The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Kicks Off 2014 Prelude Festival Today

The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY presents the 2014 PRELUDE FESTIVAL. The annual festival is dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre and performance. Following the enormous success of its tenth anniversary in 2013, the eleventh annual PRELUDE festival will be curated by Chloe Bass, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Sarah Rose Leonard, Allison Lyman, and Frank Hentschker.

Since 2003, The Segal Center's PRELUDE FESTIVAL has presented more than 300 emerging artists and companies alongside established figures such as Richard Foreman, Marina Abramovic, Mabou Mines, Charles Mee, and many more. A public lab for sharing new ideas, the 3-day festival features brief workshop performances, readings, installations, participatory events, panels, and discussions featuring some of the most exciting artists working today. The festival, which is free and open to the public, is held in various locations throughout The Graduate Center, CUNY, including The Martin E. Segal Theatre, The Elebash Recital Hall, and The James Gallery.

PRELUDE 14 will conclude with an off-site party (transportation provided), featuring special performances and the presentation of the Second Annual FRANKY Award. Named in honor of The Segal Center's Executive Director and PRELUDE founder Dr. Frank Hentschker, the FRANKY Award was created to recognize an artist who has made a long-term, extraordinary impact on contemporary theater and performance in New York City. The inaugural award was presented to Kate Valk (The Wooster Group) in 2013.

The 2014 PRELUDE FESTIVAL is produced by Sarah Stites on behalf of The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. For ongoing updates, visit: www.PRELUDEnyc.org.

About the Curators:

Chloë Bass is a conceptual artist working in performance, situation, publication, and installation. Chloë has received commissions from LUMEN, the Culture Project's Women Center Stage Festival, the Bushwick Starr's Bushwhack Festival, and 3rd Ward's Moviehouse. She has received residencies from the Bemis Center (Omaha, Nebraska), D21 Kunstraum/5533 art space (Leipzig, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey), and Eyebeam (New York). Recent work has been seen at the Neuberger Museum, Momenta Art, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Flux Factory, Kunstkammer AZB (Zürich), Akademie Schloss Solitude, Exit Art, Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, ITINERANT Performance Festival, Glasshouse, Panoply Performance Laboratory, and Agape Enterprise, among others. Selected profiles of her work have appeared in BOMB, Entorno, ArtInfo, Art Observed, and Hyperallergic. She is a the recipient of a 2014 Create Change Residency from the Laundromat Project, and a 2013 Fellowship for Utopian Practice from Culture Push. From 2007 - 2011, Chloë served as the co-lead organizer for Arts in Bushwick, which produces Bushwick Open Studios, BETA Spaces, and Armory Arts Week performance festival SITE Fest, which she founded. She has guest lectured at the Queens Museum, Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, Sotheby's Institute, the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, and Brooklyn College CUNY. She holds a BA in Theater Studies from Yale University, and an MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) from Brooklyn College.

Jackie Sibblies Drury is a Brooklyn- based playwright. Her play We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-­1915 had its world premiere at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, its New York premiere at Soho Rep in Fall 2012, and its European premiere at The Bush theater in London in 2014. Jackie's work has been featured at Woolly Mammoth, Interact Theater, Matrix Theater in L.A., Company One, Undermain Theater, The Humana Festival at The Actors' Theatre of Louisville, PRELUDE.11, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Victory Gardens 2010 Ignition Festival, American Theater Company's 10 x 10 Festival, and The Magic Theatre's Virgin Play Festival. Her work has been developed at The Sundance Theater Lab, The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, New York Theater Workshop, and the MacDowell Colony. Jackie received a 2012­-13 Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists. She was a member of the 2011-­12 Soho Rep Writer/Director lab, a 2010-­12 NYTW Emerging Artist of Color Fellow, and member of The Civilians' R&D Group. She was a dramaturg and contributing writer for Zero Cost House, a collaboration between Pig Iron Theatre Company and Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada. Jackie is a NYTW Usual Suspect and teaches playwriting at Fordham University. She is a graduate of Brown's MFA playwriting program, where she received the David Wickham Prize in Playwriting. Her play Social Creatures was commissioned by Trinity Repertory Theater Company in Providence RI and premiered there in March 2013. Jackie is the inaugural recipient of the 2012­-14 Jerome New York Fellow at the LARK Play Development Center.

