ROUNDTABLE: POWER, SEX & CLIMATE CHANGE
Join DiverseWorks and Open Dance Project for a virtual roundtable discussion on the intersecting themes of power, sexuality, and climate change explored in ODP’s new immersive dance, All the Devils are Here: A Tempest in the Galapagos. This discussion is part of a series of public programs that engage audiences with ODP’s research and creative process in the lead up to the premiere of All the Devils are Here in May 2021.
Annie Arnoult, Open Dance Project Artist Director, will be joined by
GUEST SPEAKERS
Rachel Afi Quinn, Assistant Professor, Comparative Cultural Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of Houston
Lina Dib, Multidisciplinary Artist
Ryan McGettigan, Scenic Designer, Open Dance Project
MODERATED BY
Niki Kasumi Clements, Assistant Professor of Religion and Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities, Rice University
This free roundtable discussion will be hosted on Zoom and live-streamed on DW’s YouTube channel. Registration is required to receive the Zoom link and login information.
This event is supported in part by the National Performance Network, Cullen Trust for Performing Arts, City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Texas Commission on the Arts, Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston Endowment, and the John Steven Kellett Foundation.
Rachel Afi Quinn is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston. Dr. Quinn received her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and B.A in African American Studies (concentration in Cultural Anthropology) from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. Her transnational feminist cultural studies scholarship focuses on mixed race, gender and sexuality in the African Diaspora and her forthcoming book is about Dominican women’s transnational identities in Santo Domingo. Her first book, Being La Dominicana: Race and Gender in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo will be published in May 2021 with University of Illinois Press. Dr. Quinn was part of a filmmaking team that produced the documentary Cimarrón Spirit (2015) about contemporary Afro-Dominican identities and her essay “‘No tienes que entenderlo, solo respetalo ’: Xiomara Fortuna, Racism, Feminism and Other Forces in the Dominican Republic” which was published in The Black Scholar. Her 2019 essay “Spinning the Zoetrope: Visualizing the Mixed-Race Body of Dominican Actress Zoe Saldaña” was published in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. She is a recipient of the Ross M. Lence Award for Teaching Excellence in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, a co-creator of the UH Critical Disability Studies Initiative and co-founder of the social justice feminist collective South Asian Youth in Houston Unite (SAYHU). She received a 2018-19 Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Lina Dib is a multidisciplinary artist and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology. Her installations and compositions range from the experimental to the ethnographic and investigate socio-technical and ecological change. Dib is an affiliate artist at the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University in Montreal and is a professor and fellow at Rice University in the Program in Writing and Communication and the Center for Environmental Studies. She was born in Montreal and currently lives and works in Houston. Her work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, AMIDA’s European training program, the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Moody Center for the Arts among others. Recent exhibitions include Yerba Buena Gardens San Francisco, Lawndale Art Center Houston, MOP Projects Sydney, Day For Night, Galveston Arts Center, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Discovery Green, Governor’s Island NY, the Whitney Biennial 2017, and Johnson Space Center NASA. Dib’s work has been featured by numerous media networks and publications, including the Art Newspaper, Arts + Culture Magazine, the Houston Chronicle, Glasstire, PaperCity, Fox News, KPFT and Vice.
Ryan McGettigan is a scenic designer of theatre, opera, and dance based in New York and working across the country and Europe. He is the resident designer at Cape Rep Theatre in Brewster, MA and a company artist with Prague Shakespeare Company and Houston’s Classical Theatre Company. Houston credits include previous collaborations with Open Dance Project, Theatre Under the Stars, Stages Repertory Theatre, Queensbury Theatre, 4th Wall Theatre, and Catastrophic Theatre. He has received awards for Best Scenic Design from Houston Press for Marie Antoinette (Stages); Elf The Musical and Violet (Queensbury); Jesus Hopped the “A” Train and Pride and Prejudice (4th Wall); Curse of the Starving Class, Baby Screams Miracle, and Fefu and Her Friends (Catastrophic); and from Broadway World Houston for Bonnie and Clyde (TUTS Underground). Regional theater credits include Orlando Shakespeare Theater, Cape Rep, Abilene Shakespeare Festival, Prague Shakespeare. Opera and Dance credits include Glimmerglass Festival, New Orleans Opera, Opera San Jose, HGOco, and Open Dance Project. www.RyanMcGettigan.com
Niki Kasumi Clements is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Assistant Professor of Religion and the Allison Sarofim Assistant Professor of Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Rice University. Dr. Clements is an ethicist working on how humans can shape their lives through daily practices and come to critique the social, political, cultural, economic, and ecological factors that render humans differentially vulnerable to structural violence. The volume editor for Mental Religion: The Brain, Cognition, and Culture (2016), her first monograph, Sites of the Ascetic Self (2020), approaches these questions through the ethics of John Cassian (c.360-c.435), the late ancient ascetic whose views of human ability contribute to new forms of life at the fall of empire. Dr. Clements is currently working on philosopher Michel Foucault’s fascination with Cassian, early Christianity, sexuality, and ethics as an art of living that helps contest modern forms of domination and dehumanization. This book, Foucault the Confessor, charts the relation between these fascinations over the last decade of Foucault’s life through investigation of his riveting archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. From the San Francisco Bay Area where she grew up as a dancer, Dr. Clements’ embodied, affective, and communal understandings of daily practices and self-formation inform her academic work, with degrees from Brown (Ph.D.), Harvard (M.T.S.), and Sarah Lawrence (B.A.).
