Biographies of Theatre Artists and Peacebuilding Scholars and Practitioners
Dr. Daniel Banks is a full-time faculty member in the Department of Undergraduate Drama, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He has directed and choreographed extensively both in the U.S. and abroad. He was Co-planner (with Roberta Levitow) of the 2005 Theatre Without Borders Founding Symposium and is Director of the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative at Tisch, which has worked with youth across the U.S. and in Ghana and South Africa. Dr. Banks holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Performance Studies, NYU, and is past Chair of the Black Theatre Association Focus Group for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. His anthology chapter will focus on the emergence of Hip Hop Theatre in Ghana and South Africa and the ways this genre of performance reinforces and supports young people in constructing their identities as peacemakers through their craft. He is also serving on the editorial advisory board of the project.
Dr. Kevin Clements is professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Founding Director, The Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. He joined ACPACS in September 2003 after working as Secretary General of the London-based International Alert, one of the world's largest and most highly regarded NGOs working on Conflict Transformation in Africa, the Caucasus, Asia and Latin America. Prior to that he was the Vernon and Minnie Lynch Professor of Conflict Resolution and Director of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia USA. He has also served as the head of the Peace Research Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra Australia and a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Coordinator of Peace Studies at Canterbury University, Christchurch New Zealand. He is a former secretary-general of the International Peace Research Association, and has published extensively, including on issues of peace and security, and, in particular, on development and peacebuilding in the Asia-Pacific region. Dr. Clements is a member of the editorial advisory board of Performance and Peacebuilding in Global Perspective.
Erik Ehn is a playwright, educator and theorist of contemporary theater who currently serves as Dean for the School of Theater and Head of the Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute for the Arts. He is also the co-director of the summer Rwandan Genocide Studies Program in Kigali, Rwanda, and the central organizer of annual ‘Arts in the One World’ conferences, which take place in California each January. Ehn’s most recent play, Maria Ktizito, is based on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and is the result of his research in that Central African country. He has written over eighty plays, which have been produced in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, New York, San Diego, and Chicago. His book The Saints Plays includes fifteen plays that are part of an ongoing cycle loosely based on the lives of saints and biblical characters, works that reflect his deep Catholic faith and a desire to infuse contemporary life with a feeling for the divine. Ehn is co-founder and co-artistic director of the Tenderloin Opera Company in San Francisco and also an artistic associate of San Francisco's Theatre of Yugen. He is a co-founder of the RAT movement, an international network of alternative theaters. Erik Ehn serves on the editorial advisory board of the anthology.
Catherine Filloux is a French-Algerian-American playwright whose work often explores themes of human rights and intercultural connection and reconciliation. Through her plays she has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to the search for justice and healing among the post-genocide Cambodian communities in the US and in Phnom Penh. Her 1996 play, Eyes of the Heart, is based on reading a story of the psychosomatic blindness suffered by a group of Cambodian women after witnessing the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The subject of genocide inspired her 2005 play Lemkin's House, based on the life of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-American lawyer who invented the word genocide in 1944 and spent his life striving to have it recognized as an international crime. The play is the winner of the 2006 PeaceWriting Award from the Peace and Justice Studies Association. Her play Photographs from S-21, a short play about the Cambodian genocide, which was performed in 2006 at Brandeis, has also toured the world. She has received awards from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the O'Neill, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, and the Asian Cultural Council, and has served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in both Cambodia and Morocco. Recently she was the librettist of the new contemporary rock musical performed in English and Khmer, Where Elephants Weep. Ms. Filloux’s chapter in the anthology will explore the intersections between Theatre, Performance and Peacebuilding in Cambodia through a study of the career of one of her students and of the production, Where Elephants Weep.
Kate Gardner is principal of WorldEnsemble, a studio for creative human interaction. Creative consultant, artist, and teacher, she has conducted projects and trainings in the United States, Africa, Latin America and Europe. Founding the Community Theatre Internationale ten days after 9/11 in New York City, Ms. Gardner produced and directed A Happening and BrooKenya!, an intercontinental grassroots soap opera involving 150 residents in Brooklyn, USA; Kisumu, Kenya; and Lima, Peru. Ms. Gardner has taught and presented at Brandeis University, International Center for Tolerance Education; First Latin American Conference on Education-Entertainment for Social Change; International Peace Researchers Association; International Community-Based Theatre Festival; and Youth Channel. A community organizer for many years, she worked to create a more inclusive social context, including opening up blue-collar trades to women and men of color; organizing grassroots support for democratization initiatives in domestic and foreign policy; and producing performance programs with inner city youth.
