Bonnie Marranca is a New York City-based critic and publisher and the editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, which she co-founded in 1976. [1] She has written several collections of criticism, including Performance Histories (2008), Ecologies of Theatre (2012), and Timelines (2021). Her 1984 book Theatrewritings received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. [2] Marranca has edited numerous anthologies of dramatic texts and criticism including New Europe: Plays from the Continent (2009), Plays for the End of the Century (1996), The Hudson Valley Reader (1995), and American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard (1981), in addition to The Theatre of Images (1977), a seminal collection featuring Robert Wilson, Lee Breuer, and Richard Foreman—early exponents of what was later termed postdramatic theatre. Published collections of her interviews include Conversations with Meredith Monk (2014) and Conversations on Art and Performance (1999). Marranca's essays have been translated into over twenty languages.
Marranca received a B.A. in English from Montclair State University before earning an M.A. in Theatre from Hunter College. She also studied at the University of Copenhagen. She later enrolled in Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York, but withdrew in order to found Performing Arts Journal (with Gautam Dasgupta) and begin a professional career in arts publishing. In 1990, Marranca received the Witkacy Prize. A Fulbright Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, Marranca was the recipient of the 2011 ATHE Excellence in Editing Award for Sustained Achievement, and was awarded the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship in the United Kingdom. [3] Most recently, she was a professor of theatre at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. [4] Marranca has previously taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, New York University, Duke University, the University of California-San Diego, Free University of Berlin, the Autonomous University of Barcelona Institute for Theatre, the University of Bucharest, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Anthony Robert Kushner is an American author, playwright, and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1993 for his play Angels in America, then adapted it into a 2003 miniseries. He has collaborated with director Steven Spielberg on the films Munich (2005), Lincoln (2012), and West Side Story (2021), the former two earning him nominations for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013.
Heiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. His "enigmatic, fragmentary pieces" are a significant contribution to postmodern drama and postdramatic theatre.
Johannes Birringer is an independent media choreographer and artistic director of AlienNation Co., a multimedia ensemble that has collaborated on various site-specific and cross-cultural performance and installation projects since 1993. He lives and works in Houston and London.
Jack David Zipes is a professor emeritus of German, comparative literature, and cultural studies, who has published and lectured on German literature, critical theory, German Jewish culture, children's literature, and folklore. In the latter part of his career he translated two major editions of the tales of the Brothers Grimm and focused on fairy tales, their evolution, and their social and political role in civilizing processes.
Carolee Schneemann was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneeman was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, stating, "I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." Her works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the London National Film Theatre, and many other venues.
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, originally Performing Arts Journal, is a triannual academic journal of the arts that was established in 1976 by Gautam Dasgupta and Bonnie Marranca, who still is the editor-in-chief. It has taken a particular interest in contemporary performance art and features expanded coverage in video, drama, dance, installations, media, and music and publishes essays, interviews and artists' writings, reviews of new exhibitions, performances, and books, and also plays and performance texts from the United States and elsewhere. The journal is published by MIT Press. PAJ Publications, the journal's book division, regularly publishes plays and essay collections on theater and performance.
Robert Sanford Brustein is an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator. He founded both the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remains a creative consultant, and was the theatre critic for The New Republic. He comments on politics for the Huffington Post.
Mac Wellman, born John McDowell Wellman on March 7, 1945 in Cleveland, Ohio, is an American playwright, author, and poet. He is best known for his experimental work in the theater which rebels against theatrical conventions, often abandoning such traditional elements as plot and character altogether. In 1990, he received an Obie Award for Best New American Play. In 1991, he received another Obie Award for Sincerity Forever. He has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award, and the 2003 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement, as well as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2003).
Rachel Rosenthal was a French-born interdisciplinary and performance artist, teacher, actress, and animal rights activist based in Los Angeles.
Tracie Morris is an American poet. She is also a performance artist, vocalist, voice consultant, creative non-fiction writer, critic, scholar, bandleader, actor and non-profit consultant. Morris is from Brooklyn, New York. Morris' experimental sound poetry is progressive and improvisational. She is a tenured professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Nada M. Shabout is an American art historian specializing in modern Iraqi art. She has been a professor of art history at the University of North Texas since 2002. She is the president and co-founding board member of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art (AMCA) of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey.
Mimi Reisel Gladstein is a professor of English and Theatre Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her specialties include authors such as Ayn Rand and John Steinbeck, as well as women's studies, theatre arts and 18th-century British literature. In 2011 she was named to the El Paso Historical Hall of Honor.
The Mahabharata is a French play, based on the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, by Jean-Claude Carrière, which was first staged in a quarry just outside Avignon in a production by the English director Peter Brook. The play, which is nine hours long in performance, toured the world for four years. For two years the show was performed both in French and in English. The play is divided into three parts: The Game of Dice, The Exile in the Forest and The War. In 1989, it was adapted for television as a six-hour mini series. Later, it was reduced to about three hours as a film for theatrical and DVD release. The screenplay was the result of eight years' work by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Marie-Hélène Estienne.
Marianne Weems is the artistic director of the New York-based Obie Award-winning performance and media company, The Builders Association, founded in 1994. She is a director of theater and opera and a professor at UC Santa Cruz.
Sanja Nikčević is a Croatian theatre critic and distinguished professor of theatre history in the drama department of the Arts Academy of Osijek, Croatia. She is also head of the drama module of the doctoral program in literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Osijek. She is the president of the Croatian Critics' Association and Governing Board of Matica hrvatska. Nikčević lives in Zagreb, Croatia.
Ronald Rand is an American stage and film actor, educator, director, playwright, librettist, producer, and newspaper publisher. A U.S. Cultural Goodwill Ambassador, founder and publisher of the newspaper, The Soul of the American Actor, he is also the author of Create: How Extraordinary People Live to Create and Create to Live, Acting Teachers of America, and Solo Transformation on Stage: A Journey into the Organic Process of the Art of Transformation.
Moira Roth was a feminist art historian and art critic who was Trefethen Professor of Art History at Mills College in Oakland, California from 1985 to 2017. She taught at the University of California, San Diego from 1974 to 1985. She was educated at the London School of Economics in England, and received a B.A. in sociology and an M.A. from New York University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. She wrote extensively on contemporary art, editing The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980, A Source Book, published by Astro Artz (1983). Her collection of essays, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, was published, with a commentary by Jonathan D. Katz, by Psychology Press (1998), exploring the construction of masculinity and conflicting identities. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 1997, and the National Recognition in the Arts Award from the College Art Association in 2006. She appears in Lynn Hershman Leeson's 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.
Jacqueline Bishop is a writer, visual artist and photographer, from Jamaica who now lives in New York City, where she is a professor at the School of Liberal Studies at New York University (NYU). She is the founder of Calabash, an online journal of Caribbean art and letters, housed at NYU, and also writes for the Huffington Post and the Jamaica Observer Arts Magazine. In 2016 her book The Gymnast and Other Positions won the nonfiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Theodora Skipitares is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist. Trained as a sculptor and theater designer, she began creating autobiographical solo performances in the late 1970s. She moved on to examine diverse social and political themes using a wide variety of puppets, of all sizes. She has created 26 original works featuring various forms of puppetry, original commissioned music, video, and documentary texts.
Laurence Senelick is an American scholar, educator, actor and director. He is the author, editor, or translator of many books.