Annie Lanzillotto

Last updated

Annie Lanzillotto
Annie Lanzillotto crop.jpg
(2012)
BornJune 1, 1963 (1963-06) (age 61)
Bronx, New York, United States
OccupationAuthor, performance artist, poet, song writer, teacher
Period1990s ---
Notable works Grandma Nunzio in Tony n' Tina's Wedding Times Square (2013). [1] L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir , [2] Schistsong, [3] a'Schapett at The Arthur Avenue Retail Market, How To Wake Up a Marine in a Foxhole, [4] and The Flat Earth: Wheredafffhuck Did New York Go? [5]
Website
annielanzillotto.com

Annie Lanzillotto (born June 1, 1963) is an American author, poet, songwriter, director, actor, podcaster, and performance artist.

Contents

Her book, L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir was published by State University of New York Press. [2] 2013. Her book of poetry, Schistsong was published by Bordighera Press. [6] 2013. Her double flip book of poetry and prose, Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light and Pitch Roll Yaw was published by Guernica Editions 2018. Her podcast Annie's Story Cave commenced while sheltering in place alone in 2020. She is the Artistic Director of Street Cry Inc.

Lanzillotto is a member of Actors' Equity, [7] Dramatists Guild of America, [8] PEN America, [9] Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, Malìa: a Collective of Italian American Women, [10] The Italian American Writers Association (IAWA), [11] a blogger for i-Italy.com, [12] and has been a Writer-in-Residence at Hedgebrook, [13] Santa Fe Art Institute [14] and New Jersey City University.

Lanzillotto has shared her history for the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College's Documenting Lesbian Lives Oral History Project. [15] She has taught Solo-Theater at The Actor's Theatre of Louisville.

Early years

Annie Lanzillotto was born in the Bronx, New York. She is the fourth of four children. She is a third generation Italian American whose grandparents came from the Bari province of Italy; Acquaviva delle Fonti, Cassano delle Murge, and Bitetto. Her father, Joseph Rocco Lanzillotto was an iceman, boiler repairman, and U.S. Marine who fought in World War II in the Battle of Okinawa. Her mother, Rachel Claire Petruzzelli Lanzillotto was a hairdresser and manicurist. Her father suffered from PTSD. After her parents' vicious divorce when she was twelve, Lanzillotto's mother raised her alone on welfare.

Lanzillotto and her mother moved to Yonkers, New York, where Sister Raymond Aloysis trained and coached her into becoming an oratorical champion. [16] She won the National Catholic Forensic League's New York State Championship in 1977. Lanzillotto attended Roosevelt High School in Yonkers where she began to create performance art during her pledges to sorority Sigma Phi Nu. She can be heard on iTunes [17] talking about her early years, through StoryCorps.

Lanzillotto was influenced by punk rock and Joan Jett. She graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts with honors in Medical Anthropology. As a freshman at Brown University in 1981, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease and in 1982, created the Group Independent Study Project, [18] "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Cancer But Were Afraid To Ask." This project was funded with "Odyssey Grants" in education for three years. Lanzillotto developed the curriculum with Dr. Stephanie LaFarge [19] [20] and Dr. James Crowley of Rhode Island Hospital.

She studied at The American University in Cairo, Egypt, where she cross-dressed in order to complete her fieldwork of Schistosomiasis unfettered. In 1986, Lanzillotto received the Eva A. Mooar Award for the graduating Brown University female senior who had the most impact on the community. [21] During her university years, Lanzillotto took flying lessons and earned a private pilot's licence.

Lanzillotto studied writing in New York City with her mentor Denya Cascio. She continued her studies at Sarah Lawrence College where Lanzillotto studied fiction writing with Joseph Papaleo, poetry with Joan Larkin and theater with Shirley Kaplan. Lanzillotto taught at Sing Sing, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, and Bayview Correctional Facilities through Mercy College Extension Programs, and in Harlem and Brooklyn through The New York City Ballet Education Department. She graduated with a Master's of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 1990 and delivered the commencement speech, taking on the character of Sarah Lawrence herself.

Career

Lanzillotto moved to New York City in 1987. Early influences were downtown performance artists Mark Ameen and Penny Arcade. Lanzillotto was a member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP). In 1993, she developed a literacy program at Housing Works, where she met theater director Victoria MacElwayne who directed Lanzillotto's first solo show, Confessions of a Bronx Tomboy: My Throwing Arm (This Useless Expertise) which debuted at Manhattan Class Company MCC Theater's Performance Mix and Under One Roof Theater with live sound action by Eliza Ladd.

