Rochelle Slovin is an American stage actress, and founding director of Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, New York City, which she led for 30 years, from 1981 until 2011. [1] A native New Yorker, Slovin was educated at Cornell University and the Columbia Business School. [2] She began her career in the 1960s as a performer in New York’s avant-garde theater, appearing often at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club and other off-off-Broadway venues. [3]
Slovin has lectured internationally on museum planning, exhibition philosophy, and the use of audiovisual media in museums. She is a former chair of the Cultural Institutions Group, a member of the Board of Directors of The Wooster Group, and currently serves on the President’s Council of Cornell Women. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the philosopher Edmund Leites. [4] [5]
On January 26, 2015, Slovin portrayed Holocaust refugee Maria Altmann in the stage version of the memoir The Accidental Caregiver by Gregor Collins, which premiered at the Robert Moss Theater in New York City. [6] Slovin also played Altmann in a staged reading at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York on June 25, 2015, opposite Actor Christian Scheider. [7]
Robert Capa was a Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.
Joseph Cornell was an American visual artist and filmmaker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts. He lived most of his life in relative physical isolation, caring for his mother and his disabled brother at home, but remained aware of and in contact with other contemporary artists.
Paula Vogel is an American playwright. She is known for her provocative explorations of complex social and political issues. Much of her work delves into themes of psychological trauma, abuse, and the complexities of human relationships. She has received the Pulitzer Prize as well as nominations for two Tony Awards. In 2013 she was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
Walter Slezak was an Austrian-born film and stage actor active between 1922 and 1976. He mainly appeared in German films before migrating to the United States in 1930 and performing in numerous Hollywood productions.
Katharine Cornell was an American stage actress, writer, theater owner and producer. She was born in Berlin to American parents and raised in Buffalo, New York.
The Museum of the Moving Image is a media museum located in a former building of the historic Astoria Studios, in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens in New York City. The museum originally opened in 1988 as the American Museum of the Moving Image, and in 1996, opened its permanent exhibition, "Behind the Screen," designed by Ali Höcek of AC Höcek Architecture LLC. The museum began a $67 million expansion in March 2008 and reopened in January 2011. The expansion was designed by architect Thomas Leeser.
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.
Amy Beth Dziewiontkowski, known professionally as Amy Ryan, is an American stage and screen actress. A graduate of New York's High School of Performing Arts, she is an Academy Award nominee and three-time Tony Award nominee.
Maria Altmann was an Austrian-American Jewish refugee from Austria, who fled her home country after it was annexed to the Nazi’s Third Reich. She is noted for her ultimately successful legal campaign to reclaim from the Government of Austria five family-owned paintings by the artist Gustav Klimt that were stolen by the Nazis during World War II.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is an oil painting on canvas, with gold leaf, by Gustav Klimt, completed between 1903 and 1907. The portrait was commissioned by the sitter's husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Viennese and Jewish banker and sugar producer. The painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941 and displayed at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. The portrait is the final and most fully representative work of Klimt's golden phase. It was the first of two depictions of Adele by Klimt—the second was completed in 1912; these were two of several works by the artist that the family owned.
Adele Bloch-Bauer was a Viennese socialite, salon hostess, and patron of the arts from Austria-Hungary, married to sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. A Jewish woman, she is most well known for being the subject of two of artist Gustav Klimt's paintings: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, and the fate of the paintings during and after the Nazi Holocaust. She has been called "the Austrian Mona Lisa."
Dixon Place is a theater organization in New York City dedicated to the development of works-in-progress from a broad range of performers and artists. It exists to serve the creative needs of artists—emerging, mid-career and established—who are creating new work in theater, dance, music, literature, puppetry, performance, variety and visual arts.
The Center for Jewish History is a partnership of five Jewish history, scholarship, and art organizations in New York City: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute New York, Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Together, housed in one location, the partners have separate governing bodies and finances, but collocate resources. The partners' collections make up the biggest repository of Jewish history in the United States. The Center for Jewish History also serves as a centralized place of scholarly research, events, exhibitions, and performances. Located within the center are the Lillian Goldman Reading Room, Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute and a Collection Management & Conservation Wing. The Center for Jewish History is also an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution.
Gregor Collins is an American author, speaker, producer and actor, best known for writing the memoir The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann.
Bernhard Altmann was an Austrian textile manufacturer whose business was stolen and whose family's art collection was looted by Nazis because of their Jewish origins. He introduced cashmere wool to North America on a mass scale in 1947.
The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann is a 2012 memoir by Gregor Collins, recounting the three years he was a caregiver for Maria Altmann, as well as a stageplay, which premiered in New York City in 2015.
CETA Artists Project (1977–1980) in New York City employed approximately 500 accomplished but underemployed artists in five programs, the largest of which was the Cultural Council Foundation (CCF) Artists Project. The project was funded under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) (1974–80) when more than 10,000 artists – visual, performing, and literary – were employed nationally. This was the largest number of artists supported by Federal funding since the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s.
Martyna Majok is a Polish-born American playwright who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Cost of Living. She emigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in New Jersey. Majok studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and Juilliard School. Her plays are often politically engaged, feature dark humor, and experiment with structure and time.
Rochelle G. Saidel is an American writer and researcher. She founded the Remember the Women Institute in 1997 and currently serves as its executive director.
Adriana Gaviria is an actor, producer, director, writer, and advocate in the United States. She is a founding member and artistic producer of The Sol Project, a national initiative to support Latinx theater, and the founder and producing artistic director for North Star Projects, an arts initiative that supports independent artists and theaters. Her advocacy also includes leadership roles with the Parent Artist Advocacy League (PAAL).