Deeper Lecture Series: Ifa Bayeza

SUGGESTED COST: $10, SLIDING SCALE.
OPTIONS: $5, $10, $20.

Plundering the Archives

Playwright, novelist, director and educator Ifa Bayeza reads scenes from her work, drawing on the reconstruction of archives of the plantation and Archives of Black Survival.

About Ifa Bayeza

Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning theatre artist, novelist and educator. She works through both a creative nonfiction and fictional lens to explore pivotal intersections of race throughout history. THE TILL TRILOGY interprets the epic saga of Civil Rights icon Emmett Till. Her novel Some Sing, Some Cry, co-authored with her sister Ntozake Shange, chronicles 200 years of African American music through seven generations of women. Her drama String Theory, in a quartet of voices, relives the voyage of the Amistad slave ship and the tragicomedy Welcome to Wandaland, her experience of desegregation in St. Louis post-Brown vs. Board of Education. Musicals include Charleston Olio on the birth of the Jazz Age and Bunk Johnson, A Blues Poem on the life of the legendary Jazz trumpeter. Currently commissioned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, she is collaborating with twelve writers in New Iberia Louisiana to reconstruct the historic narrative of Shadows-on-the-Teche, a former sugarcane plantation. A graduate of Harvard University with an MFA in Theatre from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the 2018 inaugural Humanist-in-Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities was a finalist for the 2020 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre and for the 2020 Francesca Primus Prize.

The Deeper Lecture Series is a new talk + Q&A program on Zoom designed to acquaint Gibney’s community of artists and audiences with the most provocative, influential and inspiring minds at work in the arts, humanities and activism.

All Winter & Spring 2021 Season events will be held online via Zoom. Gibney’s Box Office can be reached via email. For ticketing inquiries or requests, please email Marketing & Audience Services Manager, Kimiko Tanabe, at boxoffice@gibneydance.org.

Gibney encourages people with disabilities to attend online offerings, and we welcome the opportunity to make this event more accessible. This event features live ASL interpreters and live captioning. If you have any questions or additional access needs, please email us at constanza@gibneydance.org or call us at 212-677-8560 (voice only) at least 24 hours in advance of the event you plan to attend.

Photo by Katrina Wittcamp.