christopher oscar peña is an accomplished playwright with a resume that includes productions, commissions and residencies at some of the country’s most forward-thinking theatrical institutions. Among his most recent productions are the world premieres of his plays “a cautionary tail” at the Flea Theater in New York and “The Strangers” at the Clarence Brown Theatre in Knoxville, TN. chris is also amassing impressive credits as a TV writer, having written for the Emmy-nominated first season of “Jane the Virgin” on the CW and HBO’s highly lauded “Insecure” as well as the Starz series “Sweetbitter.” He is currently on the writing staff for “Promised Land,” a new series that will air this season on ABC.Early in the pandemic, chris was approached by director James Darragh to join him and composer Ellen Reid, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for her opera “p r i s m,” on a new project: a brand-new operatic work to be created specifically for and presented in the digital space. Never an opera aficionado, chris nonetheless jumped at the novel opportunity, and with the addition of “p r i s m” librettist Roxie Perkins, the creators hired a team of writers and composers and then filmed and recorded “Desert In.” All eight episodes are available for viewing on the streaming platform, OperaBox.tv. “Desert In” was described by The Wall Street Journal as “lush and expansive … a highly original marriage of opera and series television,” and The New York Observer wrote that “this stylish film-opera hybrid … is a sun-drenched melodrama.”In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, chris describes how his enduring passion for breaking form and pushing artistic envelopes has allowed him to craft an eclectic career that amplifies his voice and core beliefs. https://www.operabox.tv/desert-in

Artist as Leader

christopher oscar peña

Frank Horvat is a celebrated Toronto-based composer and pianist who for decades has written and performed music across genres, from contemporary classical to musical theater and electronica. In 2017 he was the inaugural recipient of the Kathleen McMorrow Music Award which recognizes outstanding work by Ontario composers.Frank is devoted to using his creative platform to support and bring awareness to causes about which he is passionate: the environment, human rights and mental health. Examples of his artivism include his album “For Those Who Died Trying” that memorializes the lives of murdered environmental activists and the “Piano Therapy” concert, a performance he developed and continues to tour in order to share his own mental health journey and to end the stigma around mental illness, particularly in the world of classical music. His upcoming projects include “Fractures,” a song cycle of 13 pieces commissioned by acclaimed soprano Meredith Hall on the subject of the environmental impact of fracking, and a brand-new commission from pianist Kara Huber, a suite of solo piano pieces about the hiking paths in and around the beautiful mountain town of Banff, Alberta. In fact, shortly after this interview was completed, Frank traveled to Banff for a month-long residency during which he hiked the area’s most spectacular trails and started composing pieces inspired by his mountain peregrinations. In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Frank describes why and how he went about creating “Music for Self-Isolation,” his response to the pandemic lockdown that threatened the careers of so many of his musician colleagues. “Music for Self-Isolation” became an international phenomenon, has since been recorded as an album and is the focus of a documentary film. He also explains why being candid about his own mental illness — to himself, his loved ones and his audience — allowed his creativity to flourish in ways he couldn’t have foreseen.https://frankhorvat.com/

Frank Horvat

Martine Kei Green-Rogers is an author, educator and dramaturg with decades of experience, having worked as production and new-play dramaturg at theaters all over the country, from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to Houston’s Classical Theatre Company and Chicago’s Court Theatre. This past summer she took a leave from her position as associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at the State University of New York-New Paltz to become the interim dean of the Division of Liberal Arts (DLA) at UNCSA.In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Martine explains how the key to ensuring a healthy future for the American theater is to cultivate questioning and adventurous minds in artists and audience alike, essentially encouraging all of us to approach art with a dramaturg’s curiosity.https://www.martinekeigreenrogers.com/https://whoslouis.com/https://www.signaturetheatre.org/About/Playwrights---Residencies/Branden-Jacobs-Jenkins.aspxhttps://www.jamesijames.com/

Martine Kei Green-Rogers

  Dancer/choreographer Rulan Tangen was thriving in an international career as a performer and dancer when in 2004 she survived a bout with Stage 4 cancer. Emerging from the harrowing experience, she shifted her goals and committed herself to getting a brand-new company, Dancing Earth Creations, off the ground, and 17 years later she remains its founding artistic director. Dancing Earth is a mixed-heritage company that creates contemporary dance deeply rooted and researched in the communities in which it works. Through its workshops and dances, Dancing Earth explores and links themes of ecological and social health and wellness, particularly in Indigenous communities. Dancing Earth has led workshops in many Native reservations, and to date the company has included artists from 28 First Nations as co-creators. In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Rulan describes how she and her company navigated the devastating effects of the pandemic shutdown. Although their full year of touring was canceled in an instant, Rulan and her collaborators learned to become even more limber than they’d been before, finding evermore inventive ways to engage with their audiences and community partners. https://dancingearth.org/  