Lanzillotto's practice "Action Writing," brought writing into the public sphere as performance on oversized scrolls of paper on which she would write to live music and perform improvised recitations of the text. She performed poetry and one-woman shows at: Pyramid Club, Dixon Place, The Kitchen, Performance Space 122 Avant-Garde-Arama, The Knitting Factory, Smalls Jazz Club, Revolution Books, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Worker's United 99th and 100th Triangle Fire Memorial, Remember the Triangle Factory Fire Coalition's 99th memorial at Judson Memorial Church. Lanzillotto's vision of 146 Shirtwaist-Kites became a community art project memorializing the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. [22] [23]

From November 1995 until November 1997, Annie Lanzillotto created a site-specific community-based performance-art project, "a'Schapett!" at The Arthur Avenue Retail Market Project, in a once thriving Italian neighborhood in the Bronx. [24] This was a site-specific community-based performance project where Lanzillotto brought artists into the market during business hours. She directed live scenarios both scripted and improvised, with local senior citizens, merchants and a variety of visiting opera singers, trapeze artists, musicians, dancers, and performance artists. The project came out of Annie's obsession of the vocality of pushcart peddlers. The project was commissioned by Dancing in the Streets, [25] funded by Rockefeller Foundation Multi Arts Production Grant. Lanzillotto has since written about this work in New Village Press's Works of HeART. [26] [27] was created to bridge the downtown avant-garde performance scene of New York City with the working class labor of butchers and bakers. [28] Her community-based performance work at Arthur Avenue is featured in Molly O'Neill's film New York: A Taste of the City. [29]

Seminal to her political development was the Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Program [30] in which she was a fellow in 2000.

In 2008, she wrote and performed in The Flat Earth: "WheredaFFFhuck Did New York Go?" [31] [32] [33] [34]

Lanzillotto performed songs and stories at the first Gay Pride event at Hoboken Public Library. [35]

In 2013, her site-specific "Blue Mailbox Book Crawl" took the audience on a processional walk around the East Village where Lanzillotto sat atop blue corner mailboxes and told stories from her book L is for Lion . This work was supported by Franklin Furnace and City Lore. Later that year Lanzillotto played Grandma Nunzio in Tony n' Tina's Wedding in Times Square, directed by Tony Lauria, and produced by Joe Corcoran. Lanzillotto's approach of performance was described as "She's not acting. She's living.", [36]

Personal life

Lanzillotto is a lesbian who had a 16-year relationship with choreographer/artist Audrey Kindred, then became a full-time caregiver to her hairdresser/manicurist mother Rachel Lanzillotto. Annie Lanzillotto survived Hodgkin's Lymphoma and thyroid cancer and has been a patient at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City since she was 18 years old.

Awards, grants, and honors

Works

Books

Essays

Discography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Bancroft</span> American actress (1931–2005)

Anne Bancroft was an American actress and director. Respected for her acting prowess and versatility, Bancroft received an Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two Tony Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Cannes Film Festival Award. She is one of 24 thespians to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire</span> 1911 fire in New York City

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, falling, or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian or Jewish immigrant women and girls aged 14 to 23; of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria "Sara" Maltese.

Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jessica Hagedorn</span> American playwright

Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn is an American playwright, writer, poet, and multimedia performance artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Jonas</span> American visual artist (born 1936)

Joan Jonas is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, "a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s". Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.

Caridad de la Luz, a.k.a. "La Bruja", is a Nuyorican poet, playwright, actress and activist. She is considered one of the leading spoken word poets in the world. In 2005, El Diario La Prensa, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in New York City, named De la Luz as one of the "Fifty Most Distinguished Latinas in the United States".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claudia Rankine</span> American poet, essayist, and playwright (born 1963)

Claudia Rankine is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New York shirtwaist strike of 1909</span> Labor strike

The New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, also known as the Uprising of the 20,000, was a labour strike primarily involving Jewish women working in New York shirtwaist factories. It was the largest strike by female American workers up to that date. Led by Clara Lemlich and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and supported by the National Women's Trade Union League of America (NWTUL), the strike began in November 1909.

