SPEAKERS for Saturday, March 1 panel of scholars, artists, and activists:
Amie Dowling is Chair of the Performing Arts and Social Justice Department at the University of San Francisco, as well as Artist in Residence at the San Francisco Jails and San Quentin Prison. As a member of the Dance Exchange, she performed and taught throughout the United States and Europe. In 2001 she co-founded The Performance Project, a non-profit organization that collaborates with people who are incarcerated on the creation of evening-length original dance/theater pieces. Ms. Dowling’s most recent collaboration with film maker Austin Forbord, the dance/theater film, Well Contested Sites, received the 2013 International Screen Dance Festival Jury Prize and has been presented at dance film festivals nationally and internationally. The film has been used in conjunction with its curriculum guide in high school classrooms throughout the U.S. to initiate dialogue about the school to prison pipeline. Ms. Dowling is a contributing author to the anthology, Recreating New Lives: Theater and Incarceration, published by Jessica Kingston Press. She recently received funding from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Jesuit Foundation, Fonds Soziokultur, and a choreography fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Reggie Daniels was born in San Francisco, and graduated from Riordan High School and San Francisco City College. Currently he is pursuing a master’s degree at USF School of Management in Business. He is a Manalive Facilitator and case manager at the San Bruno County Jail and a Community Works employee. After struggling with the criminal justice system for fifteen years, Reggie discovered Roads to Recovery, an in-custody substance abuse program. This was followed by a year-long peer advocacy program called Manalive, a violence prevention program for men to organize against violence in their homes and communities. He has been part of several artistic projects including MANALIVE and the dance /theater film Well Contested Sites. He hopes his story of transformation from violent survivor to community advocate will empower others to find peace through artistic expression. Reggie has received the KQED Black History Month Local Heroes Award and the “Change Agent” Award by Bayview Hunter’s Point Multipurpose Senior Services, and his story was featured in the KQED radio program In the Trenches.
Dr. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy is a scholar and activist in education, youth culture, and public policy. His research and commentary have been sought for television, radio, and community forums because they concentrate on expanding conversations, deepening analysis, and creating traction towards racial and gender equality. He is an assistant professor of Sociology and Black Studies at the City College of New York – CUNY. His talks go beyond “achievement gaps” and “diversity” to highlight the ways that institutions and individuals can foster communities through challenging privileges and building common ground. His forthcoming book Inequality in the Promised Land (Stanford University Press, Summer 2014) looks at the ways suburban school districts and families deal with issues of racial and economic diversity. As a gender scholar and activist he looks at the ways that boys and men can develop healthy masculinities in the negotiating the social world. He heads the Ndugu and Nzinga African rites of passage program for men and women in New York City. Through his speaking, writing and commentary Dr. Lewis-McCoy’s work analyzes some of the most pressing issues facing the African Diaspora. His commentary has been featured in media outlets such as US World News Report, Diversity in Higher Education, National Public Radio, Ebony.com, The Root, Fox News, Aljazeera America, the Houston Chronicle and the Detroit Free Press. He has been published in multiple journals and scholarly anthologies. He regularly updates his award winning blog, www.uptownnotes.com. Dr. Lewis-McCoy holds a Bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College and a PhD in Sociology and Public Policy from the University of Michigan.
Craig Cullinane is a social justice and diversity educator living in New York City. He is also the Program Manager for Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), which brings theater, dance, music, creative writing and other arts to people in prison at five corrections facilities north of New York City. Each week, Craig spends several evenings with incarcerated men and women, supporting them as they develop critical life skills through their participation in the arts. Craig received a Master’s Degree from The SIT Graduate Institute, where he studied social justice and intercultural relations.
