BROADWAY WOMEN CELEBRATE NEW HOLIDAY AT LINCOLN CENTER LIBRARY

New York’s League of Professional Theatre Women will host a panel of award-winning Broadway artists in honor of the second international SWAN Day (Support Women Artists Now Day). The panelists will discuss PERFORMANCE COLLABORATIONS: How Women Theater Artists Make It Happen at the Bruno Walter Auditorium of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, March 28, 2009. Admission is free.

The League’s panel is part of a world-wide SWAN Day movement that aims to increase visibility, funding, and employment for women artists. The panel will feature Robyn Goodman (producer of In the Heights, winner of the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical, founder of Second Stage Theatre); costume designer Carrie Robbins (designer of over 30 Broadway shows including the original production of Grease); playwright/performer Lisa Kron (2 Tony nominations for her Broadway production of Well); director Leigh Silverman (Well, Beebo Brinker Chronicles); Holly Hynes, costume designer for the New York City Ballet; and Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, Director of Exhibitions for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Following the panel, the public is invited to tour the League’s exhibition, CURTAIN CALL: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance, on the first floor of the library in the Oenslager Gallery.

The range of events for SWAN Day 2009 is as diverse as the artists involved. In San Francisco, there will be a four-day women’s film festival; in Washington, D.C., an exhibit of Mary McFadden’s fashion designs at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. In New York City there will be 20 events including a showcase of women’s short films organized by New York Women in Film and Television, the Lady Got Chops jazz series in Brooklyn, a carnival at the Women’s Project, a discussion with playwrights Kia Corthron and Migdalia Cruz at Revolution Books, premieres at Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, and dance events in Queens and the Bronx. Groups in the U.S., Kenya, Germany, Canada and Ghana are planning their second annual festivals, while new events will take place in Jamaica, Argentina, Israel, and China.

SWAN Day is a project of The Fund for Women Artists. For more information, please contact info@SwanDay.org or visit www.SwanDay.org or contact Eileen Koch at Eileen Koch and Company, 310.441.1000, Eileen@eileenkoch.com or www.eileenkoch.com.



ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE PANELISTS

CARRIE ROBBINS has designed the costumes for over thirty Broadway productions, including the original productions of Grease and Agnes of God; a revival of Sweet Bird of Youth starring Lauren Bacall; Frankenstein with Dianne Wiest and John Glover; Brecht’s Happy End starring Meryl Streep; Boys of Winter; Frank Langella’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac; and a revival of Shadow Box with Mercedes Ruehl. Most recently Robbins designed the costumes for Irving Berlin’s White Christmas on Broadway, in the regions and in the United Kingdom; M. Butterfly and On the Verge at Arena Stage; and The Gershwins’ An American in Paris at the Alley Theatre inHouston. Her designs for opera include Death in Venice at Glimmerglass, selected for the 2008 Prague Quadrennial International Exhibit of Scenography and Theatre Architecture, and Samson et Dalila at San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Florida Grand Opera. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Tony nominations, five Drama Desk Awards, the Maharam Award, and three awards from USITT, which will be publishing a monograph about Robbins’ designs in 2011. A long-time Master Teacher of Costume Design at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Robbins is also co-curator of the exhibition CURTAIN CALL: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance.

LlSA KRON has been writing and performing theater since coming to New York from Michigan in 1984. After an acclaimed run at the Public Theater, during which it was listed among the year’s best plays by the New York Times, the Associated Press and other media organizations, Kron’s play Well opened on Broadway in March 2006 and received two Tony nominations. 2.5 Minute Ride (Obie Award, Drama Desk nomination and GLAAD Award) premiered at the Public Theater in 1999 and has since toured extensively in the US and abroad. Other plays by Kron include 101 Humiliating Stories (Drama Desk nomination); Charity and Montecore, at the 2006 Humana Festival and the NY Fringe; and 43/13. Lisa is a founding member of the OBIE and Bessie Award–winning theater company The Five Lesbian Brothers. She has received fellowships and/or grants from the Lortel, Guggenheim and Creative Capital foundations; NEA/TCG; Cal Arts/Alpert Award; and NYFA. Upcoming: a musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, as well as new plays for Center Theatre Group, the Sloan Foundation/Playwrights Horizons and Drew University.

ROBIN GOODMAN produced Avenue Q, which received the Tony Award for Best Musical of 2004, and In the Heights, winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical of 2008. Other Broadway credits include Metamorphoses (Drama Desk Award), A Class Act (Tony nomination), Steel Magnolias, Barefoot in the Park, High Fidelity, and the current revival of West Side Story. Off Broadway she has produced Bat Boy; tick, tick…BOOM!; Our Lady of 121st Street; Red Light Winter; and the award-winning Altar Boyz. She was co-founder and artistic director of Second Stage Theatre for thirteen years, supervising producer of ABC’s “One Life to Live” for four years and is currently artistic consultant to the Roundabout Theatre Company.

HOLLY HYNES has designed costumes for over 120 ballets for some of the world’s leading opera houses and stages. Locally her designs have graced The Metropolitan Opera’s stage (La Gioconda for The Metropolitan Opera, Sleeping Beauty for American Ballet Theater); Broadway (On Borrowed Time at Circle in the Square); and the New York State Theater, where she designed over sixty works for New York City Ballet and for twenty-one years was Director of Costumes. She has also designed for San Francisco Ballet, The Royal Ballet of London, National Ballet of Canada, Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center, Houston Ballet, Morphosis, La Scalla, Stuttgart Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet and The Mariinsky Ballet (formally The Kirov). In addition to her design work, Hynes serves as a consultant with authority to teach costume reproductions of various established designs for the Jerome Robbins Estate, Peter Martins and the George Balanchine Trust. Three of her designs are featured in the exhibition CURTAIN CALL: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.


LEIGH SILVERMAN directed Lisa Kron's Well on Broadway. Off-Broadway credits include the world premieres of Liz Flahive’s From Up Here at Manhattan Theatre Club (Drama Desk nomination); David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, a co-production of the Center Theatre Group and The Public Theater; Beebo Brinker Chronicles, produced by Hourglass Group and 37 Arts; Brooke Berman’s Hunting and Gathering at Primary Stages; Well at The Public Theater, The Huntington Theater and ACT, San Francisco; The Five Lesbian Brothers' Oedipus at Palm Springs at New York Theatre Workshop; Eve Ensler's The Treatment at The Culture Project; Neena Beber's Jump/Cut, produced by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Theater J, and by Women's Project; and Big Times, produced by W.E.T. In London’s West End: Wit. Recent regional US productions include The Road To Mecca at Seattle Repertory Theatre, the world premiere of Tanya Barfield’s Of Equal Measure at Center Theatre Group, Bad Dates at Cleveland Playhouse, and How I Learned to Drive at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Upcoming projects include the new musical Coraline, with music by Stephin Merritt and book by David Greenspan, at MCC, and Five Questions by Lisa Kron.

BARBARA COHEN–STRATYNER, Ph.D., is the Judy R. and Alfred A. Rosenberg Director of Exhibitions at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, an author and a lecturer on dance and performance. She is co-curator of the exhibition CURTAIN CALL: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance.