IAStoryShare

Ep 15, IA StoryShare 2025: Lizzy Cooper Davis and Ural Grant

For this season of IA Storyshare, we brought together participants from the most recent national gathering at Las Cruces, NM - Providing Passage: Practicing the Worlds We Want, and asked them the following questions: How did you find your way to the IA community, What people, ideas, places, actions brought you here? And what has kept you coming back? Who, what, where in this network is a source of sustenance for you?

In this third episode of the season, theater practitioners/educators Lizzy Cooper Davis and Ural Grant talk about inter-disciplinary practice, working across silos, what sustains them in this work.

Lizzy Cooper Davis is an artist and scholar interested in how the arts can facilitate community conversation, resistance, and change. She is particularly focused on cultural work within Black freedom movements and has conducted research in such places as Cuba, Brazil, and New Orleans. She is currently developing an applied theatre project with formerly incarcerated people in partnership with Ritual4Return, Emerson Prison Initiative, and New Beginnings Reentry Services. Learn more>>>

Ural Grant is an award-winning theater artist and educator. He recently completed an MFA program in Theater at Michigan State University and is currently a faculty member at Kennesaw State University. Ural is particularly passionate about working with young people, community engagement, and arts education. He has led workshops on nonviolence, peer pressure, and communication through Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s Romeo and Juliet Project. Learn more >>>

Ep 14, IA StoryShare 2025: Chaz Barracks and Sylvia Gale

For this season of IA Storyshare, we brought together participants from the most recent national gathering at Las Cruces, NM - Providing Passage: Practicing the Worlds We Want, and asked them the following questions: How did you find your way to the IA community, What people, ideas, places, actions brought you here? And what has kept you coming back? Who, what, where in this network is a source of sustenance for you?

In this second episode of the season, longtime collaborators Chaz Barracks and Sylvia Gale talk about black joy and play, creative administration, and surviving the academy.

Chaz A. Barracks, PhD (he/they) is a mixed-media interdisciplinary scholar, filmmaker, podcast host, and educator. He teaches courses on Black popular culture and the politics of Black joy through critical media practice. Dr. Barracks writes on the politics of deviance in everyday Black life and wrote and directed Everyday Black Matter, a 2020 film project based in Richmond, Virginia. His research and creative practice are invested in interdisciplinary approaches that center epistemologies of Black joy and refusal, employing storytelling as a method to bridge knowledge gaps relevant to the study of Black queer life in America. Learn more>>>

Dr. Sylvia Gale is the executive director of the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) at the University of Richmond. She joined the CCE in August 2009. She serves on the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, was the founding director of Imagining America’s Publicly Active Graduate Education Initiative (PAGE), and a founding co-chair of Imagining America’s initiative on “Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarship,” which explores and advances assessment practices aligned with the values that drive community-engaged work.  Learn more >>>

Ep 13, IA Storyshare 2025: Jan Cohen-Cruz and Lynne Elizabeth

For this season of IA Storyshare, we brought together participants from the most recent national gathering at Las Cruces, NM - Providing Passage: Practicing the Worlds We Want, and asked them the following questions: How did you find your way to the IA community, What people, ideas, places, actions brought you here? And what has kept you coming back? Who, what, where in this network is a source of sustenance for you?

In this first episode of the season, longtime IA participants Jan Cohen-Cruz and Lynne Elizabeth take us down memory lane, and share their insights about the transforming ecology of publicly engaged scholarship.

Grounded in the resistant theater of the early 1970s, Jan Cohen-Cruz (pictured right) performed in street theater and co-facilitated a theater workshop in a maximum-security prison. She earned her PhD at NYU Performance Studies and then taught in the NYU Drama Department for 28 years, initiating the first minor in applied theater at a US university. In 2012, she received the Association for Theater in Higher Education’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theater and Civic Engagement. Jan was director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, co-founding its journal, Public. She was director of field research for A Blade of Grass and and co-researched its field guide for artist/municipal agency partnerships. Learn more >>>

Lynne Elizabeth (pictured left) is the founding director of New Village Press, an independent nonprofit publisher of progressive books that aim to enrich public discussion and understanding of issues vital to healthy, creative, and socially just communities. She is a past president of Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility and the founding director of the former Eos Institute for the Study of Sustainable Living. She has initiated numerous public programs, conferences, and exhibitions, and published the periodicals Earthword and New Village Journal. Learn more >>>

12. Carol Mancke, Trena Noval and Hannah Adamy

Carol is an architect, artist and educator who has worked in architecture practices in London, San Francisco and Tokyo. Through her work at the intersection of art and cities, she seeks to create thought-provoking interventions in situations and places of everyday life. In recent years, her art practice has focused on models of collaborative thinking, questioning, sharing and playing. 

Trena is an artist and educator. Her creative practice engages participatory research, generosity, cross-disciplinary platforms, food adventures and social engagement. At the heart of her work is the investigation of the intersections of social and natural ecologies, exploring the role of collective thinking and actions in a variety of contexts. Collaboration is an important part of her work process.

