Theatre & Performance in 1970s NYC: Hillary Miller’s Drop Dead

Julia Foulkes is a Professor of History at The New School where she investigates the intersection of arts and cities. Her most recent book is A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York (2016). She is also the author of Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (2002); To the City: Urban Photographs of the New Deal  (2011); and the editor of two journal volumes,The Arts in Place (Journal of Social History, 2010) and, with Aaron Shkuda, essays on arts and urban development in the Journal of Urban History (2015). Currently she is researching the rise of New York as a capital of culture in the 20th century.

Jessica Hagedorn is the author of Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster Of Love, and Dogeaters, which won the American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. Other publications include Danger And Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and Burning Heart: A Portrait Of The Philippines. Hagedorn edited both volumes of Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, and Manila Noir, a crime fiction anthology. Her plays include Most Wanted, Stairway To Heaven, Fe In The Desert, and the stage adaptation of Dogeaters. Multimedia theatre collaborations include work in the 70s and 80s with Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Urban Bushwomen, and Blondell Cummings. Music: The Gangster Choir. Screenplays: Fresh Kill, The Pink Palace. Prizes and honors include the Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, the Gerbode Foundation Playwriting Fellowship, and the Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship. Forthcoming: the stage adaptation of The Gangster Of Love for San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. www.jessicahagedorn.net

Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) is a choreographer, director, and actor. She is a founder and Artistic Director of Spiderwoman Theater, the longest running Indigenous feminist theatre in North America. Muriel is a 2016 John S. Guggenheim Fellow; has an Honorary DFA from Miami University in Ohio; is a member of the National Theatre Conference and attended the Rauschenberg Residency in 2015. She has pioneered the development of a culturally–based Indigenous performance methodology. Choreography: Throw Away Kids–Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Director ( Selected) : Material Witness–Spiderwoman Theater; The Scrubbing Project–Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble and Evening in Paris–Raven Spirit Dance Company. Acting: Off-Broadway–Taylor Mac’s Lily’s Revenge; Philomena Moosetail—The Rez Sisters; Aunt Shadie–The Unnatural and Accidental Women; One woman shows–Hot’ N’ Soft, Trail of the Otter, and Red Mother. Muriel’s lecture "Muriel Miguel: A Retrospective" and her Storyweaving Workshops have been presented in the US, Canada, and Europe.

Hillary Miller is Assistant Professor of Theatre at California State University, Northridge. Her book, Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York City (Northwestern University Press, 2016), explores how the city’s municipal crisis transformed performing arts communities across the five boroughs. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including Performance Research, Lateral, The Radical History Review, Theatre Survey, and PAJ. From 2013-2015, she was a lecturer in Stanford University’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric and Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture. Her dramatic writing has been produced in various New York venues (Cherry Lane Theatre, Dixon Place, Manhattan Theatre Source, and HERE Arts Center) and three international Fringe festivals (New York, Edinburgh, Washington, DC). She is from Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Cindy Rosenthal is Professor of Drama at Hofstra University and a performer and director. She coedited The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2011) and Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theatres and their Legacies (U. Michigan, 2006) with James Harding. With Hanon Reznikov she coedited Living on Third Street: Plays of the Living Theatre 1989-1992 (Autonomedia, 2008). She has published essays in Theatre Survey, The New York Times, Women & Performance, Women: A Cultural Review and TDR, including Fall 2016, “Circling Up with The Assembly.” She is the author of Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre, forthcoming from U. Michigan Press. Also forthcoming: The Sixties, Center Stage coedited with Harding (U. Michigan) and with Julia Listengarten, Modern American Drama: Playwriting 2000-2009(Bloomsbury/Methuen).

Elena Rossi-Snook is the moving image archivist for the 16mm circulating film collection of the New York Public Library. She has served as a curriculum consultant for the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation MA program, on the Board of Directors of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and is the chair of the AMIA Film Advocacy Task Force. Publications include “Persistence of Vision: Public Library 16mm Film Collections in America (The Moving Image),” “Continuing Ed: Educational Film Collections in Libraries and Archives (Learning with the Lights Off: a Reader in Educational Film),” and a chapter in an upcoming academic reader on race and non-theatrical film to be published by Duke University Press. Rossi-Snook was the 2002 recipient of the Kodak Fellowship in Film Preservation. Her documentary film We Got The Picture was made an official selection of the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival. She is in production on a second documentary film.

Shilyh Warren is assistant professor of Aesthetic and Film Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is currently writing a book about the history of women’s documentary filmmaking with a special focus on the 1970s. Her essays on documentary and feminist filmmaking have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Signs, Jump Cut, and Mediascape. She is also the co-editor of a special feature on feminist pedagogy and cinematic violence for Films for the Feminist Classroom.

Richard Wesley was born in Newark, New Jersey and graduated from Howard University. He has written professionally for the stage, screen, and television across five decades. He is a past winner of the Drama Desk Award, two NAACP Image Awards, four AUDELCO Awards, the August Wilson Award for Outstanding Playwriting, the Otto Award for Outstanding Writing for Political Theater and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Organization of Black Screenwriters. Currently an Associate Professor in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, Mr. Wesley also sits on the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress; the Selection Committee for the Black Film Festival of the Newark Museum; the Board of Directors, Newark Symphony Hall and is an Advisor to the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers University in Brooklyn, NY. He is married to the novelist, Valerie Wilson Wesley.

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