Rulan Tangen

Stephen McKinley Henderson has a resume that most actors in his generation would — and probably do — envy. Trained first at Juilliard and then at UNCSA, he has been working steadily onstage for more than four decades, performing in classical and contemporary plays in theaters around the country. In 1996 he originated the role of Turnbo in August Wilson’s “Jitney” in Pittsburgh and then went on to play the part many more times around the country, including in a hugely successful Off-Broadway run that netted him a Drama Desk Award. He eventually played the part at the National Theatre in London in 2001 in a production that won “Jitney” the Olivier Award for Best Play. Since then, he has appeared on Broadway several more times, including in two August Wilson plays, “King Hedley II” and “Fences,” earning a Tony nomination for best supporting actor in the latter. In recent years Stephen has also amassed an impressive film resume. When Denzel Washington directed “Fences” for the screen, he asked his Broadway castmate Stephen to reprise his role in the film adaptation. Between 2016 and 2017 alone, Stephen was featured in three films that were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: “Fences,” “Manchester by the Sea” and “Lady Bird.” Later this year he will appear in one of the most anticipated films of recent years, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of “Dune,” and he recently wrapped filming in horror auteur Ari Aster’s latest film, “Disappointment Blvd,” starring Joaquin Phoenix. In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Stephen reveals how as a young man a terrifying period of literal and metaphoric paralysis helped make him the artist he is today, a revolutionary optimist that renowned directors and playwrights alike know they can trust explicitly with their work. 

Stephen McKinley Henderson

  Tara Rynders is a dancer, choreographer and video artist based in Denver, CO. She is also a full-time registered nurse with over 15 years of experience. She combined her passions for dance and for compassionate care by creating The Clinic, an organization that through immersive artistic experiences combats compassion fatigue and professional burnout among nurses and fosters stronger connections between nurses, patients and communities. Among the projects Tara has developed through The Clinic are movement-and-art group workshops designed specifically for nurses experiencing burnout and “Resiliency Moments,” one-on-one virtual and intimate interactions between individual artists and healthcare workers in which art is made and grief and trauma begin to be healed. Both the medical and artistic worlds have recognized Tara’s work. She received the highest level of nursing recognition in Colorado when in 2019 she was awarded the Nightingale Luminary Award, and she has received numerous arts grants, including a Blade of Grass Fellowship, to support her work melding the arts with science. In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Tara delves into how her experiences caring and being cared for in a hospital informed the creation of The Clinic and explains how more moments of back-and-forth empathy between artists and scientists could lead to substantial changes in the healthcare industry and beyond. https://www.theclinicperformance.com/  

Tara Rynders

  On Super Bowl Sunday of 2019, Hannah Drake, who had long written about politics, feminism and race, reached a new level of fame when film director and producer Ava DuVernay, to protest the NFL’s treatment of quarterback-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick, tweeted out a video of Hannah’s poem “All You Had to Do Was Play the Game, Boy.” Kaepernick in turn shared the poem with his followers, and in short order Hannah’s words reached 2.4 million viewers. Hannah has only continued turning up the volume on her art and activism since, especially in the last year when after the murder of Breonna Taylor she stood and spoke on the frontlines of protests against police brutality in her hometown of Louisville, KY. She has collaborated with the Louisville Ballet and the Actors Theatre of Louisville on new projects and continues to offer up provocative commentary on her widely read blog, “Write Some S#it.” Hannah is also the chief creative officer of IDEAS xLab, an artist-run nonprofit based in Louisville, KY that champions inclusion and belonging through creativity, art, and action. Inspired by a trip she made with her daughter three years ago to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, AL, Hannah — along with IDEAS xLab’s co-founder and CEO, Josh Miller — devised The (Un)known Project. The (Un)known Project is a multi-year series of public art installations and educational experiences designed to bring to civic and national consciousness the Black men, women and children in Louisville’s past who have been overlooked in history. In this interview with Rob Kramer and Pier Carlo Talenti, conducted just a few days before the first portion of the (Un)Known Project was to be unveiled on the banks of the Ohio River, Hannah celebrates the power of art to instigate powerful social change and explains why she pushes through discomfort and fear to stand up for her art and her community. https://www.ideasxlab.com/about https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/arts/design/hannah-drake-unknown-project.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjiuvLzhCrI  