Trena and Carol are friends and have collaborated on several projects.

They discuss their professional and creative paths, the need to be proactive to connect with people and how art can change people and place.

When Trena needs to leave the conversation early, IAStoryShare facilitator Hannah Adamy steps in to continue the exploration.

Hannah is a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at UC Davis and served as a Graduate Student Researcher for Engaged Scholarship and Engaged Learning at the university.

11. Denise Johnson, Beverly Bickel and Lee Boot

Denise is a Cultural Organizer who has worked to develop and enhance art and cultural assets in southwest and west Baltimore. She’s a co-founder of CultureWorks and currently uses the group’s practices in her work with Baltimore’s historic Arch Social Club, where she’s director of the Arch Social Community Network. The club has been a fixture of Black Baltimore’s civil society for over 100 years and has served as a hub of community action.

Beverly and Lee are on the faculty of UMBC, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Lee is an experimental media artist working to develop new and effective ways to use digital media to spread knowledge for pro-social outcomes. He has assembled widely interdisciplinary teams from the sciences, arts and humanities to explore the potential of an artist’s perspective to address vexing social issues.

Beverly’s research aims at highlighting the essential role of building sustained relationships across differences while negotiating diverse knowledge sources, experiences, discourses and intellectual practices to address local and trans-national transformational challenges.

Lee and Bev got to know each other when they traveled to the 2013 Imagining America conference in Syracuse, New York. They met Denise when she joined the effort to organize the 2015 IA conference in Baltimore.

The three discuss how creating change can only be done by connecting people and listening. They also talk about how they connected and how Denise started out skeptical about the role U-M-B-C would be able to play planning IA’s Baltimore conference.

10. Ben Fink and Sonja Kuftinec

Ben works at Appalshop, a grassroots multimedia arts center in Kentucky. He spent most of his life in cities and suburbs, but in 2015 he moved to rural Kentucky to become Appalshop’s creative placemaking project manager. He now sits on the board of the organization.

Sonja is a professor at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches courses in theater historiography, leadership and performance and social change. She’s developed collaborative theater projects with youth in the Balkans and Middle East. And, Sonja works as a conflict resolution facilitator with Seeds of Peace, an organization that brings together youth from the Middle East, South Asia and Balkan regions.

The two have known each other for years. Sonja was once Ben’s professor, then dissertation chair and now colleague and friend.

Ben and Sonja discuss the importance of understanding people with different points of view and unexpected complications related to transformational work, such as recognizing your blind spots and being careful not to infringe on spaces meant for others, however well-intentioned you are.

9. Lacresha Berry and Castel Sweet

Lacresha, better known as Berry, is a singer/songwriter, actress, poet, educator and writer from Queens, New York, by way of Lexington, Kentucky. Her latest one-woman show, TUBMAN, is a re-imagining of Harriet Tubman’s life as a young girl in Harlem. She performed it to great acclaim at the IA conference.

Castel is a sociologist who explores the intricacies of community, culture and race. She is currently the Coordinator of Community Engaged Learning and Scholarship at the Fitz Center for Community Leadership at the University of Dayton.

The two met at the conference, and as they describe it, they bonded.

Lacresha and Castel discuss their professional journeys, the complexities of cultural identity and finding opportunities to communicate across cultural barriers.

8. Robin Hill and Andrew Sullivan

Robin is an artist whose work focuses on the intersection between drawing, photography and sculpture. She is on the art studio faculty at UC Davis, where she teaches sculpture and drawing, as well as special topics courses, including one on Public Art.

Andrew is a poet who facilitates community generated poems — he helped construct one at the I-A conference. He also teaches humanities at a Waldorf high school in Sacramento. He and Robin met when one of Robin’s kids took one of Andrew’s classes. And, the two have since collaborated on visual art and poetry projects.

About halfway through their discussion, you’ll hear a third voice chime in. That’s the IAStoryShare facilitator who recorded the session asking a follow-up question.

Robin and Andrew discuss challenges to developing one’s consciousness in academia, finding spaces for creative practice and the importance of “finding your people."

7. Nitya Kumaran and Pat Michael

 

At the time of the recording, Nitya was a senior and Pat a sophomore at U-M-B-C, the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Nitya plans on applying to medical school, having majored in Biology, with a minor in writing. Pat’s majoring in Global Studies and plans to pursue a masters in education and become a teacher.

The two met during their involvement in student government at U-M-B-C.

They discuss civic agency at U-M-B-C, the nature of leadership, the power of story and the importance of intercultural communication.

6. jesikah maria ross and Scott Peters

Scott is a professor of development sociology at Cornell University and is a former co-director of Imagining America. jesikah is a documentary mediamaker and Senior Community Engagement Strategist at Capital Public Radio, the NPR member station in Sacramento.

They discuss the power of story, the value of storytelling in scholarship and transformational moments that shaped their lives and work.