Anita Gonzalez
Book Writer
Anita Gonzalez advocates for beautiful art crafted for social activism and consciousness raising. She directs, devises and writes theatrical works that primarily focus on telling African diaspora stories and histories. Her innovative stagings of cross-cultural experiences have appeared on PBS national television and at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, The Working Theatre, Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, New York Live Arts, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and other national and international venues. Gonzalez believes the art of storytelling connects people to their cultures. Over 60,000 students have taken her massive open online courses Storytelling for Social Change and Black Performance as Social Protest.
Gonzalez is currently a Professor at Georgetown University and Co-Founding Lead of the Racial Justice Institute. She is a member of the Woodshed Collective, a multi-generational group of creatives who gather to develop new performance research methodologies for storytelling and experiment together with interdisciplinary creative forms.
The author is a member of the American Opera Project Fellows Program, the National Theatre Conference, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. The NEA, NYFA, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mid Atlantic Arts Association, the Bellagio Center, and the FIDEOCOMISO for United States/ Mexico Arts exchange have all funded her work.
Musicals: Kumanana (Gala Hispanic Theater), Ybor City (Brooklyn Tavern Theater), Zora on My Mind (The Woodshed), Ayanna Kelly. Plays & Librettos: Faces in the Flames (Atlanta Opera) Courthouse Bells (Boston Opera Collaborative), Finding the Light (Louise Toppin and Opera Ebony), Sunset Dreams (The Vagrancy), Home of My Ancestors (HGOCo). Books: Performance, Dance and Political Economy, Black Performance Theory, Afro-Mexico. Gonzalez is a Professor at Georgetown University and a member of the Dramatists Guild.
www.anitagonzalez.com or https://newplayexchange.org/users/7163/anita-gonzalez
Dan Furman
Music and Lyrics
Dan Furman began playing piano and writing music at the age of 6 in Old Hickory, Tennessee (just outside of Nashville). He went on to study composition and jazz piano at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, where he led “The Sky-Monks,” an 8-piece jazz group that performed his compositions and experimented with collective improvisation. Following school, he traveled to South America for a year, where he studied Latin music and played with “musica criolla” bands in Lima, Perú. Back in the US, he spent a number of years as an political activist and organizer, working in industries ranging from meat-packing to railcar manufacturing. After moving to New York in 2003 to play jazz, Dan began writing for music theater as well. Dan spent 4 years in the BMI Lehman Engels Musical Theater Workshop. His musical, “Rip!,” was awarded a staged reading by Theater Resources Unlimited in 2009, was presented by the Puffin Cultural Forum in 2010 and was produced in the 2011 Midtown International Theatre Festival. Dan’s songs have been performed in cabaret venues around the city, and he wrote the theme song for the Big Apple Circus 2010-11 show, “Dance On!” Dan works as an accompanist and music director at the Singers Forum, the Lee Strasberg Institute, Fordham University and the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Manhattan. He lives in Brooklyn and appears frequently as a jazz pianist at the off-off-Broadway show Sleep No More, as well as with the Dan Furman Trio and his original jazz band, the Primordial Jazz Funktet.