem and a group of other passionate investors to form Liberty Media for Women to secure the fate of Ms. Magazine for future generations.
Abigail also acts as Vice Chair of the board of Shamrock Holdings Incorporated. Shamrock Holdings is a professional investment company running five different funds that manage more than 1.5 billion dollars in assets for a diverse group of investors, as well as for the Roy Disney Family.
Abigail received her Bachelors degree from Yale University, her Masters degree from Stanford University, and her Doctorate from Columbia University. While pursuing her Ph.D., Abigail taught English and American Literature at Iona College. She lives in New York with her husband and their four children, one dog, three cats, a fish, a rabbit and an immortal turtle named Alfred.
Anne Hamburger-Hamburger Productions LLC is a newly launched production company dedicated to the Creative Development and Production of Broadway Shows, Arena Shows, themed and destination entertainment and events . In existence only two months, Hamburger Productions LLC already has an impressive list of new clients: the Municipal Arts Society’s pursuit to reinvent Coney Island, the National Harbor Project and the Creature Technology Company, producers of Walking with Dinosaurs. She will also consult for Disney.
Anne Hamburger was Executive Vice President of Walt Disney Imagineering Creative Entertainment (WDICE) for 8 years, the global organization which was founded with her arrival to the Disney Company. Today Creative Entertainment has a creative and production staff of 36 employees who manage hundreds of consultants each year in the creation and production of all the large scale theatrical productions, parades, nighttime spectaculars and firework shows at the 11 Disney Parks around the world.
Since Creative Entertainment was formed, stage musicals created by this division have played more than 18,000 performances to a combined audience of over 20 million guests around the world. These productions have become an opportunity for millions of families to introduce their children to the excitement of live musical theatre.
She spearheaded the strategic decision-making and the creative development and production for the entertainment for all the Disney parks. There are18 theatrical venues in the parks and two cruise ships that house procenium theatres. She oversaw an extensive creative development program called “blue sky” in which there were 30 different projects in various stages of development. Her annual budget ranged from 50 to 200 million dollars.
Prior to joining The Walt Disney Company, Anne was the Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse in La Jolla, California, where she produced
“Thoroughly Modern Millie” which transferred to Broadway and won theTony Award for Best Musical. She also was one of the original producers for “Spring Awakening”, giving the creative team their first workshop. “Spring Awakening” went on to win the Tony for Best Musical in 2007.
From 1986 to 1999, Hamburger was the Founder and Executive Producer of En Garde Arts in New York City where she won international acclaim for large scale, “site-specific” productions which resurrrected defunct performing spaces and brought attention to important landmarks, historic streets and striking architectural structures. Called “an invigorating urban presence” by the The New York Times, En Garde Arts was the recipient of six Obie Awards, two Drama Desk Awards and a special Outer Critics Circle Award. Hamburger was recognized with the prestigious EdwinBooth and Lee Reynolds Awards for the impressive body of her work. She graduated with an MFA from the Yale School of Drama.
Hanna Eady founded the first theater group Shorouq in his native village, Buqayah. During his study for BA at the University of Haifa, Hanna was writing and directing for Masrah Al Karmah. In the US he received a second BFA from the University of Wisconsin in Theater, and later a Master degree in Directing from the University of Washington. In Seattle, he is the founder of New Image Theater premiered Abraham’s Land, Seeing Double, Bosnia, In the Heart of America, Figs & Grapes are in Season, Sahmatah, and others.
Soraya Fallah is a Women and Human Rights activist from Eastern Kurdistan (Kurdistan of Iran). Currently she works extensively with local and International NGOs to promote women rights and Kurdish human rights in the USA and throughout the world.
She is the Chair of International pen, Kurdish sector, North America. She is the Chair of the Kurdish Women’s Rights Committee, KNCNA. She is a board member of Kurdish National Congress, KNCNA and board member of The Kurdish American committee for Democracy in Iran. Soraya is co-founder, coordinator, and board member of Society for Human Rights in Iran, Southern California and a member of Amnesty international. She is an active member of “Campaign for One Million Signature, Change for Equality”, which is a women’s movement in Iran.
