DR. AVERY T. WILLIS  (Moderator) has worked with Peter Sellars since 2006 as Assistant Director (Zaide, Vienna Festival Austria, Barbican Theatre London, Lincoln Center, Aix-en-Provence Festival, France), Festival & Artist Coordinator (New Crowned Hope Festival, Vienna), and Dramaturg (Othello, Vienna Festival & K15 Festival Bochum Germany). Recently, she ran the Communications Department at the Clinton Global Initiative (William J. Clinton Foundation). A Marshall Scholar, Avery earned her PhD in Classical Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford. Additional theatrical credits include: Trojan Women (Director, Oxford Playhouse, UK), The Inaugural Oxford Greek Festival (Festival Founder & Artistic Director), (Producer, international tour of Cairo, Alexandria, London & Oxford), and The Constant PrinceHijabi Monologues (Producer, national tour).

www.averyproductions.org

SEPTEMBER 20  

“The divine Desdemona”: Women as Pillars of our Communities

ANURADHA K. BHAGWATI (Executive Director of Service Women’s Action Network) Anu is the Executive Director of Service Women's Action Network (SWAN), a national non-profit human rights organization devoted to meeting the needs of servicewomen and women veterans, based out of New York City.  Anu is a Marine Corps veteran who left the service at the rank of Captain in 2004. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Yale University and a Masters of Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government, where she focused on international human rights policy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Anu founded and teaches a free weekly yoga class to veterans of all eras and ages in New York City. She is also a writer. Anu has spoken to countless audiences on the challenges faced by military women, including Military Sexual Trauma (sexual harassment, assault and rape), Domestic Violence, discrimination on the basis of gender and race, the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, the VA health care and benefits system, and homelessness among women veterans.

SWAN:  www.servicewomen.org
Yoga For Vets:  www.yogaforvetsnyc.org

ROBIN MORGAN (award winning author and Founder of The Sisterhood Is Global Institute) is an award-winning writer, feminist leader, political theorist, journalist, and editor, Robin Morgan has published over 20 books, including six of poetry, four of fiction, and the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is Forever. A founder of contemporary US feminism, she has also been a leader in the international women’s movement for 25 years. Her latest books include Saturday’s Child: A Memoir, her best-selling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, her historical novel, The Burning Time, about women fighting the Inquisition, and her latest nonfiction work, Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right. Morgan and Simone de Beauvoir co-founded The Sisterhood Is Global Institute, now celebrating its 25th Anniversary of work for women’s rights and freedoms internationally.

Robin Morgan:  www.robinmorgan.us
The Sisterhood Is Global Institute:  www.sigi.org

MEGHAN O'CONNOR (Director of Prevention and Community Development, NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault)
Meghan O’Connor, MPH, LMSW has worked with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) throughout the Horn and East Africa and in Thailand designing programs to address violence against women in settings affected by war.  At IRC’s NY headquarters, Meghan worked as the Program Manager for the Gender Based Violence Technical Unit where she provided technical assistance to IRC’s gender-based violence programs around the world and contributed to IRC’s global advocacy efforts to increase attention and commitment to ending violence against women. Domestically, Meghan has been a Survivor Advocate with Mt. Sinai’s Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention program since 2003.  She is also a clinician at Safe Horizon’s Counseling Center. Currently, Meghan is the Director of Prevention and Community Development at the New York City Alliance against Sexual Assault, an organization that conducts research, advocacy, and provides technical assistance to organizations throughout New York City to improve prevention and response to sexual and dating violence.

NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault:  www.nycagainstrape.org/about.html

MEGHAN RHOAD  (Women's Rights Division, Human Rights Watch) is the United States researcher for the Women's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, where her research focuses on violence against women and reproductive health. She is the author of the March 2009 Human Rights Watch report, Detained and Dismissed: Women’s Struggles to Obtain Health Care in United States Immigration Detention. Rhoad was formerly a women's law & public policy fellow at the National Women's Law Center in Washington, DC, where she researched federal judicial nominations and analyzed policy developments affecting the economic security of low-income women and their families. Her previous work includes international advocacy projects using the human rights framework to address issues such as reproductive health and gender discrimination in inheritance law. Rhoad is a graduate of Harvard University and Georgetown University Law Center.

Human Rights Watch work on women’s rights:  www.hrw.org/en/category/topic/women

SEPTEMBER 27

“Haply for I am Black”: Reclaiming OTHELLO from its Controversial Production History

PROFESSOR HARRY ELAM (Professor of Drama, Stanford University) is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities; the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education; Professor Drama; Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts; and the Senior Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is author and editor of six books, as well as journals in Israel, Taiwan and Poland and several critical anthologies. Professor Elam is also the outgoing editor of Theatre Journal and on the editorial boards of Atlantic Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Modern Drama. Currently he is working on a book on Mixed Race performance in the U.S. and Coloured Performance in South Africa with his wife, Professor Michele Elam.

