Director and Program Curator
David Levin, Director
5801 S. Ellis Ave. 305-17, Chicago, IL 60637 773-834-1936 / dlevin@uchicago.edu
David J. Levin is Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies. From 2007-10, he was Co-Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH). Before joining the faculty at Chicago in 1998, he taught German and Theater Studies at Columbia University. He received his BA at Brown University and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a guest professor of Theater and Performance Studies at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Mainz; he regularly team-teaches courses on opera, theater, and performance at the University of Konstanz with Professor Christopher Wild (Chicago) and Professor Juliane Vogel (Konstanz). Professor Levin's recent work focuses on the aesthetics and politics of performance in opera, theater, and cinema. He is the editor of Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford University Press, 1994) and the author of Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (Princeton University Press, 1998). His latest book Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinskywas published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007; a paperback edition appeared in 2010. Professor Levin has also worked extensively as a dramaturg for various opera houses in Germany and the United States and for William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet. He serves as executive editor of the Opera Quarterly, published by Oxford University Press. In 2010, he and Christopher Wild organized "Praxes of Theory", an international conference at Chicago that brought together artists and scholars form Berlin and Chicago to explore the intersections of performance practice and performance theory. The conference inaugurated a multi-year cooperation with the Institute for Theater Studies at the Free University Berlin.
Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, Program Curator
5801 S. Ellis Ave. 305-17, Chicago, IL 60637 773-834-1936 / lbdanzig@uchicago.edu
Leslie Buxbaum Danzig received her BA from Brown University and her PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She is currently co-creating a dance-theater production called The Better Half with Julia Rhoads/Lucky Plush Productions, which will premiere at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Fall 2011 and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, MD in 2012. The Better Half is a recipient of a National Dance Project Award and a National Performance Network creation fund award. Danzig is co-founder, resident director and former Managing Director of the Chicago-based physical theater company 500 Clown, whose shows have performed in Chicago at Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Lookingglass Theatre, among others. The group, which tours regularly throughout the US, received an Association of Performing Arts Presenters Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Grant that recognized the company as a leader in ensemble work, commissions from Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (MD) and College of St. Benedict's/Saint John's University (MN), and was a Presidential Fellow in the Arts at University of Chicago from 2005-08. Danzig’s freelance theater credits include directing Redmoon’s Hunchback at New Victory Theater (NYC) and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, touring nationally and internationally as an actor with NYC’s Elevator Repair Service, assisting director Julie Taymor, collaborating with choreographer Molly Shanahan as dramaturg, and recently appearing as Masha in The Seagull in Chekhov on Lake Lucille (director Brian Mertes). For the past five years, Danzig has taught at the University of Chicago under the auspices of the Theater and Performance Studies program, as well as in Northwestern’s MFA Directing program and at Chicago High School for the Arts.