Soraya has always been an artist at heart. Though cultural and situational obstacles have not allowed her to pursue her many artistic talents professionally, she has held steadfast to promoting art as a form of activism. As a young woman in Iran she acted in revolutionary plays and wrote creative poems and scripts promoting progressive women movements. She used her creative talents to imprint pictures of activists who were executed or martyred by drawing their portraits before photography became widely used in her town. She raised her voice and sang folklores and traditional Kurdish songs to pass down her heritage to the younger generation as a means of resistance towards the silent genocide of her culture. When selling Kurdish clothing became outlawed, she set out to design and make her own. She has since designed traditional clothing and has even found ways to innovatively unite western styles with more eastern designs. She has always been a promoter and supporter of artists and has collaborated with filmmakers and photographers internationally who have been interested in her homeland or human rights causes. As a mother, she believes that her greatest art work is perhaps her children, in whom she has woven a passion for creation much more vigorous than her own. Her daughter attributes her writing abilities to her mother and she believes that without writing she would not be alive.
In 2007, she chaired the first International Women’s Conference in Northern Iraq by the name of “International Conference on Kurdish Women for Peace and Equality”. In 2008 she participated in the United Nation’s Commission on Statues of Women with UNAUSA, San Diego delegation to New York City, NY.
Soraya has her Master’s degree in International Relations and law and has written her thesis on “The Role of the United Nations in the Progress of Women’s Rights”. Her research concentration has been mainly on Women’s Rights and Middle East studies. She worked as a researcher in “The Institute for political and International studies “(IPIS) in Tehran, before she was forced to flee from Iran in 1996, due to her political and human right activism. She lived in a several countries before moving to the United States. She has continued her activism towards human rights and women rights throughout her life and published several books and articles on foreign policy, women rights, and human’s rights specifically in the Middle East.
Carlos Fuentes- The Human Writes Project presentation at the 2009 Arts in the One World Conference is part of the CalArts Community Arts Partnership (CAP) Forum Series. The series brings leading artists, intellectuals, civic leaders, community activists and policy makers in conversation with the CalArts community. The series promotes learning and critical dialogue about artistic practices and strategies committed to community engagement, collaborative approaches and the arts as a catalyst for social change.
Mark Gonzales is a poet, educator and organizer whose traversed refugee camps in Palestine to back alley streets of Havana, Cuba and youth prisons in Los Angeles. He has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry, Fox News, Telemun2 while collaborating with countless humanitarians across the globe including Cornel West, Maxine Waters, Suheir Hammad, and Eve Ensler. His work has been commissioned by members of the United Nations, U.S. Congress, as well as universities such as Cornell, Columbia, Duke, and UC Berkeley. In 2005, he was awarded a fellowship at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education to combine his words with Hip Hop culture into pre-collegiate curriculum. An Alaskan born Chicano, Gonzales is a testament to those who are determined to remain dignified despite a society that constantly desecrates their culture.
Orena James, bay area based artist and educator, has worked in:
1) Africa – Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Kenya;
2) Europe – Italy and Spain;
3) Micronesia – The Marshall Islands; and
4) North America – U.S.A. and Mexico.
She has extensive experience working in war torn and developing countries with both adults and children, who were abducted, abused, displaced, disadvantaged and/or disabled. Practice has additionally been in psychiatric hospitals, education facilities, centers for physically and socially disabled people, and penitentiaries.
Her expertise includes all phases of project development, administration, implementation, monitoring, evaluating and reporting in the following areas: community based reintegration activities, emergency education, pedagogy, art therapy, psychosocial care, human/child rights, peace education, and substance abuse.
Karen Jungblut is the Director of Research and Documentation for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute at the University of Southern California. The Institute is the successor to Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation where Karen Jungblut was the Director of Cataloguing and Special Projects. The Institute holds nearly 52,000 video testimonies, the world’s largest digital visual history archive (VHA) of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust taken in 56 countries and in 32 languages.