Dr. Mary Ann Hunter teaches drama and performance at the University of Queensland, Australia, and is a research associate with the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. She was a Teaching Fellow at the National Institute of Education in Singapore and has worked as a radio producer, theatre director, evaluator and policy consultant with a range of local and national community arts agencies in Australia. Dr. Hunter publishes widely in the fields of youth and community cultural development, festivals, and contemporary performance. Her case study for the anthology explores the nexus of youth development, peacebuilding, and performance, drawing insights from several initiatives, including the Peace Project by Contact, Inc., a Brisbane-based NGO that engages young immigrant, refugee, and aboriginal youth in creating hip-hop performances and videos. It will also explore questions of gender and empowerment, in part through an assessment of how a young women’s skateboarding group, through performance, asserted their rights to space in the park.
Roberta Levitow is a founding member of Theatre Without Borders and has played a central role in identifying the artists involved in Performance and Peacebuilding in Global Perspective. She has directed over 50 productions in NYC, LA and nationally, with a particular emphasis on developing original writing and new American work. Ms. Levitow was the recipient of the Theater Communications Group’s Alan Schneider Award for directorial excellence in 1992. She has also served as a senior Fulbright Specialist in Romania, Uganda and China, and led the “African Playwrights Conference,” University of Iowa, Sept. 2004. Her writings have been 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. She has taught at Bennington College and U.C.L.A, and is currently a member of an Israeli/Iranian/American collaborative theatre project. She serves as a co-editor of the anthology.
Ruth Margraff is an award-winning playwright, singer, librettist, educator and author, whose operas have been developed and produced across the US as well as in Belgrade, Moscow, Tokyo and Istanbul. She has worked with the Seagull Foundation in Calcutta, India as a cultural envoy of the US Department of State. In India, she is also engaged in training workshops and reflective conversations with members of a street theatre addressing issues of domestic violence, and community groups leading theatre workshops on issues of the abuse of children and trafficking. Ms. Margraff has published widely, and recently accepted an appointment as Associate Professor of Playwriting at The School of Art Institute in Chicago. She is collaborating with Naveen Kishore on a chapter for the anthology that documents and assesses Hidden Fires, and other theatre and peacebuilding initiatives of the Seagull Foundation.
Dijana Milosevic is the artistic director of Dah Teatar and Research Center located in Belgrade, Serbia. The Theatre was involved in the Arts for Social Change Project, which was supported by European Cultural Foundation and served at-risk youth throughout Southeastern Europe. In 1991, Ms. Milosevic and four other women decided to start a small theatre company. As they were preparing for their first production, Slobodan Milosevic began moving forces into Bosnia. The members of Dah Teatar refocused their efforts to protest the war and took their production to the streets. Since that time, Dah’s work has included cross-community collaborations with a theatre in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as performances that challenge the citizens of Belgrade to acknowledge the legacy of atrocities committed by their government. For the last two years, Ms. Milosevic has also served as artistic director for the International Meeting of Theatre Workshops in Belgrade and has collaborated with the Magdalena Project, an international network of women in contemporary theatre. She is also the co-founder of Art Saves Lives, an initiative to explore the healing power of art through discussions and festivals. She is the 2007 recipient of the prestigious Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre. Ms. Milosevic’s anthology chapter explores theatre and performance as a means of communication and action in times of violence by describing and assessing the examples of DAH Theatre, Women in Black, and the Mostar Youth Theatre-Dah collaboration.
Charles Mulekwa is an award-winning playwright, actor, and director, and is a long- standing member of the National Theatre of Uganda. His interests center on the ways in which war within Uganda have informed Ugandan Theatre. Mr. Mulekwa began writing plays in his native Uganda and has produced such works as “The Woman in Me”, “The Eleventh Commandment” and “A Time of Fire”. His anthology chapter focuses on the national theatre in Uganda and it’s role as a stage, which reflects the ways cultural meaning (through ritual, song, dance, etc.) embeds itself within traditional, colonial and postcolonial theatre. Mr. Mulekwa served as a cultural consultant for the award-winning film ‘The Last King of Scotland;’ and is currently working towards a Ph.D. in performance studies at Brown University.