Harry Elam Faculty Profile: https://humanexperience.stanford.edu/helam

SUZAN-LORI PARKS is a playwright, screenwriter and novelist whose plays include 365 Days/365 Plays (produced simultaneously in over 700 theatres worldwide, creating one of the largest collaborations in theatre history) ,Topdog/Underdog (2002 Pulitzer Prize; Public Theater), Fucking A (Public Theater), Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 Obie Award for Best New American Play), The American Play (Public Theater), Venus (Public Theater, 1996 Obie Award), The Death Of The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and In The Blood (Public Theater, 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist), among others.  Her work is the subject of the PBS Film “The Topdog/Underdog Diaries.”  She is an alumnae of New Dramatists, and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was also the recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts (Drama) for 1996 and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant.   Her work for film and television includes “Girl 6” (directed by Spike Lee) and the adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’sTheir Eyes Were Watching God, for Oprah Winfrey Presents, which premiered in 2005 on ABC.  Her first novel, Getting Mother’s Body, is published by Random House.  She is currently writing the book for the Ray Charles musical (for the film producers of “Ray”).  A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, Parks received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog.

PROFESSOR AYANNA THOMPSON  (Professor of English, Arizona State University) is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, where she is also an affiliate faculty in Women & Gender Studies and Film & Media Studies. She specializes in Renaissance drama and focuses on issues of race and performance. She is the author of two books: Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008), and the editor of two books: Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan) (co-edited with Scott Newstok) and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). In addition, she is the guest editor of two special editions of scholarly journals: “Shakespeare, Race, and Performance,” Shakespeare Bulletin (special issue 27.3, Fall 2009) and “Actors of Color in Shakespeare,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (special issue 4.1, Spring/Summer 2008).

Ayanna Thompson faculty profile: https://webapp4.asu.edu/directory/person/733133

OCTOBER 4

“Is it possible?”: OTHELLO in the age of Obama

LUIS ARGUETA (documentary filmmaker): Critically acclaimed director of The Silence of Neto, Luis Argueta, along with co-producer Vivian Rivas, are in the post-production stage of abUSed - The Postville Raid, the full-length documentary that tells the story of the most brutal, most expensive, and one of the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the history of the United States. By weaving together the personal stories of the individuals, the families, and the town directly affected by the events of May 12, 2008, the film presents the human face of the issue of immigration reform and serves as a cautionary tale against abuses of constitutional human rights. In addition to the film, abUSed - The Postville Raid Archives is an audio-visual collection of the interviews recorded in the making of the documentary that will serve as the collective memory of a paradigmatic event on the quest for humane and comprehensive immigration reform in the United States.

www.abusedthepostvilleraid.com

MARY SCHMIDT CAMPBELL (Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts) has been dean of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts since 1991. Dean Campbell holds a B.A. degree in English literature from Swarthmore College, an M.A. in art history from Syracuse University, and a Ph.D. in humanities, also from Syracuse.  She is co-author of Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987) and Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987 (New York: Oxford University Press & The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1991).  She is the co-editor of Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2006.) She is currently working on a book on Romare Bearden for Oxford University Press, (2011 expected publication date). She sits on the board of The American Academy in Rome and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  In the fall of 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served as chair of the New York State Council on the arts from 2007-2009.

www.tisch.nyu.edu

MAJORA CARTER (Founder, Sustainable South Bronx) simultaneously addresses public health, poverty alleviation, and climate change as one of the nation’s pioneers in successful green-collar job training and placement systems. She founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 to achieve environmental justice through economically sustainable projects informed by community needs. Her work has garnered numerous awards and accolades including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, one of Essence Magazine’s 25 Most Influential African-Americans in 2007, and one of the New York Post’s Most Influential NYC Women for the past two years. She is a board member of the Wilderness Society, SJF, and CERES; and hosts a special national public radio series called “The Promised Land” (thepromisedland.org). Her work now includes advising cities, foundations, universities, businesses, and communities around the world on unlocking their green-collar economic potential to benefit everyone as President of the Majora Carter Group, LLC.

Sustainable South Bronx:  www.ssbx.org
Majora Carter Group: www.majoracartergroup.com


CARMEN PELAEZ (playwright & actress)
Carmen has performed her award winning solo play, RUM & COKE to raves in Chicago, Miami and most recently off-Broadway in NYC. She's currently in development for her play MARIPOSAS and just launched SKY THEATRE, a classical online theater company.  Recently she's appeared as a pundit on Maria Elvira Live and been a guest blogger for Essence Online and Latinovations.

www.carmenpelaez.com