Karen was instrumental in developing the indexing and cataloguing methodology, creating the Shoah Foundation Thesaurus of over 50,000 keywords and phrases, and in shaping a patented and revolutionary suite of software applications. Between 2001 and 2005, as head of the Cataloguing Department she led the multi-lingual staff consisting of over 50 people to reach the Foundation’s goal of indexing its 50,000 testimonies within four years. Karen also managed projects that provided large video testimony collections including multi-lingual search tools to national museums and libraries across Europe – including Germany, France and Italy.
Karen is now overseeing all aspects regarding archival access to the existing collection of 52,000 video testimonies most notably the online access via Internet2. Nearly 20 universities worldwide have online access to the entire archive and over 100 different subsets of video testimonies from the archive have been provided to museums and memorials sites all over the world under her leadership.
In addition, Karen is now charged with leading the Institute’s efforts to expand its archival content to include video testimonies of survivors and witnesses from other genocides than the Holocaust. As such she is overseeing the Institute’s partnership with the survivor organization IBUKA in Rwanda, to collect Rwandan genocide survivor testimonies in Rwanda and abroad. She also established a relationship with the Documentation Center in Phnom Penh, DC-CAM, to collaborate on collecting video testimonies with Cambodian genocide survivors.
Karen came to the Shoah Foundation in 1996 from Berlin, Germany, where she received a M.A. in Political Science from the Freie Universität Berlin. Her Master Thesis was on the ‘Historical and Political Analysis of the Deportation Mechanisms of German Jews, 1941-1945’. She received a B.A. in History with Russian as a Minor from Hunter College in 1990. While studying in New York, Karen worked at the United Nations Secretariat. Karen is a native German speaker and fluent in English.
Beth Krensky is an assistant professor of art education and the Area Head of Art Teaching at the University of Utah. She is an artist, activist and educator. She received her formal art training from the Boston Museum School. She has exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally. Her 2-person exhibition, We Make the Road by Walking, is currently traveling to multiple museum and gallery venues in the U.S. She is a founding member of the international artist collective, the Artnauts. Her work is intended to provoke reflection about what is happening in our world as well as to create a vision of what is possible.
She is also a scholar in the area of youth-created art and social change. She received a master’s degree with a focus on critical pedagogy and art education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her book, Engaging Classrooms and Communities through Art: A Guide to Designing and Implementing Community-Based Art Education, was recently published by AltaMira Press.
Laurie Lathem is a screenwriter, playwright, solo performance artist, essayist and teacher based in Los Angeles. She has been the Creative Director of the Berkeley Rep School of Theater, has taught screenwriting at Stanford University Continuing Studies Program and at Pixar Animation Studios, and has taught playwriting to incarcerated youth in several facilities throughout California. Laurie conducted the popular solo performance workshop Go Solo at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica for several years, and directed works developed in that workshop at the La Jolla Playhouse and Actors Theatre of Louisville, among other theaters. Laurie also plays several West African percussion instruments semi-professionally.
Roberta Levitow, director, dramaturg, and teacher, has directed over fifty productions in NYC, LA, and nationally with a focus on new work for the American theatre. A co-founder of Theatre Without Borders, she is committed to fostering dialogue among theatre artists around the world including extensive work in Romania and East Africa. Awards and honors include being named the American Honoree at the 15th Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre in 2003 and the Alan Schneider Award in 1992 for directorial excellence. She has also received Fulbright Senior Specialist assignments at Makerere University (Uganda), the National University of Theatre & Film (Romania), and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her accomplishments and writings are featured in The New York Times, AMERICAN THEATRE Magazine, Theatre in Crisis?: Performance Manifestos for a New Century, The South Atlantic Quarterly, and Writing the World: On Globalization. A graduate of Stanford University, she has previously taught at UCLA and Bennington College.
