Writing & Performance

Juliette Mapp is a dancer, teacher, and choreographer based in Brooklyn. She is on the faculty of The New School and has an ongoing teaching practice at Movement Research in New York and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Her choreography has been presented throughout New York City, and she has received two New York Dance and Performance Awards (“Bessies”), one for her dancing and one for her choreography.

Theodora Skipitares is a multimedia artist and theatre director based in New York. She has created twenty-three plays featuring various forms of puppetry, original commissioned music, video, and documentary texts. Her visual work has been exhibited widely in the U.S., Europe, and South America.

John Jesurun is a playwright, director, and designer who has created more than thirty new works ranging from storytelling to classics to computer-based theatre, and sixty episodes of his ongoing serial Chang In A Void Moon. A MacArthur Fellow, he has worked at La MaMa, Dance Theater Workshop, the Walker Arts Center, Soho Rep., Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Spoleto USA, and in Mexico, Europe, and Asia.

Simone Forti, dancer and writer, began dancing with Anna Halprin in 1953 and later became a pivotal figure in the Judson Dance Theater community that revolutionized dance in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. For the past couple of decades she has been developing a form of improvisation with movement and language, which she calls logomotion.

Steve Paxton has been interested in the human body since he understood this was the form into which he had been born. No conclusion has been reached.

Cynthia Hopkins is a writer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and theatre artist who creates and performs unique multimedia performance pieces that intertwine truth and fiction, and have won her a host of awards, including the 2007 Alpert Award and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently at work on This Clement World, a new musical performance work addressing the climate crisis.

Richard Maxwell, artistic director of the New York City Players, has directed more than two dozen of his own plays, which have been translated into several languages. His productions frequently travel to cities and festivals abroad, with Neutral Hero currently on tour in Europe. Maxwell is directing Early Plays by Eugene O'Neill, a collaboration with The Wooster Group, which premieres at St. Ann's Warehouse in February 2012.

Annie-B Parson is co-artistic director of Big Dance Theater. In November 2011, Big Dance performed Supernatural Wife at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival, which premiered earlier in France. Big Dance is currently working on a new play by Sibyl Kempson. Parson is also choreographing an opera by Nico Muhly, as well as a piece by David Byrne called Here Lies Love. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an OBIE, and a Bessie Award, and teaches in the Experimental Theatre Wing of New York University. http://www.bigdancetheater.org

Young Jean Lee, a writer and director, has toured her shows to more than twenty cities around the world with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company. She is the recipient of a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2011 Guggenheim fellowship.

Jonathan Kalb teaches at Hunter College and is the author, most recently, of Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater.

Paul Lazar is co-artistic director of Big Dance Theater. As an actor, he has performed with Young Jean Lee, The Wooster Group, Richard Maxwell, and most recently in Austin Pendleton's production of The Three Sisters. He is currently directing The Elephant Room, as well as a new play by Sibyl Kempson.

Kelly Copper, along with her partner Pavol Liska, is director of the New York-based Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Their most recent project, Life and Times—Episodes 1 and 2, was part of the 2011 Festival d'Avignon.

Sylvan Oswald is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and a co-editor of Play A Journal of Plays.

Neil Greenberg is a choreographer and dancer working in New York City, on the faculty at Eugene Lang College/The New School for Liberal Arts. He danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1979–1986, and served as dance curator at the Kitchen from 1995–1999.

Lois Weaver is professor of contemporary performance at Queen Mary, University of London and an independent performance artist, director, and activist. She has been a performer, director, and writer with the Split Britches Company since 1980. Her interests include live art, feminist and lesbian theatre, performance and human rights, and the use of performance as a means of facilitating public engagement.

Sibyl Kempson lives and makes theatre plays in New York City and the Pocono Mountains. She has several different projects in the works at the moment, with Big Dance Theater; the city of Austin, Texas; Elevator Repair Service; Eric Dyer; New York City Players; Advanced Beginner Group. All is owed to Mac Wellman.