On 23 February 2026, TORCHES continues with a conversation with the prolific Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet. Both are award-winning multi-hyphenate artists who founded Talking Band over fifty years ago and have been working in New York City since.
Ellen Maddow is a founding member of Talking Band and has written, composed music for, or performed in a majority of its works—most recently Triplicity directed by Paul Zimet at Mabou Mines, Shimmer and Herringbone (co-written with Paul Zimet), Existentialism directed by Anne Bogart at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, and The Following Evening with 600 Highwaymen at Perelman Performing Arts Center. She has received the 2025 Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation Tooth of Time Distinguished Career Award, an Obie Lifetime Achievement Award, an NYC Women’s Fund Award for her play Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless and a Drama Desk Award for her performance in Clare Barron’s Dance Nation at Playwrights Horizons, Obie Award for Playwriting, Frederick Loewe Award in Musical Theatre, McKnight and New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowships, NEA/TCG Award for Playwrights. She was a member of the Open Theatre and is an alumnus of New Dramatists.
Paul Zimet is the artistic director of Talking Band. Born and raised in New York City, he studied clarinet and voice at the High School of Music and Art, comparative literature at Columbia College, and medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has written and/or directed over forty productions for Talking Band: most recently Triplicity (by Ellen Maddow) and Shimmer and Herringbone (co-written with Ellen Maddow). He also directed Taylor Mac’s The Walk Across America for Mother Earth, and Part I of Mac’s Obie award-winning epic, The Lily’s Revenge. As an actor, recent performances include: Existentialism (directed by Anne Bogart), The Following Evening (by 600 Highwaymen), and This Was the End (by Mallory Catlett). He is the recipient of five Obie awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award; an award for direction; and awards for his work as a member of Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and Winter Project. He is associate professor emeritus in theatre at Smith College, and an alumnus of New Dramatists. In addition to his theatre work, Paul works with the New York Peace Institute mediating civil, criminal, and co-parenting cases, and he helps to trains NYPD officers in mediation techniques. He also holds a sixth degree black belt in Aikido and teaches at the New York Aikikai, home to chief instructor Yoshimutsu Yamada Sensei, eigth dan.
TORCHES: 30+ Years of Downtown Performance
As co-founder of HERE Arts Center—described by the Obie committee as “a lasting home for the weird and wild in downtown performance”—Kristin Marting spent the past three decades immersed in making, witnessing, and supporting groundbreaking performance in New York City. TORCHES is a much needed exploration of New York City’s unique and influential downtown performance world from the 1990s through the 2020s. Part memoir, part oral history, and part cultural inquiry, TORCHES offers in-depth video conversations with more than thirty of the most imaginative and boundary pushing artists working in the field today. TORCHES is both a living archive and an offering for the future. Learning about these artists and their work is not just looking back; it can ignite what’s coming next. They are not only inventors of form—they are keepers of community, fire-starters for our future. See more about the project on the TORCHES website at torchesnyc.org.
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