Aida Nasrallah is the pen name of Mahagna Nasera, a Palestinian-Israeli author and artist who focuses on women’s roles as peacebuilders. She organizes and runs a weekly salon for women poets and writers, serving as mentor for Arab women in Israel who wish to experiment with poetry and fiction. Most recently, she was the driving force behind “Common Threads,” an art exhibit that displayed the work of Jewish and Arab women artists side by side by side by side at the prestigious gallery of the Tel Aviv University. She has published over 40 short stories and 60 poems in various Arabic publications in Israel. Ms. Nasrallah received a B.A. in Arabic and Art, University of Haifa, and her M.A. Degree through the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa with a thesis on “Female Artists from the Wadi Ara Region: Their Artistic Endeavor as a Reflection of their Social and Individual Perception.” Her play, The Moaning of Rosary was produced as a reading by Portland Stage Company and the theatre department at Iowa University in 2001 and was later staged at New York Theatre Workshop the same year. She has given lectures on topics such as women’s roles in art and society, peace making, Arabic culture, and using the arts in teaching. She is co-curating, with Lee Perlman, a chapter on theatre and coexistence within Israel.
John O’Neal is an actor, director, stage director and civil rights leader who has been a leading advocate of the view that "politics" and "art" are complementary, not opposing endeavors. John O'Neal earned a BA degree from Southern Illinois University, and upon graduation he became a Field Secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. From this involvement the acclaimed Free Southern Theater emerged in 1963, dedicated "to using theater as an instrument to stimulate the development of critical and reflective thought among Black people in the South" and to support the efforts of those involved in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1980 O'Neal founded Junebug Productions, an arts organization based in New Orleans, of which he now serves as Artistic Director. Mr. O’Neal directed the ColorLine Project, a story collecting and performance event about the Civil Rights Movement. Currently, he guides ‘Uprooted: The Katrina Project,’ a theatrical project at the forefront of rebuilding community and energizing community activism in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster. John O’Neal is contributing to a chapter on Theatre, Racial Justice and Incarceration in New Orleans.
Madhawa Palihapitiya is a native of Sri Lanka, where he works with local populations in order to build communities, settle conflicts, and cope with natural disasters. For the last five years, he served as the Director of the Conflict Early Warning and Early Response Program at the Foundation for Co-Existence, Sri Lanka, where he also served as a negotiator engaged in land rights issues and in high-risk mediation efforts between warring factions. Mr. Palihapitiya also designed programs on peace-building and conflict resolution with Sri Lankan artists. He is currently Program Officer for Dispute Resolution at the Massachusetts Office of Dispute Resolution. He expects to receive his MA degree in Coexistence and Conflict from Brandeis University in December 2007. He is contributing to a chapter on theatre and peacebuilding in Sri Lanka.
Lee Perlman is Director of Programs at the Abraham Fund Initiatives in Israel and Lecturer at Tel Aviv University and has an extensive career in the field of Israeli education. He is also a doctoral student studying the efficacy of mainstream, community-based, and educational theatre on coexistence between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. He has written extensively on NGO efforts at improved Israeli-Palestinian relations. Perlman is currently on the Board of Directors for Nephesh Theatre, on organization geared towards national social and educational Theatre, The Centre for Progressive Judaism and the Association for the Promotion of Puppet Theatre in Israel. Lee’s chapter will focus on the current theatre and peacebuilding/coexistence initiatives within Israel.
Kathy Randels a native New Orleanian, is a theatre artist/educator and the founder/artistic director of ArtSpot Productions, a non-profit organization dedicated to creative processes and performances that allow all the stories and voices within a community to be expressed. Throughout her career she has linked arts and activism. Randels began her career as a solo performance artist. Her most renowned work of that nature, Rage Within/Without, examines anger, aggression and violence in women, incorporating the testimonies of two Illinois women who were incarcerated for killing their abusive spouses. The piece has since toured to ten states and seven countries. In 1996, Randels founded the Drama Club at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW) with funding from the NEA and, now with Assettua Amor Amenkum, continues to teach there once a week. The Drama Club has produced 10 full-length productions to date. Also in 1996, Ms. Randels developed Lower 9 Stories, a site-specific performance piece with six high school students from New Orleans’ lower 9th ward exploring environmental racism in their neighborhood; it was performed during Junebug Productions’ 1998 Environmental Justice Festival. In June 2007, Randels will premiere a new collaborative work about her childhood neighborhood of Lakeview, which was flooded by Hurricane Katrina, as part of HOME, NEW ORLEANS? She is co-curating a chapter on the LCIW drama club, and theater, racism and healing in New Orleans.
