Jean-Pierre Karegeye
Jean-Pierre Karegeye is an assistant professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. He recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. Karegeye is trained in social ethics, philosophy, African Linguistics and literary analysis and theory; he specializes in African literature. His research focuses on the 1994 Rwandan genocide in literature in dialogue with ethical, political and philosophical discourses. He is the co-founder of IGSC (the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center) in Kigali, Rwanda. Publications include edited books: L’Eglise catholique à l’épreuve du génocide (Africana, 2000), Récits du génocide, traversée de la mémoire (Espace de Libertés, 2009).
.
.
.
.
.
John Malpede
John Malpede is a director, actor, activist, and writer. In 1985, Malpede founded and continues to direct the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), the first performance group in the nation comprised primarily of homeless and formerly homeless people. LAPD’s mission is to create performances that connect lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. “A nationally acclaimed theater radical and social visionary, Malpede has been confounding audience expectations for two decades,” said Linda Eisenstein in the Cleveland Plain Dealer this year.
Directed by Malpede, LAPD is current touring Agents & Assets, a performance that addresses the consequences of the U.S. government’s escalating war on drugs and the misuse of U.S. intelligence agencies by the executive branch of the government. Agents & Assets has been produced in Los Angeles, Detroit, and at the Cleveland Public Theater.
Beginning in 2001, Malpede began researching and constructing RFK in EKY, a recreation of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 swing through Eastern Kentucky. Directed by Malpede and performed in September 2004 in five counties of eastern Kentucky, RFK in EKY recreated Kennedy’s original “war on poverty” tour over the course of a four-day event that included in-depth discussion of historic and current events, public and performance art, and social policy. RFK in EKY was produced by Appalshop and developed with a host of community partners.This monumental, real-time documentary-style performance project drew national and international attention to the strengths and needs of present-day Appalachia and its people, while revealing startling historical parallels to present-day political realities.
Malpede has taught at UCLA Dept. Dance / World Arts and Cultures; NYU Tisch School of the Arts; the Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance (DasArts); and California College of Arts and Crafts. His individual artist fellowships include grants from New York State Council on the Arts; National Endowment for the Arts; and California Arts Council. He has received Dance Theater Workshop’s Bessie Creation Award; San Francisco Art Institute’s Adeline Kent Award; and a Theater LA Ovation Award, as well as numerous government and foundation project grants. He has performed throughout the United States in solo performances including Inappropriate Laughing Responses, Generic Performance, Pre-existing Conditions, and GET.
Erik Ehn
Erik Ehn’s work includes The Saint Plays, Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling, Maria Kizito, No Time Like the Present, Wolf at the Door, Tailings, Beginner, Ideas of Good and Evil, and an adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. He is an artistic associate at San Francisco’s Theatre of Yugen, most recently writing Crazy Horse for them, which combined Noh forms with Native American music and dance. His plays have been produced in San Francisco (Intersection, Thick Description, Yugen), Seattle (Annex, Empty Space), Austin (Frontera), New York (BACA, Whitney Museum), San Diego (Sledgehammer), Chicago (Red Moon), and elsewhere; he has a longstanding collaborative relationship with the Undermain Theater in Dallas. He is co-founder of the Tenderloin Opera Company, San Francisco (with Lisa Bielawa). A graduate of New Dramatists, Ehn is Head of Playwrighting at Brown University and is organizing an Arts in the One World companion conference at Brown University.
.
.
.
Meena Nanji
Meena Nanji is a South-Asian Kenyan American filmmaker that has produced, written and directed award-winning independent documentaries and experimental videos. Titles include Voices of the Morning, a 15 minute piece about the effects of orthodox muslim law on a young women, Living in Colour about 2nd generation South Asian youth living in Los Angeles, It Is A Crime, and others. Her first feature documentary, View From A Grain of Sand (2006), about the last 30 years of women’s rights in Afghanistan, has won several awards at international film festivals as well as broadcast on television. Meena has been a recipient of several prestigious funding grants including from the Rockefeller Foundation/ Renew Media’s Media Arts Fellowship, National Endowment of the Arts, Center for Asian American Media, Paul Robeson Fund, Pacific Pioneer Fund and Women in Film Foundation. She has also served as a juror for grant-giving organizations and film festival awards including the Rockefeller Foundation, The Center for Asian American Media and the Durfee Foundation. Meena has also curated and programmed film and video festivals, including the L.A Festival and Outfest, and has been on the board of L.A Freewaves – the longest running video festival in Los Angeles. She was a founding member of ArtWallah, LA’s South Asian Arts Festival and most recently a founding member of Global Girl Media, a non-profit media training organisation for girls in underrepresented areas of the world. Meena’s keen interest in exploring race and cultural diasporas, and gender rights, inspire her to continue to make films around issues of social justice and human rights.
