Hartford is the capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford metropolitan area. Census estimates since the 2010 United States census have indicated that Hartford is the fourth-largest city in Connecticut with a 2020 population of 121,054, behind the coastal cities of Bridgeport, New Haven, and Stamford.
The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university in Storrs, Connecticut. It was founded in 1881 as the Storrs Agricultural School, named after two brothers who donated the land for the school. In 1893, the school became a public land grant college, becoming the University of Connecticut in 1939. Over the following decade, social work, nursing and graduate programs were established, while the schools of law and pharmacy were also absorbed into the university. During the 1960s, UConn Health was established for new medical and dental schools. UConn is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education.
Stamford is a city in Fairfield County, Connecticut, 34 miles outside of New York City. It is Connecticut's second-most populous city, behind Bridgeport. With a population of 135,470, Stamford passed Hartford and New Haven in population as of the 2020 census. It is in the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk-Danbury metropolitan statistical area, which is part of the New York City metropolitan area.
The Boch Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit performing arts organization located in Boston, Massachusetts. It manages the historic Wang and Shubert theatres on Tremont Street in the Boston Theater District, where it offers theatre, opera, classical and popular music, comedy, dance, and Broadway musicals. The center also offers a diverse mix of educational workshops and community activities; collaborates with artists and local performing arts organizations; and, acts as a champion for the arts in the Greater Boston community by aggressively helping to make the arts an integral part of the community's collective, daily experience. It maintains partnerships with numerous arts organizations in Boston, including the Celebrity Series of Boston, Fiddlehead Theatre Company, Express Yourself, and more.
Connecticut is a state of the United States in the New England region.
UConn Health is the branch of the University of Connecticut that oversees clinical care, advanced biomedical research, and academic education in medicine. The main branch is located in Farmington, Connecticut, in the US. It includes a teaching hospital, the UConn School of Medicine, School of Dental Medicine, and Graduate School. Other community care satellite locations exist in Avon, Canton, East Hartford, Putnam, Simsbury, Southington, Storrs, Torrington, West Hartford, and Willimantic, including two urgent cares in both Storrs and Canton. The university owns and operates many smaller clinics around the state that contain UConn Medical Group, UConn Health Partners, University Dentists and research facilities. Andrew Agwunobi stepped down as the CEO of UConn Health in February 2022 after serving since 2014 for a private-sector job. Bruce Liang is UConn Heath's interim CEO and remains dean of the UConn School of Medicine.
The XL Center is a multi-purpose arena and convention center located in downtown Hartford, Connecticut. Owned by the City of Hartford, it is managed by the quasi-public Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) under a lease with the city and operated by Spectra. In December 2007, the center was renamed when the arena's naming rights were sold to XL Group insurance company in a six-year agreement. The arena is ranked the 28th largest among college basketball arenas. It opened in 1975 as the Hartford Civic Center and was originally located adjacent to Civic Center Mall, which was demolished in 2004. It consists of two facilities: the Veterans Memorial Coliseum and the Exhibition Center.
Terrence Vaughan Mann is an American theatre, film and television actor and singer. He is best known for his appearances on the Broadway stage, which include Chester Lyman in Barnum, Rum Tum Tugger in Cats, Javert in Les Misérables, The Beast in Beauty and the Beast, Chauvelin in The Scarlet Pimpernel, Charles in Pippin, Mal Beineke in The Addams Family, and The Man in the Yellow Suit in Tuck Everlasting. He has received three Tony Award nominations, an Emmy Award nomination, and an Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical.
The Daily Campus, founded in 1896, is a student-run newspaper at the University of Connecticut that has a circulation of 2,000 on weekdays during school term. The Daily Campus has the largest circulation of any college paper in Connecticut and the third-largest in New England, behind The Daily Collegian (UMass) and The Harvard Crimson. Since its creation, the newspaper has undergone several name changes, having starting as The Storrs Agricultural College Lookout, a monthly, when it published its first issue on May 11, 1896. The name was changed to The Connecticut Campus in 1915, followed by The Connecticut Daily Campus, and then finally The Daily Campus in 1984. It began publishing five days a week during the academic year in 1952 and became a morning paper in 1955.
Virginia Tanner was an American dance instructor and founder of the University of Utah Children's Dance Theatre. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, she began her formal dance training at the University of Utah. She studied with Doris Humphrey in New York City before returning to Salt Lake City in the early 1940s to establish her school for creative dance for children.
Tim Lagasse is an American director, puppeteer and puppet designer. He has worked on films and television programs for Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, Disney XD, and HBO. He is known for playing the title character on Noggin's Oobi, and Crash on Disney XD's Crash & Bernstein.
The Durham Performing Arts Center opened November 30, 2008 as the largest performing arts center in the Carolinas at a cost of $48 million. The DPAC hosts over 200 performances a year including touring Broadway productions, high-profile concert and comedy events, family shows and the American Dance Festival. Operated under the direction of Nederlander and Professional Facilities Managaement (PFM), DPAC has twice been listed as the #1 performing arts organization in the Triangle region by the Triangle Business Journal. Construction of the DPAC was part of a larger plan to redevelop downtown Durham by the Capitol Broadcasting Company, and includes other nearby properties such as the American Tobacco Historic District, the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, and the studios of the CBC-owned Fox 50 TV station.
Earl MacDonald is a Canadian pianist, composer, arranger, conductor, recording artist, and educator specializing in jazz. Described as "a magical, musical alchemist of hip hybrids", MacDonald's compositional work frequently draws upon other musical styles, fusing them with jazz. The Winnipeg native has been employed as director of jazz studies at the University of Connecticut since the fall of 2000.
The arts in Atlanta are well-represented, with a prominent presence in music, fine art, and theater.
The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry (BIMP) is a public museum of puppetry operated by the University of Connecticut and located in Storrs, Connecticut.
Albert Nels Jorgensen was an American academic administrator who served as the seventh president of the University of Connecticut (1935–1962). Its longest-serving president and its youngest at age 36 at the time of his appointment, Jorgensen led UConn's transformation from a sleepy, unaccredited agricultural college to a major modern university. UConn came into existence via the renaming of Connecticut State College in 1939. Student enrollment rose from 844 in 1935 to 11,877 in 1962—an increase of over 1400%. Opened in 1955, the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts on the university's Storrs campus was named in Jorgensen's honor. The Harriet Jorgensen Theatre is named after his wife.
Frank Willard Ballard was an American puppeteer and educator. Serving as Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut from 1956 to 1989, Ballard developed internationally renowned programs for puppetry education. Opened in 1996 and moved to a prominent new location in downtown Storrs in 2014, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry was named in his honor.
Nafe Edmund Katter was a stage actor and director who taught theatre at the University of Connecticut from 1957 to 1997. In 2000, Katter donated $1 million to build the 241-seat Nafe Katter Theatre, which opened in 2004 on UConn's campus in Storrs.
Michael Bradford is an American playwright who is a professor at the University of Connecticut and former artistic director of the Connecticut Repertory Theatre. In 2021, the Connecticut chapter of the NAACP named Bradford one of the "100 Most Influential Blacks in the State of Connecticut."
Solomiya Ivakhiv is a Ukrainian-born classical, internationally-performing violinist who holds a doctorate in musical arts and is an associate professor at the University of Connecticut as well as a professor of violin at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. In August 2021 she was awarded by presidential decree the title of Honored Artist of Ukraine by standing president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