Hannah Drake

 Carlton Turner is an artist, agriculturalist, researcher and founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production, also known as Sipp Culture. Sipp Culture uses food and story to support rural community, cultural, and economic development in his hometown of Utica, MS. Before founding Sipp Culture, Carlton was executive director of Alternate ROOTS, an arts-service organization based in the South promoting the creation of art rooted in community and advocating for social and economic justice for all. A widely admired thought leader on the power and urgency of creative placemaking, Carlton speaks all over the country and is a current Interdisciplinary Research Fellow with the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. He is also a former Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow and a Cultural Policy Fellow at the Creative Placemaking Institute at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design in the Arts. He also currently serves on the board of First People’s Fund, Imagining America, and Project South. As for his personal artistic projects, he is currently collaborating on a new performance piece titled “River Souls” with Meena Natarajan and Dipankar Mukherjee, the co-artistic directors of Pangea Theater Company in Minneapolis. In this interview with Rob Kramer and Pier Carlo Talenti, Carlton describes how rooting his work and art firmly in his hometown has allowed him to investigate and question on a micro and macro level the many systems that determine a community’s overall well-being. He also celebrates how tapping into every community member’s innate creativity can be the first step toward civic transformation. https://sippculture.com/

Carlton Turner

 In 2016, director Snehal Desai was named artistic director of the renowned theater company East West Players in Los Angeles, only the fourth person to lead the nation’s premier Asian American theatre since its founding in 1965. East West Players was created by nine Asian American artists and ever since has been a bedrock of Los Angeles’ vibrant theater scene. Under Snehal’s leadership the company has focused on new work, producing plays by some of the country’s most admired artists, including Qui Nguyen, Lauren Yee and the writer after whom the mainstage is named, Tony Award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and opera and musical librettist David Henry Hwang. East West Players was in the news this past spring when during a livestream of its annual Ovation Awards, the Los Angeles Stage Alliance, or LASA, not only mispronounced nominated actor Jully Lee’s name but also showed a photo of another Asian American actor. This final act of sloppiness and cultural erasure was too much for Snehal, who along with other artistic directors of color in Los Angeles had for years petitioned the organization to recognize all partner theaters involved in a co-production, not just the larger and predominantly white institutions. The next day he wrote an impassioned statement on social media succinctly stating why East West Players was immediately withdrawing its membership in LASA. A host of other theaters soon followed suit, and LASA’s board quickly decided to fold. In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti and Rob Kramer, Snehal discusses how questioning and reinventing fundamental practices in the American theater could change the culture of the artform to be welcoming to a broader range of artists and audiences alike. He also places his post-Ovation Awards statement within the context of the summer of 2020 and the commitment of artists of color to wrest power from institutions that have long been content to ignore them. https://eastwestplayers.org/ https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-04-05/l-a-stage-alliance-shuts-down-ovation-awards  

Snehal Desai

  Narsiso Martinez creates drawings and mixed-media installations that focus on the lives and labor of the thousands of migrant agricultural workers on whom we all depend for our produce. Not only are the detail and atmosphere of each of his pieces breathtaking, but his canvas, so to speak, is also remarkable and evocative. He creates and assembles his work on and with discarded cardboard produce boxes that he himself collects from grocery stores. He knows his subject well as he himself earned money to pay for his art education by working alongside friends and family in the agricultural fields of Washington State. Often his work is monumental in size. In fact for most of April 2021 a large piece of his was featured on a billboard in West Hollywood, CA, part of the non-profit Billboard Creative’s annual exhibition throughout the Los Angeles City basin. In this interview with Rob Kramer and Pier Carlo Talenti, Narsiso reveals how tenaciously he pursued his dream of becoming a working artist and how having achieved that goal he is working to help others achieve theirs. https://www.cjamesgallery.com/artist-detail/narsiso-martinez  

Narsiso Martinez

  Sarah Cahill is not only a brilliant classical pianist. As a producer, researcher and commissioner of new works, she also works to ensure that the lesser-known great talents of the classical music world — in particular female and non-white composers — are recognized and celebrated. One of her newest and most ambitious projects, which had to be put on hold during the pandemic, is “The Future Is Female,” a ritual installation and communal feminist immersive listening experience featuring more than seventy compositions by women around the globe, ranging from the 18th century to the present day. The experience also includes new works, many commissioned by Cahill herself. Sarah performs an evening-length recital version of the event, but when the venue is right, she also performs a marathon-length version that can last from four to seven hours, with audiences encouraged to come and go as they please. She was due to perform the marathon version at the Barbican in London when the pandemic hit. In the 2021-22 season, though, many venues, including the Barbican, will have the great fortune of being able to experience “The Future Is Female.” In this interview with Rob Kramer and Pier Carlo Talenti, Cahill describes how she embarked on her mission to make the classical music canon more inclusive and why it may be surprisingly simple. As she explains it, all it takes is curiosity, because the music of the overlooked talents speaks very clearly for itself.  

