Mary Zimmerman Workshop

On Tuesday, January 22, 2008 the acclaimed, director, writer and theater visionary Mary Zimmerman offered a Masterclass to the Design MFA students, and a Masterclass on Staging and Performance to undergraduate performance students.

Mary Zimmerman is the recipient of a 1998 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2002 Tony Award for best direction and 10 Joseph Jefferson Awards, including ones for best production and best direction. She is the Manilow Resident Director of Goodman Theatre, a member of the Lookingglass Theatre Company of Chicago, an artistic associate of Seattle Repertory Theatre, and a professor of performance studies at Northwestern University. Works which she has adapted and directed include Silk ; The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci ; The Odyssey ; Arabian Nights ; Journey To The West ; Metamorphoses ; Secret in the Wings ; and Eleven Rooms of Proust . Ms. Zimmerman has also directed the highly acclaimed Pericles at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 2004; Measure for Measure and Henry VIII at New York Shakespeare Festival; A Midsummer Night's Dream at Huntington Theatre; All's Well That Ends Well and Seneca's Trojan Women at the Goodman. In 2002, she created a new opera with Philip Glass called Galileo Galilei which premiered at Goodman Theatre. She is currently directing her work Argonautika at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC. This production runs from January 15 to March 2, 2008.

Jim Henson Artist-in-Residence

For the 2007-2008 academic year, the Jim Henson Artist-in-Residence, Ralph Lee, presented as part of the Clarice Smith Center's Take 5 Series. He conducted a graduate masterclass in the winter term and taught an undergraduate course in mask making in the spring semester. Photos from the masterclass are shown below.

In the 2006-2007 academic year, the Department of Theatre's first Jim Henson Artist-in-Residence, Blair Thomas, taught two puppetry courses each semester. These included: Contemporary Puppet Practices: Language of Puppetry; Puppet and Visual Theatre Studio; Contemporary Puppet Practices: Miniature Replica World. In addition, he conducted a workshop to complete a staging of his new work for young audiences, A Rabbit’s Tale. A Rabbit's Tale is a story examining distrust and friendship, staged to a live performance of M. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibitions, using human size Bunraku puppets and larger than human puppet costume pieces. This staging was in preparation for his Company’s professional debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Chicago in April 2007.

Graduation 2008	Awards	Events	Professional Affiliations

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Department of Theatre, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742-1610