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BORDER PEOPLE is based on conversations with immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and border crossers of all kinds at both the Northern and Southern borders, and the many unseen borders in between. A startling gallery of portraits of those who cross borders, geographical or cultural, by necessity or choice.
Join us for an evening exploring the current Bronx Documentary Center exhibition, Trump Revolution: Immigration.
BDC Founder and Executive Director Mike Kamber will lead a guided tour of the exhibition, followed by a discussion among our community members on the works exhibited and the human cost of American’s changing immigration policy. Refreshments will be provided.
What is happening at the U.S. / Mexico Southern border? What are the realities of daily life along the West Bank? For those of us who have not spent time at these contested areas, what is reported on the nightly news can seem confusing, chaotic and overwhelming.
Join Working Theater Audience and Community Engagement Coordinator Jessica Angima in conversation with Jess Beck, documentary producer, writer and director and Palika Makam, U.S. Senior Program Coordinator at WITNESS to move beyond the stories depicted in the media and the reality on the ground across borders. We’ll explore how the medium of film can be used as a tool of connection rather than a source of anxiety, to get us closer to the lived experience of life along borders and the humans who inhabit these in-between spaces.
For the solo performer, the process of creating a piece of theater based on another person’s lived experience is complex. It is a back and forth activity including multiple interviews, repeated review and personal investigation. In this panel discussion we will take a look at the cultural landscape of representation and the nuances of what it means to inhabit the bodies, voices and souls of other people.
Join Working Theater Audience and Community Engagement Coordinator Jessica Angima in conversation with Border People actor and playwright Dan Hoyle and performers Lisa Ramirez and Judith Sloan in an exploration on the artistic process of solo work. With a depth of experience, each performer will share their methods, practices and approach for creating a piece of journalistic theater.
The discussion directly follows the performance and is at no additional charge. Open to 2/6 ticket holders only.
Join Peter Goldberg, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund in conversation with Marcial Godoy-Anativia, Managing Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, Julia Preston of The Marshall Project and Theresa Thanjan, Manager of Member Engagement, NYC, at the New York Immigration Coalition to discuss the most urgent policy proposals and the human cost for those who will be most deeply affected.
Immigration policy is one of the most polarizing issues in U.S. politics. This evening’s panel brings together four individuals whose experiences range from first hand experience in immigration courts along the border to organizing with immigrants youths in Queens to look at the big and small of immigration within our current political climate.
The discussion directly follows the performance and is at no additional charge. Open to 2/19 ticket holders only.
Jess Beck is a documentary producer, writer, and director. She has been producing nonfiction films and television shows for nearly 20 years across a wide array of genres including science, history, docu-soap, travel, true crime, long-form documentary, and short-form digital. Her projects have taken her across the globe and aired on CNN, MSNBC, Discovery Networks, Bravo, MTV, and PBS among others. Notable credits include CNN’s This is Life with Lisa Ling, Bravo’s Real Housewives of Atlanta, Discovery’s Storm Chasers, and the Emmy-award winning feature documentary A Walk to Beautiful. Jess has recently ventured into the education space, creating story-driven content for online university courses, and is concurrently in production on an independent documentary about Central American migrants. When not behind the camera, Jess can be found singing on the streets and in theaters throughout NYC and the world with activist performance group Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir.
Palika Makam is a media activist and the proud daughter of the South Asian community that raised her. Palika has produced video advocacy campaigns and trained activists in using video as a tool for justice all over the world – from Ferguson to Palestine. She is the US Senior Program Coordinator at WITNESS – a global human rights nonprofit dedicated to supporting marginalized communities in using video, storytelling and technology to expose human rights abuses. Palika leads the organization’s immigration focused work with Eyes on ICE – a project that supports directly impacted immigrant communities and allies to document abuses by ICE and Border Patrol, and use those videos to fight deportations and advocate for immigrant rights.
Palika is also the cofounder of The Babel Project – a nonprofit that teaches youth activists to use storytelling and documentary film to advocate for their communities and specific policy change. Media she helped produce has been used as evidence in human rights court cases, and in advocacy campaigns around education, police violence, and immigration reform. Films have been screened everywhere from The United Nations to high school classrooms.
DAN HOYLE is an actor and writer whose brand of journalistic theater has been hailed as “riveting, funny and poignant” (New York Times) and “hilarious, moving and very necessary” (Salon). His solo shows EACH AND EVERY THING, THE REAL AMERICANS, TINGS DEY HAPPEN, FLORIDA 2004: THE BIG BUMMER, and CIRCUMNAVIGATOR, have toured the country and overseas including The Public Theater, Culture Project, Baltimore Center Stage, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Cleveland Playhouse, Mosaic Theater Company (Washington, D.C.), Portland Center Stage, Playmakers Repertory Company, Painted Bride (Philadelphia), The Park in Kolkata, India, the Samuel Beckett Theater in Dublin, Ireland, Taliesin in Swansea, Wales, and Abuja, Bauchi, Calabar, Lagos, and Jos, Nigeria.