Violeta Luna obtained her graduate degree in Acting from the Centro Universitario de Teatro and Casa del Teatro in Mexico City. She has performed under the direction of relevant Mexican artists such as José Caballero, Raúl Zermeño, José Ramón Enríquez and Estela Leñero. In 1995 she founded Grande y Pequeño (“Big and Small”) an all-women theater company that focuses on developing original works and experimental stagings of classical theater. Violeta has toured her work extensively throughout Mexico. She has also performed and taught workshops in Cuba, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Spain, France, Portugal, Norway, Slovenia, Egypt and the USA, to name some touring destinations. Her art in community engagement ranges from work with marginalized neighborghood projects in Mexico City, to theater with incarcerated and recently arrived immigrant women in San Francisco. Since 1998 she is an associate artist of La Pocha Nostra, a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary performance collective under the direction of Guillermo Gomez Peña. In San Francisco, she is also the associate director of El Teatro Jornalero!, a theater company that brings the voice of Latin American immigrant workers to the stage, and the immigrant performance collective Secos & Mojados. Her current work explores the relationship between theater, performance and community engagement. Visit El Teatro Jornalero! at: www.teatrojornalero.com
Alana Macías is a performer, writer, and producer. She was born to parents who were guerillas in the Nicaraguan civil war and spent her early hours in a make-shift hospital in the ruins of post-earthquake Managua. Her plays have been produced and developed by Theater Key West, Ford Amphitheater in L.A., Ground Zero Theater Company and Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas. She was a Finalist for the 2007 Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab and the 2007 Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center. She and her husband, a musician, moved back to his native Texas last year in with the intent of establishing an artist collective, Texas Performance Labs. Texas Labs will produce work in an intentional community. At the moment the group offers music lessons, music rehearsal space, and runs a small communal vegetable garden in East Austin. She received her MFA in Playwriting/Writing for Performance at CalArts. Prior to CalArts she studied Theatre at the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, and received her B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights at University of Texas at Dallas. She loves ceviche and is an aggressive gardener.
Jen Marlowe traveled to Northern Darfur and Eastern Chad to make the documentary film “Darfur Diaries: Message from Home” as part of a three-person team and wrote the accompanying book “Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival”, which is included in the 2007 compilation of “Best American Non Required Reading”, edited by Dave Eggers. (www.darfurdiaries.org) She has spoken about the situation in Sudan at over 100 universities, high schools, community groups, book stores, congregations, and film festivals, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell. She has nearly a decade of experience in peace and justice work in such locations as Palestine and Israel, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Cyprus. She serves on the board of directors of Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre (www.friendsofthejeninfreedomtheatre.org). Jen is currently writing a book and a play about Palestine and Israel and directing a documentary film about South Sudan (www.rebuildinghopesudan.org). Her writing can be found online at The Nation, Alternet, Tomdispatch.com, and Counterpunch.
Maja Mitic, Actress of DAH Teatar-I am willing to believe that every play and working process demonstration as well has its destiny in real life. It is about the way of making it, the time within it’s been created, the place of performing it…It is like that it’s first performing some how determine it’s life.
My previous working process demonstration “The Flame on the Bottom of the Sea” dealt with theatre techniques of Third Theatre, physical and vocal training, making materials for the performance. It has been performed for the first time in London (February 1998) at Central School for Drama and Speech. I performed it mostly abroad, very often at Universities, just like the one where I performed it for the first time.
By the end of the last year Mr. Sead Djulic, director of Mostar Youth Theatre invited me to give a lecture at their 4thInternational Conference which theme was “The Healing Power of the Theatre”. The seed was planted and the process began.
During the conversation that I had with my director Dijana Milosevic, she suggested me that, since I am an actress, I am fully entitled to a privilege of the performer, and that way I can “act” on the stage, unlike the others who are not entitled to that kind of privilege. She was right and I listened to her. INNER MANDALA was born as performance/lecture, which my focus was on the question from our last performance “Maps of Forbidden Remembrance ” – How long a vigil does historical violence impose on us? How far can or should my personal responsibility extend for injustices I did not commit?
Using the montage of texts from our performances since 1991 up to now, I made the material, which speaks about healing power of the theater. I performed it for the first time in Mostar, February 23 th 2002, the town which was a part of a country where I was born, and today it belongs to Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
On the road from Nevesinje to Mostar, my bag full of props and costumes and the wings, which I used for one of my characters-an angel, fell out of the bus. Later, when the policeman stopped the bus, during his routine control I realized what has happened. Almost crying I begged the driver to turn the bus so I could find the bag filled with 11 years of DAH Theater’s life. He grumbled. Other people in bus were silent; they probably understood how important that was to me. In the middle of those cliffs of Herzegovina mottled with soft, juicy, spring grass, after a few kilometers of returning, I saw my bag and my wings of angel lying there. What kind of destiny has my “INNER MANDALA” when despite all it had its opening night in Mostar? And what does it mean for it’s further life?
