2008 Fellows

Lynn Nottage
Institute/Goodman Theatre Fellow
Fall 2008


Lynn Nottage is an award-winning playwright, garnering critical acclaim from across the country. She is the author of Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Fabulation, and Intimate Apparel, which was produced in New York at the Roundabout Theatre Company after its world premiere production at Center Stage and South Coast Rep. The play received numerous awards, including the 2004 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play and the Outer Critics Circle Best Play award and has gone on to receive dozens of productions around the country.  Nottage is the recipient of numerous individual awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Genius Grant in 2007, the 2004 PEN/Laura Pels Award for literary excellence, the 2005 Guggenheim grant for playwriting, and fellowships from Manhattan Theatre Club, New Dramatists and the New York Foundation for the Arts, where she is a member of the Artists Advisory Board.

As the Institute/Goodman Theatre Fall 2008 Fellow, Nottage returns to Chicago with her Goodman Theatre commission, Ruined, which the Goodman Theatre workshopped and produced as part of the 2007 New Stages Series. Set in the present day Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ruined centers around Mama Nadi, a savvy businesswoman who, in the midst of a complex civil war, protects and profits from the women whose bodies have become a battleground.  Ruined, directed by Kate Whoriskey, had its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre November 8 – December 7, 2008 in the Goodman’s Owen Theatre.  Following the production at the Goodman, Ruined will be presented at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York.

As part of this Fellowship, the Institute co-presented a post-discussion with Lynn Nottage at the Goodman Theatre on November 16, and will partner on another program with the Goodman Theatre in Spring 2009.

The Institute and Lynn Nottage will continue to collaborate on future related programming associated with the Institute’s Congo/Women Portraits of War: The Democratic Rebuplic of Congo exhibition project in 2009 and the production of Ruined.

Lynn Nottage has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her play Ruined. Co-produced by the Goodman Theatre and the Manhattan Theatre Club, Ruined premiered in Chicago in November 2008 to widespread critical acclaim.


 
E. Patrick Johnson
Summer 2008
Chicago, IL

E. Patrick Johnson is Professor, Chair, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Performance Studies, and Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University.  A scholar and artist, Johnson has performed nationally and internationally and published widely in the area of race, gender, sexuality and performance.  His book Appropriating Blackness:  Performance and the Politics of Authenticity was published by Duke University Press in 2003, and has won several awards, including the Lilla A. Heston Award, the Errol Hill Book Award, and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.  He has co-authored with Mae G. Henderson the book Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press).  He recently published the scholarly text Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

During E. Patrick Johnson’s Fellowship period, he worked to create the full-length performance piece Pouring Tea:  Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales developed from the scholarly ground-breaking research of his book, Sweet Tea:  Black Gay Men of the South-An Oral History.  In summer 2008, the Institute’s Executive Director and Johnson created and hosted a series of intensive one-on-one all day workshops with invited distinguished artists, performers, and scholars to investigate the concepts, forms and content of the future full production.

The Institute is partnering with About Face Theatre to co-produce Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tale in Fall 2009. Johnson is also developing a book of auto-ethnographic essays on race, class, and gender as well as an anthology on black and Latina/o queer performance.

 
Nambi E. Kelley
Institute/Goodman Theatre Fellow
Summer 2008
Chicago, IL

Nambi E. Kelley is an international award-winning actor, as well as both a published and produced playwright. Including three national tours and the World AIDS Day Event 2005-06 in Tanzania, Africa, her most recent Chicago credits include The Glass Menagerie (Steppenwolf Theatre) The Ballad of Emmett Till (Goodman Theatre), Harriet Jacobs (Steppenwolf Theatre) and Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Goodman Theatre). The latter of which won her recognition from Joseph Jefferson Nomination Committee for Principle Actress. While Ms. Kelley’s playwriting productions span New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Los Angeles, additionally her television credits include: The Beast (A&E); L.A. Dragnet (ABC), City of Angels (CBS), Early Edition (CBS), Cupid (ABC), Close to Home (WB Pilot), and Strong Medicine (Lifetime).  Receiving a BFA from The Theatre School at DePaul University, Ms. Kelley is a guest lecturer at Lake Forest College, and is currently an MFA candidate at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont

Nambi Kelley is in the process of developing a new play with a working title of Devils That Dance.  Based on a painting of a similar title, the script conveys the internal whirlwind of existence for people that suffer from mental illness. Devils That Dance will continue Kelley’s fascination with the inner sanctum of the mentally ill mind as supported by working partnerships with Trilogy, an organization that focuses on rehabilitation of those afflicted with psychiatric disabilities on Chicago’s North Side. Exploring the relationship between God and the devil as they dance for attention inside the mind of a schizophrenic, she anticipates that the piece will share elements of her earlier works—infusing music and movement to shape the environment of the play. Ultimately however the play will be different from her other plays by involving multi-disciplinary art forms with text, here hoping to explore more multi-dimensional facets of live performance.


In September 2008, the Institute and Nambi Kelley organized “The Spiritual Squeegee Writing Workshop,” an intimate story-gathering exercise for the future development of Kelley’s new work. The workshop gathered together a small group of African-American individuals who have family members touched by mental illness. The workshop provided an opportunity for Kelley to gather real-life stories and experiences that will serve as the basis of her script. In addition Kelley’s play Hope VI will be produced at the Chicago Dramatists Theatre from May 28- July 12, 2009. The Institute will co-present a public program as part of that production.


Teresa Prados-Torreira
Faculty Spring/Summer 2008
Chicago, IL

Teresa Prados-Torreira is Professor of American History and Cultural Studies in the Department of Humanities, History and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago. She received her B.A. in History from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in American Intellectual History from the University of Missouri at Columbia. Her classes include: Cartoons and Satire in American History, Women in U.S. History, and American Cultural History. She is the creator and organizer of the annual Paula Pfeffer and Cheryl Johnson-Odim Political Cartoon Contest for Columbia College students. Currently, she is faculty in the Women and Gender Studies program. Her areas of study are the United States and Cuba. Her research interests include women’s history, cultural history, and political satire. She is the author of Mambisas: Rebel Women in Nineteenth Century Cuba (University Press of Florida, 2005).

Teresa Prados-Torreira’s Fellowship project examines the image of American women in history through the lens of political cartoons. Cartoons are filled with information about the society in which they were created and first read. As such, they contain a rich array of clues that help us understand the past. We find in them information about family life, racial conflict, gender roles, attitudes towards work, religion and many other aspects of society. She is interested in analyzing the multiple roles women have been made to play in political cartoons from the Colonial period to 9/11. Throughout American history, cartoonists have used images of womanhood as both symbolic and specific references to political and cultural conflicts their society encountered.  Her research aims to use cartoons to illustrate ways in which the notion of womanhood was politicized and perceived throughout history.

Since cartoons are not as intimidating as many other historical sources of information, they are the perfect medium to illuminate major events in history. Prados-Torreira teaches a history class on this subject called “Cartoons and Satire in American History” and has found that students easily relate to the visual elements and the humor of cartoons. She also teaches courses on Women in U.S. History. This Fellowship allows her to combine two of her areas of scholarly interest. By selecting cartoons whose meaning still resonates with a contemporary audience and captures specific significant aspects of a given society, she hopes to create a tool that will help students decipher the past.


Lynsey Addario
Spring 2008
Istanbul, Turkey

Lynsey Addario is a photojournalist based in Istanbul, Turkey, where she photographs for the New York Times, National Geographic, and Fortune magazine, among others.  Addario began photographing professionally in 1996—with no professional photographic training or studies--for The Buenos Aires Herald, where she worked over the course of one year before returning to New York. In 1997, she began freelancing for the Associated Press, where she became a contributor for three years. Throughout her time in New York, Addario completed several overseas assignments, with Cuba as a major focus.  In 1997, she traveled to Havana to work on a series of photo essays focused on the influence of Capitalism on the young generation of Cubans, and returned to Havana every year thereafter until 2002 to continue documenting life under one of the last communist regimes.  In January 2000, she moved to New Delhi, India, where she was based for eight months, covering human rights, social, and women’s issues in India, Afghanistan (then under Taliban rule), Pakistan, and Nepal for the Associated Press and the Boston Globe.