Joan Larkin is an American poet and playwright. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion in the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. She is now in her fourth decade of teaching writing. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniela Gioseffi</span> American writer

Daniela Gioseffi is an American poet, novelist and performer who won the American Book Award in 1990 for Women on War; International Writings from Antiquity to the Present. She has published 16 books of poetry and prose and won a PEN American Center's Short Fiction prize (1995), and The John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry (2007).

New Village Press is a not-for-profit book publisher founded in 2005 in the San Francisco Bay Area now based in New York, New York. It began as a national publishing project of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), an educational non-profit organization founded in 1981.

Ruth Sergel is an American director, writer, activist, and interactive technology designer in New York City. She works across multiple mediums to exploit technical prowess while creating opportunities for community engagement. Her work has been supported by NYSCA, The Jerome Foundation, and the Experimental Television Center amongst others. Her films were screened at MOMA, Tribeca Film Festival, and aired on PBS and the Interdependent Film Channel (IFC). Ruth was also a Resident Researcher at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and teaches interactive technology and video in various contexts. Her main efforts focus on art and social engagement.

Grace Cavalieri is an American poet, playwright, and radio host of the Library of Congress program The Poet and the Poem. In 2019, she was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland.

Sandra María Esteves is a Latina poet and graphic artist. She was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, and is one of the founders of the Nuyorican poetry movement. She has published collections of poetry and has conducted literary programs at New York City Board of Education, the Caribbean Cultural Center, and El Museo del Barrio. Esteves has served as the executive director of the African Caribbean Poetry Theater. She is the author of Bluestown Mockinbird Mambo and Yerba Buena. She lives in the Bronx.

Ellen Frankel was the Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) from 1991 until 2009, and also served as CEO of the JPS for 10 years. She retired in 2009 to pursue her own writing and scholarly projects, serving as JPS's first Editor Emerita.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louisa Calio</span> American poet and writer

Louisa Calio is an American poet, writer, multimedia performance artist and teacher. She has directed the Poets and Writers' Piazza for Hofstra University's Italian Experience for the past 10 years. Calio's writings have appeared internationally in anthologies, magazines and journals. She has been honored by Barnard College, Columbia University as a Feminist Who Changed America Second Wave 1963–1975. She has traveled to East and West Africa, lived in the Caribbean and documented her journeys in photographs and the written word, completing an epic poem "Journey to the Heart Waters" which was also the title of an exhibition of photos and poems that opened at Round Hill Resort in Montego Bay in 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paola Corso</span> American poet

Paola Jo (PJ) Corso is an American fiction writer, poet, photographer and literary activist. Corso is a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow, Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award Winner,, and included on the Pennsylvania Center for the Book's Literary Map. She is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry, including 'Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps,' (2020) with original photos by the author and archival photographs from the University of Pittsburgh Library; Catina's Haircut: A Novel in Stories (2010) on Library Journal’s notable list of first novels; Giovanna's 86 Circles And Other Stories (2005), a Binghamton University's John Gardner Fiction Book Award Finalist; a book of poems, Death by Renaissance (2004), and award-winning poetry collections, The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing; and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing (2012), about Pittsburgh steelworkers and garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and winner of a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Award.

Bordighera Press is an independent publisher that was founded in 1989 by Fred Gardaphé, Paolo Giordano, and Anthony Julian Tamburri. Committed to Italian and Italian American culture in North America, the press consists of four series and two journals.

Edvige Giunta is a Sicilian-American writer, educator, and literary critic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carola Woerishoffer</span> American labor activist and settlement worker

Emma Carola Woerishoffer was an American labor activist and settlement worker.

