Featured Speakers

COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO THEATRE SYMPOSIUM FEATURED SPEAKERS BIOGRAPHIES

Richard Christiansen is the author of A Theater of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2004). He has been an arts journalist for more than 40 years, covering theatre, dance, film, and the visual arts in Chicago, the nation, and abroad. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Carleton College and serving an internship at Time, Inc., he began his career in 1956 as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago and moved to the Chicago Daily News a year later. In 1978, he joined the Chicago Tribune as its critic at large and moved on to become the arts and entertainment editor and, subsequently, chief critic and senior writer, a post he held until his retirement in 2002.

Martha Lavey is an ensemble member and the Artistic Director of Steppenwolf Theatre, as well as Board President of the Theatre Communications Group. As an actor, she has appeared at Steppenwolf, Goodman, Victory Gardens, Northlight, and Remains theaters in Chicago, and in New York at the Women’s Project and Productions. She has served on grants panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the Theatre Communications Group 3Arts, USA Artists, and the City Arts panel of Chicago. She holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and is a member of the National Advisory Council for the School of Communication at Northwestern. She is a recipient of the Sarah Siddons Award and an Alumni Merit Award from Northwestern University.

Todd London is the author of numerous books and essays about theatre, including Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of The New American Play (Theatre Development Fund, 2009), and the editor of the forthcoming book An Ideal Theatre (Theatre Communications Group, 2011), a documentary anthology of essays, letters, and memoirs, the founding visions for American theatres in the words of the pioneers who built them. A former Chicagoan, he chronicled the history of Chicago theatre in a 1990 article for American Theatre magazine titled “Chicago Impromptu.” A former managing editor of American Theatre, he received the 1996=1997 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for his essays in the magazine. In 2009, he became the first recipient of the Theatre Communications Group’s Visionary Leadership Award. He is entering his 15th season as artistic director of New Dramatists, the nation’s oldest center for the support and development of playwrights; under his leadership, the New York-based company received both a special Tony Honor and the Village Voice’s Ross Wetzsteon Award. Prior to joining New Dramatists, he was guest literary director of the American Repertory Theatre and visiting lecturer of dramatic arts at Harvard University. He holds an M.F.A. in Directing from Boston University and a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from American University, has taught at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and currently serves on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama as a lecturer in theatre management.

Lisa Portes is an Associate Professor at the Theatre School at DePaul University, where she heads the MFA directing program and serves as artistic director of the school’s Chicago Playworks for Families and Young Audiences series. As a director with a particular interest in new plays and musicals, she has worked with some of the Chicago area’s leading theatres, including the Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Northlight Theatre, Teatro Vista, the Rivendell Ensemble, and Next Theatre. Her New York credits include productions at Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, the Public Theater, the New York Theatre Workshop, Flea Theatre, Cherry Lane Alternative, and New Dramatists; regionally, she has directed at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Among the playwrights whose work she has staged, frequently in Chicago or world premieres, are Naomi Iisuka, Migdalia Cruz, Erin Cressida Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Harvey Young is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and director of the university’s interdisciplinary doctoral program in theatre and drama. He is the author of Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (University of Michigan Press, 2010) and editor of the forthcoming book Performance in the Borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he is researching and writing two book projects related to Chicago theatre: an oral history of African-American theatre in the city and a narrative history of Chicago theatre, post-1968. He is Vice President for Research and Publications of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, a non-profit organization consisting of nearly 2,000 theatre educators, graduate students, and theatre practitioners.