After September 11, 2001, Addario returned to South Asia, where she has been covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the New York Times, including features on women’s education since the fall of the Taliban. In 2004, she also began her coverage of the conflict in Darfur, focusing on Sudanese refugee camps in Chad and internally-displaced people and rebel groups. Addario’s recent bodies of work include: the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the New York Times (present); “Bhutan’s Enlightened Experiment” for National Geographic (March 2008); “Battle Company is Out There” for the New York Times Magazine (February 24, 2008); and “Where Boys Grow up to be Jehadis” in Morocco for the New York Times Magazine (November, 25, 2007).

As an Institute Fellow, Lynsey Addario created a new body of work focusing on women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), specifically for the Institute’s and Art Works Projects’ upcoming exhibition and educational project Congo/Women Portraits of War: The Democratic Republic of Congo. This project is an internationally touring photography exhibition and educational campaign that raises awareness of the wide-spread sexual violence facing women and girls in the DRC. The Installation features recent work by Lynsey Addario, Marcus Bleasdale ,Ron Haviv, and James Nachtwey, and contextual essays by experts in a range of fields addressing this issue.

Lynsey Addario recently photographed a piece titled "Talibanistan: Right on the Edge" for the New York Times Magazine and "Life and Death," a portrayal of the people of Sudan, both Khartoum and Darfur, which was published in Harpers. In September 2008 at the Visa Pour L'Image Festival, Addario received the Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography.

Lynsey Addario has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize as part of the New York Times team for International Reporting.  Her photographic work has part of  the New York Times coverage of the war in Afghanistan for the magazine cover article Talibanista (Sept 7, 2008).


 
Jackie Kazarian
Spring 2008 Fellow
Chicago, IL


Jackie Kazarian is a Chicago painter, video and installation artist, who uses intense colors and complex surfaces to explore utopian impulses in the face of emotional, social and physical upheaval.  Her visually challenging and kinetic paintings integrate different languages of painting and drawing with screen-printing, stamping, flocking, and collage.  Kazarian has collaborated with dance choreographers to create installation and video backdrops for performances about biological systems (Fertile Muck, 2003), water (Overflow, 2007), and trash (Monument, 2008).

Kazarian’s work has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, Miami, California, Armenia and Japan.  She has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and created public works for The U.S. Embassy and the City of Chicago.  Kazarian received her MFA in painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989 and a BS from Duke University in 1981.  She lives and works in Chicago.

As the Spring 2008 Fellow, Jackie Kazarian reviewed video and audio history and utilized Columbia College resources to create video and audio recordings, learn about current scientific studies of the relationship between breathing and emotion, and collaborate with scientists and institutions that investigate human mechanisms for understanding and processing personal and social upheaval.

In the summer 2008, Jackie Kazarian and The Seldoms’ Carrie Hanson and Doug Stapleton participated in a panel discussion about their collaborative process at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC). The video and dance Overflow will be presented at The Dance Center of Columbia College on February 19, 2009, along with an exhibition of Kazarian’s paintings.

In Fall 2008, new paintings and wallpaper were exhibited at HPAC’s benefit exhibition Not Just Another Pretty Face (November-January 2009). She also completed video editing classes at Chicago Filmmakers and began editing two short videos: one that focuses on the transformation of a woman during a facial and a second that traces the artist’s failed attempts at painting a serene landscape on her mother’s face.  Production for another video, Ahrirang, will begin in December.  This video explores issues of vulnerability, empathy, and intimacy in a Korean bathhouse in Chicago, which serves as a place of refuge and rejuvenation for women of different cultures.

A one-person exhibition of Kazarian’s paintings is scheduled for February 1-28 2009 at the Union League Club of Chicago.