References

Notes

  1. ↑ David Gonzalez "A Role That Blurs the Lines Between Drama and Reality". The New York Times, May 25, 2014.
  2. 1 2 Annie Lanzillotto, L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir, SUNY Press: Archived June 23, 2012, at the Wayback Machine Excelsior Editions, (2013).
  3. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto, Schistsong, Bordighera Press, Via Folios, (2013).
  4. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto, How To Wake Up a Marine in a Foxhole Archived April 30, 2012, at the Wayback Machine , One Woman Show.
  5. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto, The Flat Earth: Wheredafffhuck Did New York Go? Archived May 1, 2012, at the Wayback Machine Performance.
  6. 1 2 Annie Lanzillotto, Schistsong, 2013.
  7. ↑ Actors' Equity Archived September 13, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  8. ↑ Dramatists Guild of America|
  9. ↑ "Home". September 20, 2016.
  10. ↑ Malìa: a Collective of Italian American Women
  11. ↑ Italian American Writers Association
  12. ↑ i-Italy.com blogger,
  13. ↑ Hedgebrook
  14. ↑ Santa Fe Art Institute
  15. ↑ Interviewed by Caitlin DuBois, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto. Documenting Lesbian Lives Oral History Project, Sophia Smith College, Smith College. Northampton, MA, April 3, 2011.
  16. ↑ National Catholic Forensic League's Competition Events Archived June 25, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
  17. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto. [ permanent dead link ]
  18. ↑ Group Independent Study Project, Brown University.
  19. ↑ Stephanie LaFarge is Senior Director of Counseling Services at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, The Smartest People.
  20. ↑ Stephanie LaFarge, of Project Nim.
  21. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto receives Eva A. Mooar Award Archived April 30, 2012, at the Wayback Machine .
  22. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory: and The Work of Remembering, March 22, 2008.
  23. ↑ Steven Greenhouse, "In a Tragedy, a Mission to Remember" The New York Times, March 19, 2011.
  24. ↑ Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium. Performance Research 4, 1 (1999): 1–30.
  25. ↑ Dancing in the Streets
  26. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto, 'a'Schapetti!' Final report [Arthur Avenue Retail Market Project], 1997.
  27. ↑ Lanzillotto's performance, How to Cook a Heart, described by David Gonzalez as a "Valentine to the Italian-American community of her youth" ."Where Hearts Are Worn On The Sleeve" The New York Times February 15, 1997.
  28. ↑ Gonzalez, David (May 25, 2014). "A Role That Blurs the Line Between Drama and Reality (Published 2014)". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 4, 2019.
  29. ↑ "Molly O'Neill's New York: A Taste of the City".
  30. ↑ Elizabeth Canner, Kathie deNobriga, Timothea Howard, Annie Lanzillotto, Pam McMichael & Cara Page Art, Creative, Practice, Action, and Leadership: A Next Generation Leadership Alumni Network Cooperative Inquiry
  31. ↑ Ruth McCann, "The Flat Earth Glows: Masochistically marrying New York" The Village Voice. Wednesday, July 2, 2008.
  32. ↑ Martin Denton, The Flat Earth: WheredaFFFhuck Did New York Go? nytheatre.com review, June 19, 2008.
  33. ↑ Dan Bacalzo, The Flat Earth: WheredaFFFhuck Did New York Go? Archived September 17, 2014, at the Wayback Machine Theater Mania, June 24, 2008.
  34. ↑ Stefano's Network, The Flat Earth: WheredaFFFhuck Did New York Go? Archived September 17, 2014, at the Wayback Machine June 20, 2008 Friday.
  35. ↑ Lana Rose Diaz, "Out and About" The Hudson Reporter, July 1, 2011.
  36. ↑ "A Role That Blurs the Lines Between Drama and Reality" David Gonzalez The New York Times, May 25, 2014.
  37. ↑ NYFA FELLOWS 1999
  38. ↑ Puffin Foundation
  39. ↑ Dancing In The Streets, Inc.
  40. ↑ Ann Rachele Lanzillotto, Marquis Who's Who: Biographies, when you need them, Copyright © 2012 Marquis Who's Who LLC.
  41. ↑ Philadelphia Poets Archived August 21, 2014, at the Wayback Machine
  42. ↑ "26th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists Announced". Lambda Literary. March 6, 2014. Retrieved August 2, 2024.
  43. ↑ NYFA FELLOWS 2014
  44. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto, L is For Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir, Archived June 23, 2012, at the Wayback Machine 2013.
  45. ↑ New Village Press
  46. ↑ Wallid Walla Bint, in Politics of Water: A Confluence of Women's Voices, Issue 9.4, Guest Editor: Paola Corso, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Centre for International and Security Studies, Toronto Ontario, Canada, York University, 2007.
  47. ↑ Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch, eds. Gastropolis: Food and New York City Archived February 19, 2012, at the Wayback Machine , 2007.
  48. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto, Eleven Recitations.
  49. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto Band, Blue Pill. Archived March 31, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
  50. ↑ Annie Lanzillotto and Lori Goldston, Carry My Coffee.
  51. ↑ "Swampjuice: Yankee with a Southern Peasant Soul, by Annie Lanzillotto & Washbucket Blues". Archived from the original on November 15, 2017.
  52. ↑ "Never Argue With a Jackass, by Annie Lanzillotto". Annie Lanzillotto. Retrieved June 9, 2024.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.