Knowing Native Arts
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Knowing Native Arts brings Nancy Marie Mithlo's Native insider perspective to understanding the significance of Indigenous arts in national and global milieus. These musings, written from the perspective of a senior academic and curator traversing a dynamic and at turns fraught era of Native self-determination, are a critical appraisal of a system that is often broken for Native peoples seeking equity in the arts. Mithlo addresses crucial issues, such as the professionalization of Native arts scholarship, disparities in philanthropy and training, ethnic fraud, and the receptive scope of Native arts in new global and digital realms. This contribution to the field of fine arts broadens the scope of discussions and offers insights that are often excluded from contemporary appraisals.
"Our Indian Princess": Subverting the Stereotype
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Are images and representations central to understanding Native Americans? How do Native artists, as producers of visual culture, respond to what art critic Lucy Lippard has called "the overwhelming burdens" of Indian art? In this path breaking study, anthropologist Nancy Marie Mithlo examines the power of stereotypes, the utility of pan-Indianism, the significance of realist ideologies, and the employment of alterity in Native American arts. Addressing the question of how visual referents communicate across cultural divides, she aims to deconstruct the common understanding of stereotypes and suggest that they may play a role in conveying otherness. By using concepts such as "strategic essentialism" and "conventional representations," she analyzes the ways in which disparate groups employ damaged knowledges in trying to communicate their own values and those of contrasting groups, especially when other conceptual tools are unavailable.
The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds
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Mapping the new geography of the visual arts, from the explosion of biennials to the emerging art markets in Asia and the Middle East.The geography of the visual arts changed with the end of the Cold War. Contemporary art was no longer defined, exhibited, interpreted, and acquired according to a blueprint drawn up in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin. The art world distributed itself into art worlds. With the emergence of new art scenes in Asia and the Middle East and the explosion of biennials, the visual arts have become globalized as surely as the world economy has. This book offers a new map of contemporary art's new worlds. The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds documents the globalization of the visual arts and the rise of the contemporary over the last twenty years. Lavishly illustrated, with color throughout, it tracks developments ranging from exhibition histories and the rise of new art spaces to art's branding in such emerging markets as Hong Kong and the Gulf States. Essays treat such subjects as curating after the global turn; art and the migration of pictures; the end of the canon; and new strategies of representation.
The Everyday Practice of Public Art: Art, Space, and Social Inclusion
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The Everyday Practice of Public Art: Art, Space, and Social Inclusion is a multidisciplinary anthology of analyses exploring the expansion of contemporary public art issues beyond the built environment. It follows the highly successful publication The Practice of Public Art (eds. Cartiere and Willis), and expands the analysis of the field with a broad perspective which includes practicing artists, curators, activists, writers and educators from North America, Europe and Australia, who offer divergent perspectives on the many facets of the public art process. The collection examines the continual evolution of public art, moving beyond monuments and memorials to examine more fully the development of socially-engaged public art practice. Topics include constructing new models for developing and commissioning temporary and performance-based public artworks; understanding the challenges of a socially-engaged public art practice vs. social programming and policymaking; the social inclusiveness of public art; the radical developments in public art and social practice pedagogy; and unravelling the relationships between public artists and the communities they serve. The Everyday Practice of Public Art offers a diverse perspective on the increasingly complex nature of artistic practice in the public realm in the twenty-first century.
Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums
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Visualizing Genocide examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. Interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, exhibition practices, artistic critiques, archival investigations, and public arts, are among the many decolonizing methods incorporated in contemporary curatorial practices. Rather than dwelling simply in celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival, this unprecedented volume tracks how massacres, disease, removals, abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, and relocation are conceived by contemporary academics and artists. Contributors address indigeneity in the United States, Norway, Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean in scholarly essays, poems, and artist narratives. Missions, cemeteries, archives, exhibitions, photography, printmaking, painting, installations, performance, music, and museums are documented by fourteen authors from a variety of disciplines and illustrated with forty-three original artworks. The authors offer honest critique, but in so doing they give hopeful and concrete strategies for the future. This powerful collection of voices employs Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial strategies, providing essential perspectives on art and visual culture. Contributors T. Christopher Aplin Emily Arthur Marwin Begaye Charlene Villaseñor Black Yve Chavez Iris Colburn Ellen Fernandez-Sacco Stephen Gilchrist John Hitchcock Michelle J. Lanteri Jérémie McGowan Nancy Marie Mithlo Anne May Olli Emily Voelker Richard Ray Whitman
Articles + Essays
Blog Posts + Other Informal Writings
Films, Videos, + Webinars
Organizations + Initiatives
Reading + Resource Lists
Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance
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Choreographing Copyright is a new historical and cultural analysis of U.S. dance-makers' investment in intellectual property rights. Stretching from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book reconstructs efforts to win copyright protection for choreography and teases out their raced and gendered politics, showing how dancers have embraced intellectual property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial and gendered power. A number of the artists featured in the book are well-known in the history of American dance, including Loie Fuller, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, and George Balanchine. But the book also uncovers a host of marginalized figures--from the South Asian dancer Mohammed Ismail, to the African American pantomimist Johnny Hudgins, to the African American blues singer Alberta Hunter, to the white burlesque dancer Faith Dane--who were equally interested in positioning themselves as subjects rather than objects of property. Drawing on critical race and feminist theories and on cultural studies of copyright, Choreographing Copyright offers fresh insight into the raced and gendered hierarchies that govern the theatrical marketplace, white women's historically contingent relationship to property rights, legacies of ownership of black bodies and appropriation of non-white labor, and the tension between dance's ephemerality and its reproducibility.
Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces
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In Kinesthetic City, author SanSan Kwan explores the contentious nature of Chineseness in diaspora through the lens of moving bodies as they relate to place, time, and identity. She locates her study in five Chinese urban sites--Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, New York's Chinatown, and the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles--at momentous historical turning points to parse out key similarities and differences in the construction of Chineseness. The moving bodies she considers are not only those in performances by some of the most well-known Chinese dance companies in these cities, but also her own as she navigates urban Chinese spaces.By focusing primarily on kinesthesia--the body's awareness of motion--to gather information rather than more traditional modes of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, she highlights the importance of motion in the determination of space. In examining in these specific places at these precise historical moments, Kwan illuminates how moving bodies contribute to the production of those places and those moments. For Kwan, Chinese communities in diaspora provide particularly salient examples of how when and where our bodies are help to determine who we are. Whether engaged in otherwise unremarkable walking or in highly choreographed acts of political protest, human movement exists in dialogue with the kinesthetic of these city spaces, helping Chinese communities make meaning of themselves away from mainland China.As a whole, Kinesthetic City offers dance studies ways to extend movement analysis to study not only concert, folk or social dance, but also quotidian movement and urban flow.
Choreographing in Color: Filipinos, Hip-Hop, and the Cultural Politics of Euphemism
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In Choreographing in Color , J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo shifts attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and U.S. imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, subservient wives, and natural dancers and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and Hip-Hop? Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Perillo analyzes the conditions of possibility that gave rise to Filipino dance phenomena across viral, migrant, theatrical, competitive, and diplomatic performance in the Philippines and diaspora. Advocating for serious engagements with the dancing body, Perillo rethinks a staple of Hip-Hop's regulation, the "euphemism," as a mode of social critique for understanding how folks have engaged with both racial histories of colonialism and gendered labor migration. Figures of euphemism - the zombie, hero, robot, and judge - constitute a way of seeing Filipino Hip-Hop as contiguous with a multi-racial repertoire of imperial crossing, thus uncovering the ways Black dance intersects Filipino racialization and reframing the ongoing, contested underdog relationship between Filipinos and U.S. global power. Choreographing in Color therefore reveals how the Filipino dancing body has come to be, paradoxically, both globally recognized and indiscernible.