Dr. Kandasamy Sithamparanathan is director of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Jaffna and the founder and director Theatre Action Group (TAG), a community of theatre artists based in the Tamil community of northern Sri Lanka. TAG engages members of Tamil communities in transformative theatrical experiences, including healing rituals, educational workshops, political demonstrations and dialogue. Dr. Sithamparanathan’s work is rooted in a belief that dynamic, community-based approaches to the theatre arts provide safe venues for people to heal from trauma, articulate their personal and collective desires and mobilize for action. He was a Brandeis International Fellow in 1998, where he contributed to conversations exploring the theme Coexistence and the Quest for Justice. He is contributing a description and assessment of the Theatre Action Group to a chapter on Theatre, War and Peace in Sri Lanka.
Dr. Diana Taylor is a professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University as well as the founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. As a major contributor to the area of Performance Studies in the Americas, her work focuses on Latin American and U.S. theatre and performance, performance and politics, feminist theatre and performance in the Americas, Hemispheric studies, and trauma studies. Taylor is also the author of The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas; Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America; Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War'. She co-edited Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform; Defiant Acts: Four Plays by Diana Raznovich; Negotiating Performance in Latin/o America: Gender, Sexuality and Theatricality; and The Politics of Motherhood: Activists from Left to Right.
Dr. Eugene Van Erven has been researching theatre and social change since 1980. He is a senior lecturer/researcher at Utrecht University and author of Radical People’s Theatre; The Playful Revolution: theatre and liberation in Asia; and Community Theatre: Global Perspectives. He is currently the research coordinator and website editor of the Utrecht Community Art Lab (CAL), a facility sponsored by the city and province of Utrecht that aims to develop and investigate the rapidly growing community art practice in Utrecht and beyond. For Performance and Peacebuilding in Global Perspective, Dr. van Erven is conducting original research into community theatre productions designed to address relations between the Muslim immigrant communities and their non-Muslim neighbors in cities in the Netherlands. He is co-curating a chapter with Kate Gardner on international community theatre.
Roberto Varea began his career as an actor and director in his native city of Córdoba, Argentina. Upon receiving his MFA in Theater/Directing from UCSD in 1992, he moved to San Francisco where he makes his home. His research and creative work focuses on issues of performance and its relationship to state violence and resistance movements, issues that he has presented and lectured about in the US and abroad. He has directed numerous productions and workshops associated with new play development and community-driven issues and projects, particularly in the Latino - Chicano community. Roberto 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 a professor of theater at the University of San Francisco, where he is co-founder of the Performing Arts and Social Justice Major, and teaches theatre to incarcerated women at the San Francisco County Jail's Sisters Project. He also serves as an Associate Editor of Peace Review, an international journal on peace and justice studies, published by Routledge Press. Mr. Varea is a co-editor of the anthology, and curating a case study of theatrical productions in Peru and Argentina.
Dr. Polly Walker is a peacebuilding scholar/practitioner based in the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Herself of mixed Tsalagi (Cherokee) and Anglo-American descent, she focuses her research on conflict transformation and reconciliation between indigenous and settler peoples, with an emphasis on addressing epistemic violence toward indigenous knowledge systems. She is a specialist in intercultural conflict transformation with a background in education, cross-cultural communication, mediation, indigenous knowledge systems, and reducing epistemic violence. Dr. Walker is a co-editor of Performance and Peacebuilding in Global Perspective, and is curating a case study entitled Singing Up Worlds: Ceremony and Conflict Transformation, which describes and analyzes the effectiveness of contemporary ceremonies that seek to reconcile descendents of indigenous and settler communities, both in Australia and the United States.
Additional Anthology Contributors
Naveen Kishore is a playwright, writer, photographer, publisher, cultural worker, and the co-founder and managing trustee of the Calcutta-based Seagull Foundation for the Arts. A theatre artist of international reputation, Mr. Kishore has worked with several performance companies in Calcutta. His case study for the anthology project, “Hidden Fires: Examples of artistic responses to Hindu/Muslim ethnic violence and oppression in India,” documents and assesses the work of the Seagull Foundation in Gujarat, and its efforts to engage theatre artists to affect attitudes and values, and enhance critical thinking on the part of young people in the aftermath of the 2002 anti-Muslim violence. His colleague Ruth Margraff is curating the case.