I wish to perform it in: Holstebro and New Orleans, New York and Ljubljana, Zagreb, Wellington, Maribor and Novi Sad, Calcutta and Podgorica, Sarajevo and Buenos Aires, Madrid, Nis and Pristina, Athens and Jerusalem, London and Beograd.
Because I believe that we could all understand each other in a better way, when we draw mandala within us. Through my experience, I believe that theatre has the healing power.
Cklara Moradian was born in Eastern Kurdistan in May 1987. She marks this year as the year before the largest bio-chemical attacks in the history of mankind that terrorized her people of Kurdistan in Halabja. Conceived and raised by incredible political activists and inspirational artists, she spent the first eight years of her childhood in Iran. Though her environment was brutal, she was protected by her family’s love and the richness of her Kurdish culture. Her parent’s prison memoirs, revolutionary childhood, and the stories of the countless prisoner’s of conscious who were her “aunts” and “uncles” were her bedtime stories.
The years between nine and fourteen can neither be summarized nor ignored. Cklara and her family fled Iran and sought asylum from UNHCR. The stories of these years are the realities of thousands of other displaced refugees around the world. Though they are full of madness and at times unbelievable tales of human atrocity, Cklara remembers travel, new languages, and a world of experience, human connections, and adventures.
Cklara has lived in California since the age of fourteen and has done her best to grow from a teenager into an adult woman. These years have been years of healing and reconciliation and of solidifying her much battered identity. She has also used this time to formulating her vision for a better world. She is currently in her senior year of undergraduate studies in Philosophy and undertaking the monstrous task of applying for Law school.
She boldly claims that to write is not just her passion, but a necessity, as much needed for her survival as the air she breathes and the food she consumes.
She is an activist for human rights, specifically Kurdish women and youth rights, and LGBTQQ rights. She takes her membership with Amnesty International very seriously and collaborates closely with other NGOs to bring awareness towards progressive movements. She uses spoken word, and theater to break through to her generations’ epidemic of apathy and cynicism.
David Myers is a playwright, actor and freelance project-doer based in New York. This Fall, his play 1800 Acres was produced at Riverside Studios in London, where the play also recently received development from The Old Vic through their New Voices program. Readings in New York include his two plays Babyhead and Chosen, both read separately at the Paper Beats Rock reading series, his play Deleted Scenes from the Love of John Smith and Pocahontas, read at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and 1800 Acres, read at The Lark Play Development Center. Myers participated in the Young Writers’ Programme at The Royal Court Theatre and has studied under playwrights Edward Albee, Nilo Cruz, Ntozake Shange, and David Eldridge. Myers was born and raised in Houston, Texas, where his play Shatterings was produced at Theatre Collide, his No Man’s Land, Greenland played to full houses at Infernal Bridegroom’s Axiom Theatre and his musical play A String of Breath had a sold out run at the EZ Credit Theater in the fall of 99. Myers has also traveled to rural Rwanda, where he developed a full length and several short plays, in collaboration with Rwandan youth, designed to fight the spread and stigma associated with HIV/AIDS. He is a graduate of Brown University. www.swimdavid.com
Hala Khamis Nassar is an assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Culture in the Department of Near Eastern languages and Civilization and in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She studied at Birzeit University (BA) in Palestine, as well as in StrathClyde University Scotland ( M.Phill. British Council Scholarship), in the US, and Germany (DAAD Scholarship) where she did her PH.D. in theater Studies at the Free University of Berlin under Prof. Dr. Erica Fisher Lichte. She came to the US as Rockefeller fellow at the University of Californian, Berkeley. She has taught courses on contemporary Arab culture and Literature at Bethlehem University, Palestine, UC Berkeley, Columbia University and Evergreen State College. She has published articles on Palestinian and Arab Cultural productions. She is the senior editor of *Mahmoud Darwish : Exile’s Poet ( Interlink 2007), Performing the Nakba on Palestinian Stage* ( Forthcoming winter 2008/ Interlink) She is currently working on two manuscripts, Urban insanity in Arab women’s fiction, and the performance of Militant Iconography in the Middle east.