Daniel Banks
Daniel Banks, Ph.D., is a theatre director, choreographer, educator, and dialogue facilitator. He has worked extensively in the U.S. and abroad, directing at the National Theatre of Uganda (Kampala), the Belarussian National Drama Theatre (Minsk), The Market Theatre (Johannesburg, South Africa), the Hip Hop Theatre Festival (New York and Washington, D.C.), and the Oval House (London). Additionally, Banks served as choreographer/movement director for productions at New York Shakespeare Festival/Shakespeare in the Park, Singapore Repertory Theatre, La Monnaie/De Munt (Brussels), Landestheater (Saltzburg), Aaron Davis Hall (Harlem), and for Maurice Sendak/The Night Kitchen. Daniel has served on the faculties of the Department of Undergraduate Drama, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University and the MFA in Contemporary Performance at Naropa University, and is the founder and director of the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative that uses Hip Hop Theatre as a tool for youth empowerment and leadership training. HHTI has worked on campuses and in communities across the U.S. and in Ghana, South Africa, Hungary, and Mexico. Currently, he is a Visiting Scholar in the Africana Studies Program/Department of Social and Critical Analysis at and is a long-time advisor in the Gallatin School for Individualized Studies, which are both at NYU.
Banks is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Career Development Program for Directors. He sits on the steering committee of Theatre Without Borders, on the Editorial Board of No Passport Press, and on the Advisory Boards of the Hip Hop Association and the Downtown Urban Arts Festival. He has guest lectured extensively, at such institutions as: SUNY Stony Brook, University of California-Riverside, Stanford University, Brandeis University, University of Western Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Central Florida, and University of Florida-Gainesville; and has been a Guest Artist at Williams College, City College of New York, Marymount Manhattan College, and the National Theatre Conservatory, Denver. He holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU. Publications include “Unperforming ‘Race’: Strategies for Re-imagining Identity” in A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (edited by Mady Schutzman and Jan Cohen-Cruz, Routledge, 2006) and “Youth Leading Youth: Hip Hop and Hiplife Theatre in Ghana and South Africa” in Theatre, Ritual and Building Peace: An Anthology for Artists, Peace Builders, and Policy Makers, a project of Coexistence International, Brandeis University, and Theatre Without Borders (Fall 2009). He is editor of the forthcoming critical anthology of Hip Hop Theatre plays Hip Hop Theatre: Theatre of Now for the University of Michigan Press (Spring 2009).
Adam Wolpert
Adam Wolpert is a Sowing Circle Community member, a painter and the Director of the Arts Program and co-director of the Intentional Communities Program at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC). He studied for two years in Florence, Italy, at the classical atelier, Studio Cecil-Graves, and received his MFA at UC San Diego. Adam has lectured on sustainable community and led painting workshops at many West Coast venues. His painting has been widely exhibited throughout California. Adam offers workshops on group process and organizational structure in many OAEC trainings and courses. His work can be viewed on the internet at www.adamwolpert.com.
The OAEC is a nonprofit organizing and education center and organic farm in Northern California’s Sonoma County. OAEC was founded in 1994 by a group of biologists, horticulturists, educators, activists, and artists seeking innovative and practical approaches to the pressing environmental and economic crises of our day. Much of the Center’s work addresses the challenges of creating democratic communities that are ecologically, economically and culturally sustainable in an increasingly privatized and corporatized economy and culture. OAEC’s programs combine research, demonstration, education, and organizing to develop collaborative, community-based strategies for positive social change and effective environmental stewardship.
Stephanie Nugent
Artistic Director of NUGENT DANCE since 2001, Stephanie Nugent’s choreography, performance and teaching have been presented throughout the US and abroad since 1991. She holds a BFA from North Carolina School of the Arts and a MFA from California State University -Long Beach.
Recent group choreographic projects include Would I Then Be, a twenty-six-minute dance/theater quartet for androgynous women, inspired by Virginia Wolf’s fictional biography Orlando, Sub(stance) commissioned for the BYU Dancers’ Company (Orem, UT), with, within, without commissioned for CONDER/Dance (based in Phoenix, AZ), small spaces commissioned for “New Dance at St. Joseph Ballet” (Santa Ana, CA), and Frame/ReFrame commissioned for Dance New Amsterdam’s “Splice: East Coast / West Coast,” (NYC NY).
