CultureTalk with Anna Deavere Smith and Julia Wolfe: The Artist's Voice in Times of Crisis

Following her one-woman presentation the previous evening, playwright, actor, and educator Anna Deavere Smith will be joined by Julia Wolfe, composer, educator, and recipient of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music, in CultureTalk, an exploration of the ideas surrounding the arts and culture. Lisa Gaye Dixon, Producer/Chair of the Illinois Acting Program and Associate Professor in Theatre, will serve as moderator. This discussion is presented in collaboration with the Office of the Dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts, the Center for Advanced Study, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

Smith is the founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University (NYU) where she is also university professor at Tisch School of the Arts. This facilitated conversation will provide a special opportunity to hear perspectives from “the American theater’s most dynamic and sophisticated oral historian” in the context of the complexities and challenges of our own time (The New York Times).

A MacArthur Fellow and Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year, Julia Wolfe is the co-founder/co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can and the Artistic Director of Music Composition at NYU Steinhardt. Wolfe's 2019 large-scale work for orchestra and women's chorus, Fire in my mouth, was described as "a monumental achievement in high musical drama, among the most commandingly imaginative and emotively potent works of any kind that I've ever experienced" (The Nation Magazine).

This performance will last approximately one hour and 15 minutes with no intermission.

Don't miss Anna Deavere Smith on Tuesday, February 18, 2020, at Krannert Center where she will use her singular brand of theatre to explore issues of community, character, and diversity in America through living portraits of both legendary and everyday people.