May 23 @ 4:30 pm
Guest of honor Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon from Sweet Honey in the Rock
Moore Theater
Free Admission
Associate Professor of Theater
Office: 106 Hopkins Center
Office Phone: (603)646-3218
E-mail: Laura.Edmondson@Dartmouth.edu
Laura Edmondson is a scholar and playwright whose work focuses on East Africa. Her articles on Tanzanian, Ugandan, and Rwandan theater have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, TDR, and the anthologies African Performance Arts (Routledge 2002), Violence Performed (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), and Vectors of the Radical (Palgrave Macmillan 2011). Her book, Performance and Politics in Tanzania: The Nation on Stage was published by Indiana University Press in 2007. Her fieldwork has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the American Association of University Women. As a playwright, her work has received finalist or semi-finalist status at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, PlayPenn, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, Kitchen Dog Theatre's New Works Festival, Playfest at the Orlando Shakespeare Festival, the Global Age Project at the Aurora Theatre, Reverie's Next Generation Playwrights Contest, and the W. Keith Hedrick Playwriting Award. In 2010, her children's play The Tanzanite Princess won the Aurand Harris Memorial Award. In addition, her plays have been developed or produced at the HRC Showcase Theatre, Abingdon Theatre Company, Panndora's Box, Penn State University, Tulane University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Florida State University. She has also collaborated on a performance piece, Forged in Fire, with Ugandan performer Okello Kelo Sam and Tanzanian musician Robert O. Ajwang'. The piece, which was a finalist for the Sundance Theatre Lab, integrates music, dance, and text to explore Okello's personal experiences of the civil war in northern Uganda; excerpts are published in the forthcoming anthology Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters (Intellect Press 2012). In 2008, she co-organized "Eti! East Africa Speaks!," a residency for East African theater artists at Dartmouth and in New York City, which was featured in the November 2008 issue of American Theatre magazine. Prior to coming to Dartmouth, she held positions at the University of Georgia and Florida State University. She has also taught theater history and playwriting at the Bagamoyo College of Arts in Tanzania and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. For the 2012-2013 academic year, she will be based at Makerere University in the Department of Literature as a Fulbright Scholar, where she will be conducting research for her book on the performance of trauma in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
