“They don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
| Jim Henson
I currently teach acting for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Theatre Studies Department.
DIGITAL EDITING PROJECTS
Often the UIUC Acting for the Camera class will include a project of short pieces shot on location in partnership with Video Services which I contextualize and edit together.
< The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign hosted a staged reading of exiled playwright Andrei Kureichik’s Voices of the New Belarus at the Krannert Art Museum on April 28, 2022. This is a documentary play about the experiences of political prisoners in Belarus following the fraudulent 2020 Belarusian presidential elections, and the event was an interdisciplinary project featuring performers from across campus and was co-directed by Andrei Kureichik and Nisi Sturgis.
In September 2020, the UIUC junior studio actors created The Harlem Renaissance Project to explore poems from the extraordinary African American cultural movement a century before. This was a cherished experience and served the class’s mission of inclusion, decolonization of the canon, and expression of passion and commitment to the Black Lives Matter movement. This video was shared as an offering from Illinois Theatre honoring Black History Month for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s community and beyond. >
< In 2021, I directed Chelsea Marcantel’s play Airness for Principia College and edited two recorded performances together for a streamable offering of the play. The full play isn’t available here, but I put together a trailer for the streaming version which gives you a bit of an idea.
An enterprise in magical realism, REDBALL is an interdepartmental partnership between Illinois Theatre Actors, Theatre Studies Screenwriters, and Media and Cinema Studies Filmmakers to create and produce original content from the ground up. It was shown April 15-17 in the Krannert Art Museum Auditorium on a continuous loop, with sound, and was included in 2021’s Ebertfest. >
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