Flexible Bodies: British South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neoliberalism
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Flexible Bodies honors the lives and labor of British South Asian dancers and celebrates their contributions to a distinct and dynamic sector of British dance. Drawing on expertise gained from over seven years dancing in Britain, author Anusha Kedhar presents a multifaceted picture of British South Asian dance as its own distinctive genre.ÂAnalyzing dance works, dance films, rehearsals, and touring - alongside immigration policy, arts funding initiatives, and global economic conditions - Flexible Bodies traces shifts in British South Asian dance from 1990s "Cool Britannia" multiculturalism to fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis and, more recently, the anti-immigration rhetoric leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Kedhar draws on over a decade of interviews and conversations with dancers in Britain as well as in-depth choreographic analysis of major dance works to reveal the creative ways in which British South Asian dancers negotiate neoliberal, multicultural dance markets through an array of flexible bodily practices. Providing a new, critical dance studies lens through which to view the precarious economic, racial, national, and legal positions of South Asians in Britain, Flexible BodiesÂultimately argues for centering dance labor in studies of neoliberalism.
Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop
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The dance circle (called the cypher) is a common signifier of breaking culture, known more for its spectacular moves than as a ritual practice with foundations in Africanist aesthetics. Yet those foundations - evident in expressive qualities like call and response, the aural kinesthetic, theimperative to be original, and more - are essential to cyphering's enduring presence on the global stage. What can cyphers activate beyond the spectacle? What lessons do cyphers offer about moving through and navigating the social world? And what possibilities for the future do they animate? With aninterdisciplinary reach and a riff on physics, author Imani Kai Johnson centers the voices of practitioners in a study of breaking events in cities across the US, Canada, and parts of Europe.Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop draws on over a decade of research and provides a detailed look into the vitality of Africanist aesthetics and the epistemological possibilities of the ritual circle.
Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop
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Popular music compels, it entertains, and it has the power to attract and move audiences. With that in mind, the editors of Indigenous Pop showcase the contributions of American Indian musicians to popular forms of music, including jazz, blues, country-western, rock and roll, reggae, punk, and hip hop. From Joe Shunatona and the United States Indian Reservation Orchestra to Jim Pepper, from Buffy Saint-Marie to Robbie Robertson, from Joy Harjo to Lila Downs, Indigenous Pop vividly addresses the importance of Native musicians and popular musical genres, establishing their origins and discussing what they represent. Arranged both chronologically and according to popular generic forms, the book gives Indigenous pop a broad new meaning. In addition to examining the transitive influences of popular music on Indigenous expressive forms, the contributors also show ways that various genres have been shaped by what some have called the "Red Roots" of American-originated musical styles. This recognition of mutual influence extends into the ways of understanding how music provides methodologies for living and survival. Each in-depth essay in the volume zeros in on a single genre and in so doing exposes the extraordinary whole of Native music. This book showcases the range of musical genres to which Native musicians have contributed and the unique ways in which their engagement advances the struggle for justice and continues age-old traditions of creative expression.
Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies
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Reimagining how we understand and write about the Indigenous listening experience? Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the "whiteness of sound studies," Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism's "tin ear" that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, Hungry Listening examines structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, Hungry Listening offers examples of "doing sovereignty" in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibition, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence. Throughout the book, Robinson shows how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, he demands a reorientation toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are here sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space.
Sympathy and Synchrony: Music's Promise for the Future Tribes of Hominina
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Music is not only universal among all existing cultures, it is found universally throughout the written record, and archaeological remains of musical activity have been found in nearly every settlement uncovered. There is even evidence to suggest that music predates our species, beginning as early as Homo ergaster. Yet, if Homo sapiens learned music from another human species, who did that species learn it from? Is it possible to trace the origins of music, or to discover why music has been with us for so long? Today, from the moment we are born, we are predisposed to music. In fact, reaction to auditory stimuli begins before we are born, and thus we enter the world eagerly seeking rhythmic patterns and melodic contours. Once we locate our first rhythmic pattern (within twenty minutes or so) human infants are capable not only of identifying patterns, but also of replicating those patterns. This process of matching our body with an external rhythm is known as entrainment. Human-to-human entrainment using music, furthermore, can occur both with intimate relations and with complete strangers. Musical "communication" via entrainment can also occur across cultural and geographical boundaries, across racial and ethnic groups, across gender differences, and across wide age gaps. Why should this be the case? Sympathy and Synchrony seeks to understand the role of music in our lives. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, Brian Harlan uncovers the essential function of music, and speculates about how we might use this new understanding to enrich our lives in the future.
