Scholarly Perspectives Spring 2025

Monday, February 24, 5-7pm
Location: Black Box Theater, PBK
American Pluralism: Storytelling, Social Practice and Performance

Join Kamara Thomas for a performance based on her “storywork” Tularosa: An American Dreamtime. Kamara will be joined by collaborator and Band of Toughs member Janet Mylott.

Additional Events
Tuesday, February 25, 5-8 pm, Studio Theatre
Workshop on community storytelling and oral history.

Wednesday, February 26, 5-8 pm, Studio Theatre:
Performance with ensemble and larger community.

Bios
Kamara Thomas '96 is a songspeller, multidisciplinary storyteller and ritualist based in Durham, NC. She uses her musical "storyworks" as containers for community-based artmaking in pursuit of surprising and disruptive storytelling forms and the re/invention of collective mythologies and symbols. Kamara is a recent Princeton Arts Fellow, and while at Princeton she debuted the storywork Xulgaria and presented iterations of Tularosa: An American Dreamtime, a collaboration with theater company Band of Toughs which received a 2022 MAP grant and has been featured at Santa Fe Art Institute and Boulder Museum of History. Her film work includes The Death of Nebuchadnezzar, which was shot in the White Sands Desert of New Mexico, and Good Luck America, which documented an agitprop theatre performance activating public spaces throughout downtown Durham. Kamara also spearheads Country Soul Songbook, a curation and production team rooted in the mission to amplify BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices in country and American roots music.

Janet Mylott '96 has held various roles supporting non-profit theatre, devising and playwriting and is currently a member of Boulder, CO theatre company Band of Toughs. Janet served as Director of Muse Works, an annual new play development series for Muse of Fire Productions in NYC and taught at the Young Writer’s Workshop at the University of Virginia. Most recently Janet spent creative time at Princeton University with Kamara Thomas as a collaborator on the multi-disciplinary storywork Tulorosa: An American Dreamtime.

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Monday, March 24, 5-7pm, Concert Hall, Music Building
"ArtLords and Artivism"
Public Lecture by Omaid Sharifi and Kabir Mokamel

Additional Events
Tuesday, March 25, 4-6 pm, location TBD
Workshop on activism and art

Wednesday, March 26 & Thursday, March 27, 10 am – 5 pm, Sadler Center Atrium
Public mural painting
The community will be invited to paint a mural here that symbolically replaces one destroyed by the Taliban.

Omaid Sharifi, President and Co-founder of ArtLords, will speak about the role of art in fostering freedom and democracy, reflecting on ArtLords' journey and the challenges faced by artists worldwide. The town hall will allow open dialogue, encouraging participants to engage deeply in these critical themes.

ArtLords, an internationally recognized art for social change institution founded in Afghanistan, uses public art as a tool for advocacy, healing, and dialogue. Over the past decade, ArtLords has created powerful murals that symbolize freedom, democracy, and resilience. Many of these artworks were erased by oppressive regimes, including the Taliban, yet their messages of hope and resistance endure.

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Time: 5-7pm
Location: Reves Room

Iman Zaki is a cultural manager, researcher, consultant, and theater maker with a passion for empowering the independent performing arts sector. She is the founder and director of Perform Arts Hub, an organisation that provides training and practice opportunities for young performers while enhancing the capacity and visibility of independent artists. She also co-founded Reflection for Arts, Training, and Development NGO, which supports visual and performing artists and promotes the role of the arts in community development.

Her professional experience spans cultural management, facilitation, training and producing art, focusing on art that addresses social issues, focusing on personal transformations and using theater and other arts as tools for social change.

She holds a Master’s degree in Theater for Development from the University of East Anglia, UK. Her commitment to the arts has been recognized through several prestigious fellowships, including the ISPA Global Fellowship Program from the International Society for the Performing Arts (USA, 2025), the IFA CrossCulture Programme Fellowship for Civil Society Strengthening (Germany, 2024), a fellowship in Arts Management from CEC ArtsLink (USA, 2021), a fellowship in Cultural Management from the Goethe-Institut (Germany, 2015), and a fellowship in Advanced Studies for Social Change from the Ford Foundation International Fellowship Program (UK, 2010).

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Time: 5-7pm
Location: Theater, Ewell Hall

Guatemalan photographer Daniel Hernández-Salazar has loved photography since childhood and worked as a photojournalist for AFP, Reuters and the Associated Press during the Guatemalan Civil War.  Daniel currently works as Official Photographer of Guatemala’s President Bernardo Arévalo De León.

He also works as a freelance photographer, interested in human subjects and historical memory. He is proficient in both digital and film photography.

He has shown his work in more than 35 solo exhibitions and 40 group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. He received the Jonathan Mann Prize in the Humanities (1998) and was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture (2005), leading to his promotion to Officer (2017).

Two anthologies have been published for him, by Kage Shobo (Tokyo, 2006) and the University of Texas (Austin, 2007). His work is on permanent display at the Belgian Museum of the Holocaust and Human Rights, where he conceptualized his exhibition Genocide, the Silent Tragedy of Guatemala (2014).

In 2015 he created the Se re (v) bela project, which presented the series Guatemala se re (v) bela (2016) and Xela se re (v) bela (2017). In 2018 it was the turn of San Salvador.