Sarah Rose Leonard is a dramaturg, director, and producer. She is the Literary Associate at the Signature Theatre. She has been the Associate Agent at AO International, the Next Generation Fellow at The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Literary Associate at Page 73, and the Literary Resident at Playwrights Horizons. In 2013 Sarah ran Smith + Tinker, a collaborative writers group hosted by HERE Arts Center; she produced the 5 writers' plays in a mini-festival called LADDER TO THE MOON. Sarah's curating/producing work includes GUADALUPE, an annual event about femininity, DESORIENTACIÓN, a cross-cultural reading series in Chile, and producing the performance parties for the PRELUDE Festival. She has dramaturged for The Women's Project, The TBA Festival, and The Bushwick Starr, among others, and read scripts for the Sundance Institute, The Playwrights Realm, The O'Neill, and Berkeley Rep. Her work as a director/deviser includes In The Fog (Dixon Place, Brooklyn Arts Exchange), and The North-South Trilogy: Destino (Little Theatre at Dixon Place), Destination (site-specific, Chile), and Los Híbridos (Chilean-North American Institute of Culture, Chile). She has written articles for Culturebot and NITE News and is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. Upcoming projects: curating/producing a mini-festival of contemporary Chilean plays in translation and creating a dance/theatre piece for a bar.

Allison Lyman is currently the Artistic Producer of The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, where she curates and oversees the Center's annual public programming and organizational development efforts. As an independent dramaturg/producer, she has worked with dozens of artists and companies in the development and production of new performance. Selected work includes Branden Jacobs Jenkins (An Octoroon, PS122), Moving Theatre (Armory Show, Park Avenue Armory), Ads (NYC Players, PS122), Trish Harnetiaux (If You Can Get to Buffalo, Incubator Arts Project), Ben Gassman (The Downtown Loop, 3LD), Whore (dir. Stephen Brackett, SPF), Him (dir. Meghan Finn, Walkerspace), as well as Kirk Lynn + Melanie Joseph, Corina Copp, and Moe Yousuf. Prior to joining the Segal team, she held development positions at the Metropolitan Opera and Los Angeles Opera, and produced for The Foundry Theatre, Mac Wellman's Bring a Weasel...Festival, and 2008 + 2009 PRELUDE festivals. A former Buchwald Literary Fellow at Soho Rep., she has been a guest lecturer and panelist for Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (LMDA), Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Through her company Teeth of Tooth, she develops and produces new performance work, live and online. MFA (Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism): Brooklyn College.

About The Segal Center - The Segal Center bridges the gap between the academic and performing arts communities through dynamic public programs and digital initiatives that are free and open to all.

Home to theatre artists, scholars, students, performing arts managers, and the local and international performance communities, The Segal Center provides a supportive environment for conversation, open exchange, and the development of new ideas and new work. Year round, the Center presents a wide variety of FREE public programs which feature leading national and international artists, scholars, and arts professionals in conversation about theatre and performance. Programs include staged readings to further the development of new and classic plays, festivals celebrating New York performance (PRELUDE) and international plays (PEN World Voices), screenings of performance works on film, artists in conversation, academic lecture series, televised seminars, symposia, and arts in education programs. In addition, the Center maintains its long-standing visiting-scholars-from-abroad program, publishes a series of highly-regarded academic journals, as well as single volumes of importance (including plays in translation), all written and edited by renowned scholars.

Executive Director, Co-Director of Programs / Frank Hentschker

Managing Director / Rebecca Sheahan

Artistic Producer, Co-Director of Programs / Allison Lyman

Development Associate / Sarah Stites

MESTC Next Generation Fellow / Michael Locicero

Segal Center Associate / Brad Burgess

The Graduate Center, CUNY, of which the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is an integral part, is the doctorate-granting institution of The City University of New York (CUNY). An internationally recognized center for advanced studies and a national model for public doctoral education, the school offers more than thirty doctoral programs, as well as a number of master's programs. Many of its faculty members are among the world's leading scholars in their respective fields, and its alumni hold major posi­tions in industry and government, as well as in academia. The Graduate Center is also home to twenty-eight interdisciplinary research centers and institutes focused on areas of compelling social, civic, cultural, and scientific concerns. Located in a landmark Fifth Avenue building, The Graduate Center has become a vital part of New York City's intellectual and cultural life with its extensive array of public lectures, ex­hibitions, concerts, and theatrical events.

For more information, visit www.thesegalcenter.org.