Identity and Diversity in New Music: The New Complexities
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Identity and Diversity in New Music: The New Complexities aims to enrich the discussion of how musicians and educators can best engage with audiences, by addressing issues of diversity and identity that have played a vital role in the reception of new music, but have been little-considered to date. Marilyn Nonken offers an innovative theoretical approach that considers how the environments surrounding new music performances influence listeners' experiences, drawing on work in ecological psychology. Using four case studies of influential new music ensembles from across the twentieth century, she considers how diversity arises in the musical environment, its impact on artists and creativity, and the events and engagement it makes possible. Ultimately, she connects theory to practice with suggestions for how musicians and educators can make innovative music environments inclusive.
Applying Karnatic Rhythmical Techniques to Western Music
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Most classical musicians, whether in orchestral or ensemble situations, will have to face a piece by composers such as Ligeti, Messiaen, Varèse or Xenakis, while improvisers face music influenced by Dave Holland, Steve Coleman, Aka Moon, Weather Report, Irakere or elements from the Balkans, India, Africa or Cuba. Rafael Reina argues that today's music demands a new approach to rhythmical training, a training that will provide musicians with the necessary tools to face, with accuracy, more varied and complex rhythmical concepts, while keeping the emotional content. Reina uses the architecture of the South Indian Karnatic rhythmical system to enhance and radically change the teaching of rhythmical solfege at a higher education level and demonstrates how this learning can influence the creation and interpretation of complex contemporary classical and jazz music. The book is designed for classical and jazz performers as well as creators, be they composers or improvisers, and is a clear and complete guide that will enable future solfege teachers and students to use these techniques and their methodology to greatly improve their rhythmical skills. An accompanying website of audio examples helps to explain each technique. For examples of composed and improvised pieces by students who have studied this book, as well as concerts by highly acclaimed karnatic musicians, please copy this link to your browser: http://www.contemporary-music-through-non-western-techniques.com/pages/1587-video-recordings
Women in Audio
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Women in Audiofeatures almost 100 profiles and stories of audio engineers who are women and have achieved success throughout the history of the trade. Beginning with a historical view, the book covers the achievements of women in various audio professions, then focuses on organizations that support and train women and girls in the industry. What follows are eight chapters divided by discipline highlighting accomplished women in various audio fields: radio, sound for film and television, music recording and electronic music, hardware and software design, acoustics, live sound and sound for theater, education, audio for games, virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality as well as immersive sound. Women in Audiois a valuable resource for professionals of all levels, educators and students looking to gain insight into the careers of trailblazing women in audio-related fields and represents required reading for those looking to add diversity to their music technology programs.
The African Imagination in Music
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The world of Sub-Saharan African music is immensely rich and diverse, containing a plethora of repertoires and traditions. In The African Imagination in Music, renowned music scholar Kofi Agawu offers an introduction to the major dimensions of this music and the values upon which it rests.Agawu leads his readers through an exploration of the traditions, structural elements, instruments, and performative techniques that characterize the music. In sections that focus upon rhythm, melody, form, and harmony, the essential parts of African music come into relief. While traditional music,the backbone of Africa's musical thinking, receives the most attention, Agawu also supplies insights into popular and art music in order to demonstrate the breadth of the African musical imagination. Close readings of a variety of songs, including an Ewe dirge, an Aka children's song, and Fela's'Suffering and Smiling' supplement the broader discussion.The African Imagination in Music foregrounds a hitherto under-reported legacy of recordings and insists on the necessity of experiencing music as sound in order to appreciate and understand it fully. Accordingly, a Companion Website features important examples of the music discussed in detail in thebook. Accessibly and engagingly written for a general audience, The African Imagination in Music is poised to renew interest in Black African music and to engender discussion of its creative underpinnings by Africanists, ethnomusicologists, music theorists and musicologists.