In 2004 she created and presented an evening-length solo show entitled One, with collaborations in music, dance and scenic design with artists including SF based Sonic/Dance/Theater artist Kim Epifano, and NYC-based avant gard composer/vocalist Eve Beglarian. One received performances in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, CA, and Padova, Italy. More recent solo dance projects have included Yet-to-be-named, a trio for seven-and-a-half-month pregnant dancer (Stephanie) and violinist/composer (Robin Cox, Nugent’s partner), and Slippery, a caricature of life as a new mother and full-time artist.
Improvisational scores and performances include collaborations with CI artists Shel Rasch, Jones Welsh, Kirk Andrews, Kim Epifano, and video instillation artists Carole Kim at venues throughout the grater Los Angeles area.
Currently she is engaging in working improvisational investigations with Kathy Carbone and Shel Rasch, the purpose of which is to reinvest in creativity as an open-ended practice. This spring she will mentor an exciting interdisciplinary project led by BFA theater student at Cal Arts Sam Shay (based upon Shakespeare’s The Tempest). She continues the process of making a choreographic commission for Da Da Dance (NYC, NY), which began August 2009, and she looks forward to participating in Arts in the One World, an anual international festival sponsored by the Cal Arts Theater School. This year’s conference will revolve around the notion of “guhahamuka: the breathless attempt to articulate the
inexpressible.”
Nugent’s recent honors include an ARC Grant from the Durfee Foundation, two faculty development grants from Cal Arts, a Lester Horton Award for performance, and eight Horton nominations for choreography, solo /company performance, and costume design.
__________________________________________________________________________________
NewGround
In Los Angeles, NewGround is a Joint Project of Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). In the Bay Area NewGround is in association with the Arab Cultural and Community Center (ACCC), Islamic Networks Group (ING) and Islamic Center of Northern California.
NewGround: A Muslim Jewish Partnership for Change originated in Los Angeles in 2006 as a partnership of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Progressive Jewish Alliance. Due to differences in regions, PJA works with other Muslim organizations when appropriate.
Leila Ghaznavi, Silken Veils
Leila Ghaznavi is a California Institute of the Arts MFA candidate in the acting program. She is a graduate of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre Professional Training Program. She is originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has had a life long passion for the arts. Her father is from Iran and is the source of her love for Persian culture, art and history. She has studied puppetry under Janie Geiser, Ron Binion, Philip Huber, Jim Rose and Christine Marie. She has also trained in aerial acrobatics and flying trapeze. Ms. Ghaznavi’s work focuses on spanning both cultural and artistic mediums, believing that it is only by combining the differences in the world around us that we may truly discover the beauty locked within.
The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts
The CSPA was founded by Ian Garrett and Miranda Wright in early 2008 after individually working on each of the programs that now make up the multi-faceted approach to sustainability separately. The CSPA provides a network of resources to arts organizations, which enables them to be ecologically and economically sustainable while maintaining artistic excellence. We support the infrastructure of this network by supplying artists with the information, education and intellectual community they need to make the best choices for their sustainability. We do this through three independent programs: The CSPA Online Resource Guide, annual CSPA convergence and the CSPA Institute’s curriculum building. We extend these efforts with key partnerships: A producing partnership with Texas Performance Labs and a periodical partnership with Mammut Magazine. Under the umbrella of the CSPA, each program and partnership uses different tactics with their own mission to create a comprehensive and cooperative synthesis in artistic sustainability.
The CSPA donated 100% post-consumer recycled paper products including paper and tableware to the 2010 Arts in the One World conference.
The CalArts Gospel Choir
The CalArts Gospel Choir was envisioned in the spring of 2009 and began that fall under the leadership of Erinn M. Horton. This harmonious opportunity was formed due to her want to expand upon the musical and religious content experienced here at CalArts but also a want to form a performance group that students from all across campus could join and enjoy. Now, the CalArts Gospel choir meets every week with a dedication to learning the music true to its style and honoring its origin, the Black Christian Church. The choir not only pursues the traditional forms of gospel music in anthems but they also explore contemporary works by various performing artist within the genre. In addition to supplementing musical life and expressing Christian love, the ensemble is also dedicated to fostering a fellowship of brotherly love. This message includes members of different races, ethnic backgrounds, religious denominations, and perspectives.