Austin Forbord is a video artist, filmmaker, and choreographer. He has received numerous awards and honors for his work in each of these fields, including an Emmy nomination in 2013 for the documentary film Stage Left: A Story of Theater in San Francisco, an Isadora Duncun Award nomination for performance in 2001, visual design in 2003 and the award in 2006 for his design contribution to Deborah Slater’s House of Memoires, and the Jury prize at ADF’s 2013 International Screen Dance Festival for his short film Well Contested Sites. Austin has performed with a diverse group of San Francisco based companies including his own company Rapt and AWD, as well as Scott Wells & Dancers, On-Site Dance Co, Kunst-Stoff and Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband. He has created video designs for performances by Opera Parallele, Asolo Rep, Joe Goode Performance Group, Robert Moses’ Kin, Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband, Stephen Pelton, Erling Wold, Liss Fain Dance, Kunst-Stoff and Motion-Lab. As the Artistic and Executive Director of Rapt Productions, also a film company, Austin directed and edited dance films for Anna Halprin, Amie Dowling, Deborah Hull, and Tiit Helimets. Rapt is responsible for the critically acclaimed full-length documentary film, Artists in Exile: A Story of Modern Dance in San Francisco. His film Stage Left: A Story of Theater in San Francisco commissioned by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation was featured at the 2011 Mill Valley Film Festival among many others and had its broadcast premiere on KQED. Currently, he is working on Normal People, a film about Sarajevo, Bosnia. His production company Rapt Productions is the primary source for video documentation, as well video marketing and promotional materials for the San Francisco Bay Area dance community.
Vivian Nixon is Executive Director of College and Community Fellowship (CCF), an organization committed to removing individual and structural barriers to higher education for women with criminal record histories and their families. She identifies her most valued and life-changing experience as the time she spent as a peer educator in the adult basic education program at Albion State Correctional Facility in New York. Rev. Nixon is ordained by the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC) and currently serves as an associate minister at Mt. Zion AMEC in New York City. She is a Columbia University Community Scholar and has received multiple honors and awards including the John Jay Medal for Justice, the Ascend Fellowship at the Aspen Institute, the Soros Justice Fellowship, the Petra Foundation Fellowship. Her leadership activities include co-founding the Education Inside Out Coalition (EIO), a collaborative effort to increase access to higher education for justice involved students. Rev. Nixon holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the State University of New York Empire College.
PARTICIPANTS in the Symposium’s Curricular Initiative
Joanna Dee Das is a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University and a lecturer in dance at Barnard College. Prior to entering graduate school, she danced with the Tze Chun Dance Company and produced dance concerts at the Merce Cunningham Studio in New York. She is interested in the intersection of race, politics, and performance in the modern world, and her dissertation examines choreographer Katherine Dunham’s political activism. She has an article on Dunham’s work in East St. Louis forthcoming in the Journal of Urban History and has also written book reviews for Dance Research Journal, contributed entries on Dunham and Aida Overton Walker for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and edited a series of interviews with Broadway artists for the journal Studies in Musical Theatre. In addition to her scholarship and teaching, Das enjoys bringing the history of performance to a wider public. In 2009, she processed the Katherine Dunham Papers at the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center, and she is currently co-curating an exhibit on the history of American Ballet Theatre at the Library of Congress.
Jenny Reed is a graduate of the Performing Arts & Social Justice program at the University of San Francisco (USF). Over the past five years she has created and consulted on various devised dance and theater pieces, which have been presented at San Bruno Jail, USF, Climate Theater, Elsewhere Collaborative, Dance New Amsterdam, Theater for a New City, and Movement Research. Ms. Reed is a director and facilitator with Rehabilitation Through the Arts at Fishkill Correctional Facility. Currently she is co-directing Fishkill’s spring production of Death of a Salesman.
ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
Selby Wynn Schwartz, a Visiting Scholar in Performance Studies at NYU (2013-14), co-directs a new interdisciplinary program at Columbia University in University Writing and Human Rights. Her articles on dance, gender, politics, and intermedial performance have appeared in Women and Performance, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Dance Research Journal, Critical Dance/Ballet-Dance Magazine, In Dance, Dance International, and Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies: Visual Culture and the Performing Arts, and a chapter is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Screendance. In 2011, she received the Society of Dance History Scholars’ Lippincott Award for the Best English-language Article in Dance Studies. In addition to working with Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, she was the dramaturg for Monique Jenkinson’s Instrument (2012). She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and has also taught at UC Berkeley and in the LEAP program for dancers.
EC Crandall co-directs the pilot program “Readings in Gender and Sexuality” in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University. Their poems have been published in journals and anthologies such as PANK, Shampoo, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry. Crandall co-hosts the Brooklyn house reading series Rumor, with Amanda Davidson and Diana Cage, and was recently awarded a 2014 Emerging Poets Fellowship at Poets House in NYC.