Artist Residencies
The Curb Center hosts artists for campus visits throughout the academic year. Visiting artists speak to Vanderbilt classes, offer public programs and talks, and support ongoing programs and initiatives at Vanderbilt. To inquire about scheduling an artist-in-residence for a class visit, please contact Rachel Thompson.
Spring 2025 Visiting Artists:
Andrew Zitcer, Tom Borrup, and Sonja Kuftinec
February 4–6, 2025
Co-editors of Democracy as Creative Practice, Andrew Zitcer and Tom Borrup are both experts in community planning and arts-based solutions. They have brought together a group of artists, curators, teachers, activists, and others in this volume of essays on creative and artistic interventions. This book champions creativity as a democratic tool to enact both local and global change. Sonja Kuftinec, renown theatre artist and professor at University of Minnesota, has coauthored a chapter in this book titled “All the Relatives: Animating Stories of Democratic Participation Through Speaking Out.”
Andrew Zitcer is an associate professor at Drexel University where he directs the Urban Strategy graduate program. He is also the author of Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism and has been published in HowlRound Theatre, Antipode, Urban Geography, Planning Theory & Practice, Journal of Planning Education and Research, and the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society.
Tom Borrup is a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota where he is the Director of Graduate Studies for the Arts and Cultural Leadership and Civic Engagement Programs. He served as executive director of Intermedia Arts for 20 years and now works with a variety of communities on creative tools for revitalization and change. He is also the author of The Creative Community Builder’s Handbook and an international speaker and consultant.
Sonja Kuftinec’s research includes artistic pedagogy, community theatre, conflict transformation, and the work of storytelling as a tool against historical amnesia. She has been widely published and holds a Seeds of Peace honorarium for facilitation work with Middle East Youth among other awards. She collaborated with fellow theatre expert Maria Asp on her chapter of Democracy as Creative Practice.
Jenny Baum
February 18–21, 2025
Jennifer Baum has recently published her new memoir, Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right. This memoir details Baum’s life in a version of New York that made artistic communities possible through affordable housing policy. Through the narrative of Baum’s childhood, the city itself becomes a character that might seem totally unfamiliar with those who have only seen New York in its current state: a city that centered unity, community, and growth.
Jennifer Baum is both an author and a filmmaker, with films like The Boy Test (2000) and Spirit Vessels (2002) under her belt. Her short films have screened in Havana, Seattle, Tokyo, San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Toronto, and Ottawa. She has also had her writing published in Guernica, Mutha, Jewish News, New York Daily News, Jacobin, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Filmmaking from University of British Columbia.
Allison Orr
February 15–March 30, in conjunction with the Spring 2025 Community Engagement Bootcamps
For over 20 years, Forklift Danceworks has created inclusive, one-of-a-kind performance projects that share stories, build understanding, and create community. With a mission to activate communities through a collaborative creative process, Forklift has reached over 50,000 people with free performances that typically feature the people whose work sustains our everyday lives. Additionally, Forklift Danceworks partners with different communities across the world to train local artists and government staff on the unique Forklift collaborative creative process. Through artistic programming and coaching, Forklift builds capacity for more informed civic dialogue, greater collaboration between individuals, and stronger connections and leadership across communities.
Allison Orr, Founder and Artistic Director of Forklift, creates award-winning choreography with the people whose work sustains our everyday lives. Inspired by the beauty and virtuosity in the movement of labor, and building on her background in anthropology and social work, Allison has honed a methodology of ethnographic choreography that engages community members as co-authors and performers in the creation of large-scale civic spectacles. Challenging audiences to expand notions of dance and performer, her dances have been performed for audiences of 60 to 6,000+.
Lisa Byrd, Organizational Strategist for Forklift, has a 30+ year career in the arts with roles ranging from audio engineering and production management to providing organizational leadership as production director for dance companies and executive leadership for community-based arts organizations. Lisa has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Penn State University and a Master’s Degree in Theater History and Criticism from Texas State University. She continued her studies in leadership and organizing with Marshall Ganz’s Leadership, Organizing and Action, an Executive Education program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Public Policy.
Robert Shetterly
March 17–21, 2025, in conjunction with the Changemakers of the 21st Century exhibition
Robert Shetterly is the creator of Americans Who Tell The Truth, a series of portraits of American citizens who, in a variety of ways, spoke truth to power. This series of over 250 paintings has been shown all over the country, including in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. His subjects range from climate activists to whistleblowers, and often Shetterly himself has performed humanitarian work alongside his subjects. Shetterly has a degree in English Literature from Harvard University, where he both took the drawing courses that turned his life towards visual art and was active in the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War movements.
A selection of this series has been curated by Vanderbilt students as part of Dr. Jack Crawford’s History of Portraiture course. This series, titled Changemakers of the 21st Century, is a selection of Shetterly’s painting of figures active within the past 25 years. This selection will be displayed at The Curb Center until April of 2025.
Hannibal Lokumbe and Lauren Coyle Rosen
April 7–11, 2025
Jazz legend and composer Hannibal Lokumbe has been writing pieces celebrating the African-American experience for decades. His work has been commissioned and performed by symphonies across the country, including his piece “In The Spirit of Being,” which will be performed by Blair students here at Vanderbilt during his visit. He is also the founder of the Music Liberation Orchestra, a program that teaches music, writing, and genealogy to incarcerated men. He is a Harlem Jazz Hall of Fame Lifetime Inductee, recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant, and holds a Lifetime Achievement from The Detroit Symphony Orchestra among other awards.
Lokumbe has coauthored a biography with scholar Lauren Coyle Rosen titled Hannibal Lokumbe: Spiritual Soundscapes of Music, Life, and Liberation. This biography is a portrait of Lokumbe’s life and works that illustrates the importance and spiritual significance of his creative journey. Rosen is a cultural anthropologist, artist, and poet in her own right and is both the author of Fires of Gold, Law in Light, The Spirit of Ani (coauthored with Ani DiFranco) and seven volumes of poetry.