A+D Student events

Abstract
Join us for a spirited and gloriously unruly conversation between Holly Hughes—legendary provocateur of the Culture Wars and queer feminist performance icon—and Katie Pearl, acclaimed theatre-maker whose work wrestles (artfully) with the climate crisis. Together, they take on the unsayable: rape culture, ecological collapse, and the ever-growing list of words, topics, and truths deemed “too risky” for public discourse. Through a conversation that is equal parts critical inquiry and creative exchange, Hughes and Pearl reflect on strategies of resistance, the politics of representation, and the generative possibilities that emerge when artists address what dominant discourse attempts to silence.

Bios
Holly Hughes is a 2010-11 Guggenheim Fellow, two time Obie Award winner, and internationally acclaimed performance artist. She began her work at New York City's WOW Cafe in the Lower East Side, a cooperative art space that gleefully described itself as "a home for wayward girls," or "a refuge for feminists who had been run out of other feminist organizations." At WOW she worked with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, Tony Award winning Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the Five Lesbian Brothers. She has performed at the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, Yale Rep, New Victory Theatre, numerous colleges, universities and community based performance spaces. In 1990, she was propelled into the center of the Culture Wars after the National Endowment for the Arts rescinded funding granted to Hughes and 3 other artists under pressure from conservative politicians. She is the recipient of 7 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as funding from the Jerome Foundation, the MAP Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts. Her work is widely anthologized. Recent projects include a national tour of her solo performance "The Dog and Pony Show: Bring Your Own Pony," curating and performing in a series of animal themed performances at Links Hall (Chicago), and developing a new solo piece in collaboration with Katie Pearl.

Katie Pearl is a theater artist whose work is fueled by the belief that personal encounter and creative exchange are necessary in a humane world. Her projects range from plays to interactive installation to community-wide collaborations, and invite audiences and participants into radically imaginative situations that playfully challenge traditional structures and norms. As co-Artistic Director of PearlDamour, the interdisciplinary company she shares with playwright Lisa D’Amour, Katie has co-created, directed, and sometimes performed in a body of work spanning 25 years. PearlDamour’s recognition includes an Obie (Nita & Zita), a Creative Capital Award (How to Build a Forest), four Multi-Arts Production Fund Awards (LandMark, Terrible Things, How to Build a Forest), two NEA Our Town grants (Milton), and a NYSCA individual artist commission. She is a producer of the documentary The Rest I Make Up about the visionary Cuban-American dramatist Maria Irene Fornes, which premiered at MoMA in February 2018 and is now screening at Festivals world-wide (Women Make Movies, distributor); she directed Fornes’ masterpiece What of the Night? at UCSD while serving there as the 2017 Quinn Martin Distinguished Chair of Directing. She is a founding member of Climate Lens, and is a co-founder of Works on Water, a triennial dedicated to supporting artists working on, near, and with the world’s waterways. Katie has been a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University and an Anschutz Fellow at Princeton, where her teaching and research focus on the concept of the Artist-Citizen.  Katie received her MFA in Writing for Performance from Brown University in 2015. She splits her time between  Brooklyn, where she lives with her wife, filmmaker Michelle Memran, and Middletown CT, where she teaches theater at Wesleyan University.
https://katiepearl.com/