2007-2008 Guests-In-Residence

September 16, 2007 – September 21, 2007
Speak Theater Arts consists of writer/performers Rafael Agustin, Allan Axibal, Miles Gregley, and writer/producer/directors Liesel Reinhart and Steven T. Seagle. Drawing from their experiences in theater, stand up comedy, slam poetry, television, education, graphic novels and hip-hop, they present dangerously compelling original works of populist theater with enough laughs to ease the sting of their social commentary. Their flagship show: NWC: The Race Show is a 90-minute original work for the stage that mixes drama, hip hop, slam poetry, and stand-up comedy. N*W*C is the winner of the 2003 award for “Best Play” from the American Readers Theater Association, as well as the Audience Prize and four other major awards. Their residency is being co-sponsored by the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in conjunction with performances of N*W*C at Krannert.

September 30, 2007 – October 5, 2007
Hadani Ditmars is an international journalist based in Canada whose work has been published in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, The London Independent, The Globe and Mail, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, and broadcast on the BBC and CBC radio and television. She has been covering the Middle East since 1992, Iraq since 1997, and has reported from Iran, North Africa, Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, Colombia, Indonesia, and Gaza and the West Bank. Her Ms. Magazine essay on Iraqi women has been adopted for many university courses. She is the author of the bestseller, Dancing in the No Fly Zone: a Woman’s Journey Through Iraq, a book that provides a unique perspective on the troubled nation both before and after the US invasion. Her next book is on Israel/Palestine, where she first worked in 1994 for a joint Israeli-Palestinian magazine.

October 14, 2007 – October 18, 2007
Billy Jonas is a singer/songwriter, guitarist, "industrial re-percussionist," and a one-man-band. A Billy Jonas performance is an explosion of energy. In singalongs, bangalongs, whisperalongs, as well as improvised songs, his primary instrument is the audience. Jonas' original pieces are played on fanciful "industrial re-percussion" instruments made from found objects. He sings in a clear tenor voice; his guitar work is adventurous, alternately percussive and lyrical. Previously a member of the highly acclaimed duo, "The Billys," he has been featured at prestigious festivals and venues nationwide. Jonas has shared stages with some of the world's favorite acoustic artists, including Patti Larkin, Ani DiFranco, David Wilcox, Richard Thompson, and Pete Seeger.

January 27, 2008 – January 31, 2008
Climbing PoeTree: Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman — the tag-team, two-spirited, boundary-breaking artist duo, Climbing PoeTree—have advanced what it means to be renaissance women. Poets, performers, print-makers, dancers, educators, bookmakers, muralists, designers, and new media artists, these janes-of-all-trades prove that you can be masterful in multiples. With roots in Haiti and Colombia, Alixa and Naima reside in Brooklyn and track footprints across the country and globe on a mission to overcome destruction with creativity. In a nutshell, Climbing PoeTree is a queer-feminist soul-sister co-conspiracy of acrobatic poets who moonlight as street artists and infiltrate public schools and prisons with infectious ideas of how people can shape their own destinies.

February 3, 2008 – February 7, 2008 
Sonia Shah is an investigative journalist and critically acclaimed author whose writing on human rights, medicine and politics has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, New Scientist, The Nation and elsewhere. She is the author of The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients, and Crude: The Story of Oil. Her collection, Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, continues to be required reading at colleges and universities across the country. Shah’s writing, based on original reportage from around the world, from India and South Africa to Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, and Australia, has been featured on current affairs shows around the United States, as well as on the BBC and Australia’s Radio National. Her television appearances include A&E and the BBC, and she’s consulted on many documentary film projects, from the ABC to Channel 4 in the UK. Shah is currently writing a book on the history and politics of malaria.

February 17, 2008 – February 21, 2008 
Josh MacPhee is a street artist, designer, curator, author and activist. His first book, Stencil Pirates: A Global Survey of Street Stenciling was published in July 2004 by Soft Skull Press. He is currently co-editing a book of radical political graphics and a collection of writings about art and anarchism. A street stenciler and poster maker for over a decade, MacPhee also runs a radical art distribution project as a way to develop and distribute t-shirts, posters, and stickers with political content. For 8 years he has curated the Celebrate People's History poster series, a collection of inexpensive educational posters focused on suppressed and little known histories of social justice movements. MacPhee also collectively organizes agit-prop cultural actions with ad-hoc groups of artists under various organizational names such as “Department of Space and Land Reclamation” and “Counter Productive Industries.”

February 24, 2008 – March 6, 2008
Bre Pettis is CANCELED.