Sarah Cahill

Keith Knight is currently busy writing the second season of “Woke,” the hit show on Hulu that he co-created and co-produces. “Woke” follows a cartoonist named Keef Knight who after a startling assault by a policeman discovers that inanimate objects start speaking to him. In brutally funny ways, these objects, as well as Keef’s human friends, open his eyes to the pressing social issues his art has yet to address.   The show is clearly semi-autobiographical, but there’s no question that the real Keith Knight has been socially and politically aware decades longer than his TV creation. Since the early 1990s, he has been creating razor-witted comic strips that regularly tackle such issues as systemic racism and police brutality. His work, including the popular comic series “The K Chronicles,” “th(ink)” and “The Knight Life,” has been seen in newspapers and web outlets all over the country. In 2007 he received a Harvey Kurzman Award, the Oscar of the cartooning world, for “The K Chronicles”; in 2010 he received an Inkpot Award for career achievement at the San Diego Comic-Con; and in 2015 the NAACP honored him with a History Maker award in recognition of the impact of his body of work.   In this interview with Rob Kramer and Pier Carlo Talenti, Keith reveals how he has navigated a number of unexpected obstacles — from the shrinking of traditional newspaper outlets to the COVID-19 lockdown — to stay on his toes and shape his remarkable career. https://kchronicles.com/ https://www.hulu.com/series/woke-034909c6-8c46-4cad-8d0d-062574a9e5f1

Keith Knight

  Eisa Davis is a woman of many talents, all of them considerable. She has authored several acclaimed plays, including the historical drama “Bulrusher,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and “Angela’s Mixtape,” an autobiographical comedy with music that chronicled her coming of age in Oakland, CA under the tutelage of the powerful women in her life, including her aunt, the legendary activist Angela Davis. Eisa also starred in the play’s premiere, playing herself. As an actor, she has amassed an impressive resume onstage, receiving an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance for her work in theaters throughout New York City. Her TV and film credits are no less remarkable and include recurring appearances on the award-winning series “House of Cards” and “The Wire.” She is also a singer-songwriter who has released two albums, “Somewhere Else” and “Tinctures.” In recent years, she has also been writing for television, including on two seasons of the Netflix series “She’s Gotta Have It.” In this conversation with Pier Carlo Talenti, Eisa discusses the generative and industry-changing impact of formally banding together with artist friends who share not only one’s esthetic values but moral imperatives as well. https://www.eisadavis.com/  

Eisa Davis

  Chip Thomas moved to the Navajo Nation in Northern Arizona in 1987 to work as a physician in a community with limited healthcare and thus repay a National Health Services Corps scholarship. The plan was to stay there four years. Thirty-four years later, Chip Thomas is not only still living and working as a physician in the Navajo or Diné Nation; he has also become an artist beloved by his community and increasingly by admirers from all over the world. Since 2009 Chip, an avid photographer since his early teens, has been printing out large-scale enlargements of his photos of his neighbors and community and affixing them to structures throughout the Diné Nation, reflecting the beauty and stories of the people and their culture back to themselves. Sometimes the murals also tackle the many social issues and environmental issues, such as the sickening effects of uranium mining in the 20th century, that have challenged the Diné for generations. During the pandemic, Chip created murals to share vital health information with his community, which was disproportionately affected by COVID-19. In this interview with Rob Kramer and Pier Carlo Talenti, Chip recounts how he earned his neighbors’ trust, first as a physician and later as an artist, and harnessed his combined skills to serve and improve the community’s overall wellness.  

Chip Thomas

  Over the course of a remarkable 45-year career, lighting designer Kathy A. Perkins has worked in theaters all over the United States and as far away as South Africa and Cuba. She has also cultivated a distinguished academic career as a theater historian, editing or co-editing several collections of plays and textbooks, including most recently “The Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance.” She chaired the MFA lighting department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 20 years, and in 2012 she joined the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill, where she is currently Professor Emerita of Dramatic Art. In this conversation with Pier Carlo Talenti and Rob Kramer, Kathy considers the upheaval of the last year through the lens of a theater veteran, a trailblazer in a field where exceedingly few women, much less Black women, have been able to make a career.  

Kathy A. Perkins

Corey Madden, executive director of the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, and Rob Kramer, founder and CEO of Kramer Leadership, LLC, interview a broad range of extraordinary artists about how their creativity influences their leadership style.

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Artist as Leader

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