Hoyle has been recognized with many awards, including the Will Glickman, Prize of Hope, Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, TBA, and Lucille Lortel (Nomination). He’s been supported by grants from the Edgerton Foundation, the Pew Theater Initiative, the Fleishhacker Foundation, and been commissioned by Aurora Theater, First Person Arts, San Francisco Playhouse and The Working Theater. He holds a double degree in Performance Studies and History from Northwestern University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Nigeria in 2005-2006. In 2016-2017, he was an artist-in-residence at the Heyman Center for Humanities at Columbia University where he began work on his new solo journalistic theater piece BORDER PEOPLE. It opened at The Marsh in San Francisco in January 2019, and ran for ten months. www.danhoyle.com
LISA RAMIREZ (actor/playwright) A veteran actor, Lisa has performed at many theatres in NYC and regionally, including the Vineyard Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Rising Phoenix Rep, Atlantic Theatre, the Cherry Lane Theatre, New York Theater Workshop, INTAR, Working Theater, Playmakers Rep, Berkeley Rep, Magic Theater, Ubuntu Theater Project and many more.
As a playwright EXIT CUCKOO (nanny in motherland), presented Off Broadway by the Working Theater (Colman Domingo- director), subsequently toured in various theaters throughout the U.S. and Ireland. Other writing credits include, ART OF MEMORY, a dance theatre piece, commissioned by Company SoGoNo, presented at 3-Legged Dog in New York (Tanya Calamoneri- director); INVISIBLE WOMEN- RISE, Foundry Theatre & Domestic Workers United (Lisa Ramirez- director); Pas de Deux (lost my shoe), MENTOR PROJECT at the Cherry Lane Theatre (Cynthia Hopkins- mentor),TO THE BONE, Cherry Lane Theatre, world premiere (Lisa Peterson-director), Pulitzer Prize nominee, recipient of the NYCT Helen Merrill Emerging Playwriting Award and the KILROY LIST; ALL FALL DOWN, written at INTAR during the Maria Irene Fornés Playwrights in Residency Lab; DOWN HERE BELOW, an adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s THE LOWER DEPTHS for the Ubuntu Theater Project, world premiere in 2019 (Michael French- director).
Judith Sloan, is an actor, audio artist, writer, and educator whose work has been produced in theatres and festivals throughout the U.S. and abroad including: LaMama,The Public Theatre, The Theatre Workshop (Scotland), The Market Theatre (Johannesburg), etc. Her work has aired on public radio stations throughout the U.S. Solo performances include: Denial of the Fittest, A Tattle Tale: eyewitness in Mississippi, and YO MISS. Sloan has received numerous awards for her audio mixes, documentaries and performances integrating storytelling, sampling and multiple languages including a 2013 New York Foundation on the Arts fellowship, grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation among others. Sloan was commissioned to write the libretto for 1001 Voices: A Choral Symphony for a New America, with music by Frank London and animations by Warren Lehrer, and received a 2018 artist commissioning grant from the Queens Council on the Arts for a new play in development IT CAN HAPPEN HERE, which will have a reading at the Queens Theatre in the Park March 7th, 2020. Sloan teaches at NYU Gallatin, and is the recipient of a Partnership in Education Award for her work with immigrant youth at the International High School in Queens. She is co-founder of the non-profit EarSay based in Queens, NY. www.earsay.org
Marcial Godoy-Anativia is a sociocultural anthropologist and the Managing Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. He is Editor of emisférica (with Macarena Gómez-Barris), the Institute’s trilingual online journal. His publications include “Area Studies and the Decade after 9/11” (2016) with Seteney Shami; Religiones, matrimonio igualitario y aborto: Alianzas con y entre actores religiosos por los derechos sexuales y reproductivos en Argentina (2014) with Daniel Jones y Angélica Peña; Rhetorics of Insecurity: Belonging and Violence in the Neoliberal Era (2013) with Zeynep Gambetti; and Ciudades Translocales: Espacios, flujo, representación—Perspectivas desde las Américas (2005) with Rossana Reguillo. From 2000-2007, he worked in the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean and the Program on International Collaboration at the Social Science Research Council. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).
Peter Goldberg, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund: In 2015, BCBF began operating as a charitable bail fund to secure the freedom of presumptively innocent people accused of criminal misdemeanors who would have been jailed pretrial – or forced to plead guilty and carry a lifelong record, just to go home. In 2018, BCBF launched the New York Immigrant Freedom Fund to pay bond for non-citizens detained by ICE and at imminent risk of deportation. BCBF was proud to be a member of the coalition that won historic bail reform legislation in New York State, effective January 1. Peter began his career as an attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. He received his BA from Johns Hopkins University and his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.
Julia Preston, The Marshall Project, covered immigration for The New York Times for 10 years, until December 2016. She was a member of The Times staff that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on international affairs, for its series that profiled the corrosive effects of drug corruption in Mexico. She is a 1997 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished coverage of Latin America and a 1994 winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Humanitarian Journalism. She has worked as an editor and foreign correspondent for The Times and, before that, The Washington Post.
Theresa Thanjan, Manager of Member Engagement, NYC, at the New York Immigration Coalition, has worked with immigrant communities in NYC for two decades. She started her career working with Catholic Charities as a community organizer in Queens conducting needs assessments and creating culturally sensitive programming. She then directed programs for immigrant youth in the areas of leadership development and community service at South Asian Youth Action, Citizens Committee for New York City and Interfaith Neighbors. Soon after, she directed award winning documentaries highlighting stories of immigrant youth and profiling their ongoing fight for justice and civil rights. Theresa served as the National Co-Chair of South Asians for Obama during the 2012 election and lead a task force fighting for comprehensive immigration reform post-election. She is currently the Manager of Member Engagement, NYC, at the New York Immigration Coalition where she organizes member based organizations to be involved in city, state and federal advocacy campaigns. Theresa received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Rochester and her Masters in Social Work from Columbia University.
