EventsCommon Ground#793

The Camargo Foundation

Featuring Julie Chénot, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Cassandra Medley, Jenny Polak, and Amanda Millet-Sorsa, with Samira Negrouche

Thursday, April 20, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Camargo Foundation Executive Director Julie Chénot and Camargo Foundation past and present residents author Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, playwright Cassandra Medley, and artist Jenny Polak join Rail contributor Amanda Millet-Sorsa for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Samira Negrouche.

Julie Chénot

A photo of Julie Chénot on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Julie Chénot joined the Camargo Foundation in January 2014 initially as Program Director. Following the separation of the Jerome and Camargo Foundations, in September 2017 she was appointed Executive Director of the Camargo Foundation. From 2007 to 2013, Julie Chénot worked on the organization of Marseille Provence 2013 European Capital of Culture. Ms. Chénot was a Rockefeller Research Fellow at the Center for Folk Life and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution. She holds a Masters’ in Business Administration with a specialization in public administration and city economy from the ESSEC Business School in Paris.

    Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

    A photo of Alex Marzano-Lesnevich on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Photo by Greta Rybus
    Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award and the Chautauqua Prize, among many other recognitions, and is in development with HBO. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, among others, Marzano-Lesnevich is now a 2023 United States Artists fellow. They have written for publications including The New York Times, Harper’s, and The Best American Essays. In July 2023, they will become an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Their next book, BOTH AND NEITHER, is forthcoming from Doubleday (US), Phoenix (UK), and Sonatine (France).

    Cassandra Medley

    A photo of Cassandra Medley on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Cassandra Medley is a playwright and teacher. Her recently produced plays include American Slavery Project (NYC) and Cell (Molelo Theater, CA, and Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon 2011, NYC), among others. Ms. Medley has the received the 2004 “Going to the River Writers” Life Achievement Award, the 2002 Ensemble Studio Theatre 25th Anniversary Award for Theatre Excellence, and many other awards. She teaches playwriting at Sarah Lawrence College, has taught at New York University, and has also served as guest artist at Columbia University, the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop and Seattle University. She is a playwright member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre, New River Dramatists, and the Dramatists Guild.

    Jenny Polak

    A photo of Jenny Polak on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Jenny Polak makes site and community responsive art that amplifies demands for social justice. Originally from England, Polak makes art that draws on her background in architecture and includes public and socially engaged projects such as architectural installations, drawings and useful commemorative objects. Polak’s family history of migration drives her to examine detention centers, the violence of borders and strategies for surviving hostile authorities. Polak’s fictional firm Design For The Alien Within creates hypothetical hiding and dwelling places, symbolic lookout and counter-surveillance structures. Polak’s work has been exhibited widely across the world, and she has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards.

    Amanda Millet-Sorsa

    A photo of Amanda Millet-Sorsa on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment

    Amanda Millet-Sorsa is an artist, arts writer and arts worker based in New York. She has exhibited at Spring Projects DUMBO, The Socrates Sculpture Park, Governor's Island, and Time Equities Inc, among others. She has received grants through the Fulbright Scholar award for Brazil, Materials for the Arts, NYC Cultural Affairs, and Queens council on the arts . She holds an M.F.A from the New York Studio School, a B.A. from Brandeis University, and has been a contributor to the Brooklyn Rail since 2021.

    The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

    Dao Strom

    A photo of Dao Strom on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

    We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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