Kathy Randels, founding artistic director of New Orleans’ ArtSpot Productions, has written, performed in, and directed numerous original solo and group works in Louisiana and beyond. She recently received a 2008 V-Day Leadership Award, as well as a 2003 OBIE (Nita & Zita) and the 2007-9 NEA/TCG career development program for directors. Recent collaborations include: Flight, Lakeviews, and Alternate Roots’ UPROOTED: The Katrina Project. She collaborated on three Dah Teatar performances (1997-2003). She founded the Drama Club at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (1996) and has worked with the Students at the Center program in New Orleans Public Schools since 1998. Visit www.artspotproductions.org
Michael Robinson recently received his MFA in animation from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. His films and title sequences have been screened internationally at festivals and won awards. Before USC, he spent several years designing and producing web sites for MTV Networks, Comedy Central, VH1, Microsoft, and Target Stores. He is also an electronic music producer and has had his music released on a nationally distributed compilation.
J. T. Rogers’s plays include The Overwhelming (National Theatre, London; UK tour with Out of Joint; BBC radio; Off Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre), Madagascar (Off Broadway SPF Festival and throughout the US), and White People (currently running Off Broadway). His essays have appeared in American Theater and The New Statesman. Recent awards include NEA/TCG and NYFA fellowships, the Pinter Review Prize for Drama, the American Theatre Critics Association’s Osborne Award, and the William Inge Center for the Arts’ New Voices Award. His works are published in the US and UK by Faber and Faber and in acting editions by Dramatists Play Service. Rogers is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and a member of both PEN and the Dramatists Guild.
Toni Samek is Professor and Graduate Coordinator at the School of Library & Information Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. Her interests and contributions are in the areas of:
- critical librarianship
- intercultural information ethics
- global information justice
- human rights
- intellectual freedom
- academic freedom
- social responsibility
Toni is author of the 2001 book Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967-1974 (available in Japanese translation) and the 2007 book Librarianship and Human Rights: A Twenty-first century guide (just out in 2008 in Spanish translation, adapted for the Latin American readership as Biblioteconomía y derechos humanos: Una guía para el siglo xxi. Gijón, España: Ediciones Trea, S.L.
Toni is past convenor (2005-2008) of the Canadian Library Association’s Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom and serves on both the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee and Canada’s Book and Periodical Council’s Freedom of Expression Committee. She is also an Advisory Board Member for the international activist group Information for Social Change and its journal of the same name, for Counterpoise: A Journal for Liberty, Social Responsibility, and Dissent, for the International Review of Information Ethics, and for Library Juice Press.
Toni is a founding member and first convenor of the Association for Library and Information Science Education’s (ALISE) Information Ethics Special Interest Group, which produced the Position Statement on Information Ethics in LIS Education (ratified by ALISE in January 2008).
Toni was an Information Ethics Fellow, 2006-07 at the Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.
Most recently, she was named the first winner of the debut 2007 Library Journal Teaching Award in recognition of her fusion of social justice into LIS education. Locally, she was just invited to join the University of Alberta’s fledgling Working Group for Global Citizenship Curriculum Development.
Vivien Sansour is a native of Palestine. She grew up under Israeli military occupation in the city of Bethlehem. In 1996, she came to the United States and earned both a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Theatre Arts, and an M.A. in International Studies from East Carolina University. She is a founding member of a community-based theatre called Al Harah Theatre in Beit-Jala, Palestine and co-founder of ImaginAction in Los Angeles. Vivien is an activist and organizer. She has been involved in social justice issues in many communities such as Honduras, Uruguay, Palestine, United States, India, and Egypt. She is frequently invited to participate in panels, shows, conferences, and civic events to speak about the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Vivien is a spoken word artist and is a producer and writer for ImaginAction. Most recently she led a project in Palestine called The Olive Tree Circus.
Peter Schumann was born in 1934 in Silesia. He studied and practiced sculpture and dance in Germany, moved to the USA in 1961, and founded Bread and Puppet Theater in New York City in 1963. From hand and rod puppet shows in the streets to giant puppet parades, Schumann addressed local injustices as well as the Vietnam War. In 1970 Schumann and the company moved to Vermont. There he continues to build puppets, create shows and giant outdoor spectacles and perform locally and internationally, and to bake bread, grow garlic and split firewood. Peter Schumann is married to Elka Leigh Scott and they live in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. They have five children and five grandchildren.
Niloufar Talebi was born in London to Iranian parents. She received a BA in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine, and an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College and studied theater with Jean Shelton and Cyril Clayton. She has produced and performed nationally at venues including the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in NYC, The New School, The National Arts Club, Asia Society, the New York Public Library, Theater Artaud, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Actor’s Theater, Baltimore Center Stage, ODC Theater, and Intersection for the Arts. She is the founder of The Translation Project www.thetranslationproject.org, an organization dedicated to bringing contemporary Iranian literature to worldwide audiences in multiple languages and media. She is the editor/translator of BELONGING: New Poetry By Iranians Around the World (North Atlantic Books, July 2008), and has created “Midnight Approaches“, a DVD of short films, and “ICARUS/RISE“, a multimedia theatrical piece, both inspired by the Iranian spoken word tradition of “Naghali” and based on the new Iranian poetry in BELONGING. Visit her at www.niloufartalebi.com
Paula Tavrow, PhD, MSc, MALD is the Director of UCLA’s Bixby Program in Population and Reproductive Health and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Community Health Sciences Department at the UCLA School of Public Health. Since 1984, she has been involved in implementing public health programs and conducting health research in East and Southern Africa. Prior to coming to UCLA, Dr. Tavrow was the Deputy Research Director for the USAID-funded Quality Assurance Project (1997-2001). She oversaw eleven operations research projects to improve the quality of health services in Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Dr. Tavrow also helped design Tanzania’s National AIDS Control Program and National Family Planning Program (1987-90), and served as a reproductive heath advisor and researcher at the University of Malawi’s Centre for Social Research (1993-95). Dr. Tavrow’s current research interests include adolescent reproductive health in Kenya and strategies to improve rural health providers’ performance.
Roberto Gutiérrez Varea began his career in theater in his native city of Córdoba, Argentina. His research and creative work focuses on live performance as means of resistance and peace-building, in the context of social conflict and state violence. He has directed numerous productions and workshops associated with new play development, particularly with Latino-Chicano artists in the United States, where credits include premieres of works by Cherrie Moraga, Migdalia Cruz, Jose Rivera and Ariel Dorfman, among others. Gutiérrez Varea is the founding artistic director of Soapstone Theatre Company, a collective of male ex-offenders and women survivors of violent crime, and of El Teatro Jornalero!, a performance company that brings the voice of Latin American immigrant workers to the stage. He is an Associate Professor of Theater at the University of San Francisco, where he is Chair of the Performing Arts and Social Justice Major, and the Performing Arts Department. He is an associate editor of Peace Review, an international journal on peace and justice studies published by Routledge Press, and guest-editor of e-misférica, the journal of performance and politics published by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. He is a member of the San Franicsco-based performance collective Secos & Mojados. www.teatrojornalero.com
Nizar Wattad (a.k.a. Ragtop) is a filmmaker and hip-hop artist, born in Palestine and raised in the Tennessee hills. His Action-Adventure screenplay Agency was a finalist for the 2006 ABC/Walt Disney Studios Writer’s Fellowship, and his Civil-Rights drama Glenville was a finalist for the 2008 Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab. He is currently penning a feature film for Walt Disney Pictures and writing for Golden Globe-winning director Hany Abu-Assad – as well as developing his own indie project Land of the Brave, an official selection for the 2008 Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab in Jordan. Wattad also executive-produced Free the P, the first Arab-American hip-hop project to secure nationwide distribution (via Ryko/Warner), and has performed around the world from Vancouver to Bahrain. He earned a Bachelor’s in English, Theater and Creative Writing from the George Washington University in 2001, and a Master’s in screenwriting from the University of Southern California in 2006. He has written and edited for several news and literary publications, and lives in Los Angeles, where the palm trees sway.