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
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A groundbreaking collection of essays in feminist music criticism, this book addresses problems of gender and sexuality in repertoires ranging from the early seventeenth century to rock and performance art. OC . . . this is a major book . . . McClaryOCOs] achievement borders on the miraculous.OCO The Village VoiceOC No one will read these essays without thinking about and hearing music in new and interesting ways. Exciting reading for adventurous students and staid professionals.OCO ChoiceOC Feminine Endings, a provocative OCysexual politicsOCO of Western classical or art music, rocks conservative musicology at its core. No review can do justice to the wealth of ideas and possibilities McClaryOCOs] book presents. All music-lovers should read it, and cheer.OCO The WomenOCOs Review of BooksMcClary writes with a racy, vigorous, and consistently entertaining style. . . . What she has to say specifically about the music and the text is sharp, accurate, and telling; she hears what takes place musically with unusual sensitivity.-The New York Review of Books"
Articles + Essays
Ewell, Philip A. "Music Theory and the White Racial Frame." Music Theory Online 26, no. 2 (2020).
Fitch, W. "Dance, Music, Meter and Groove: A Forgotten Partnership." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 10 (2016): 64.
Girard, Aaron. "Music as a (Science as a) Liberal Art at Princeton." ZGMTH 7 / Sonderausgabe [Special Issue], 31–52. November 1, 2010.
Grim, Jennifer. "Classical Music’s Racial Awakening – Was It All a Mirage?" I Care If You Listen. November 16, 2022.
Hisama, Ellie. "Life Outside the Canon? A Walk on the Wild Side." Music Theory Online: The Online Journal of the Society for Music Theory 6, no. 3 (2000).
Lewis, George E. “New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps.” Outer National. 2020.
Morrison, Matthew D. "(De)Constructing Musicology’s Borders along the Color Line.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65 (2012): 849-856.
O'Hara, William. "Music Theory and the Epistemology of the Internet; or, Analyzing Music Under the New Thinkpiece Regime." Analitica 10 (2018).
Wood, Robert Jackson. “The Stubborn Classism of Classical Music.” The New Republic. December 10, 2020.
Blog Posts + Other Informal Writings
Films, Videos, + Webinars
“5. Panel II with Q&A: Decolonizing the Curating Discourse in Europe.” YouTube video, 1:13:08. October 20, 2020.
Weisbard, Eric. “Alex Ross and Kira Thurman on Afro-Wagnerism for Popular Music Books in Process Series, 9/22.” YouTube video, 1:12:49. September 22, 2020.
Organizations + Initiatives
Reading + Resource Lists
Beyoncé's Lemonade and Information Resources [Decker Library, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)]
Sweat
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In one of the poorest cities in America, Reading, Pennsylvania, a group of down-and-out factory workers struggles to keep their present lives in balance, ignorant of the financial devastation looming in their near futures. Set in 2008, the powerful crux of this new play is knowing the fate of the characters long before it's even in their sights. Based on Nottage's extensive research and interviews with real residents of Reading, Sweat is a topical reflection of the present and poignant outcome of America's economic decline.
Notes from the Field
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"Smith's powerful style of living journalism uses the collective, cathartic nature of the theater to move us from despair toward hope." --The Village Voice Anna Deavere Smith's extraordinary form of documentary theater shines a light on injustices by portraying the real-life people who have experienced them. "One of her most ambitious and powerful works on how matters of race continue to divide and enslave the nation" (Variety). Smith renders a host of figures who have lived and fought the system that pushes students of color out of the classroom and into prisons. (As Smith has put it: "Rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated.") Using people's own words, culled from interviews and speeches, Smith depicts Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who eulogized Freddie Gray; Niya Kenny, a high school student who confronted a violent police deputy; activist Bree Newsome, who took the Confederate flag down from the South Carolina State House grounds; and many others. Their voices bear powerful witness to a great iniquity of our time--and call us to action with their accounts of resistance and hope.
Critical Plays: Embodied Research for Social Change
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Critical Plays is the systematic study of one (fictional) classroom culture populated by six students and their two professors, imaginatively conceived from interviews, experience, observation and thematic analysis, and shaped into performance text. This play-as-research-text aims to provide an encounter both creative and scholarly for readers. The characters who populate it are drawn from the authors' lived experiences as researchers, teachers, and performance makers.
Articles + Essays
Aucoin, Don. "What Racism in Theater Looks Like, and How to Dismantle It." The Boston Globe. July 2, 2020.
Blog Posts + Other Informal Writings
Films, Videos, + Webinars
Talking Back: A six-part web series that reveals the growing movement for justice in the theatre field [artEquity]
Organizations + Initiatives
Reading + Resource Lists
