INITIATORS

Martin Puchner is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, is a prizewinning author, educator, public speaker, and institution builder in the arts and humanities. His writings, which include a dozen books and anthologies and over sixty articles and essays, range from philosophy and theater to world literature and have been translated into many languages. Through his best-selling Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC Masterpieces of World Literature, he has brought four thousand years of literature to audiences across the globe. His most recent book, The Written World, which tells the story of literature from the invention of writing to the Internet, has been widely reviewed in The New York Times, The Times (London), the Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Atlantic, The Economist, among others, covered on radio and television, and is forthcoming in over a dozen languages. In hundreds of lectures and workshops from the Arctic Circle to Brazil and from the Middle East to China, he has advocated for the arts and humanities in a changing world. At Harvard, he has instituted these ideas in a new program in theater, dance and media as well as in the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research.   www.martinpuchner.com   Harvard University

Gloria Benedikt was born in Austria and trained at the Vienna State Opera Ballet School and English National Ballet School. From 2002 she has worked as a dancer and choreographer across Europe and the USA. Since graduating from Harvard University in 2013, she focuses on creating artistically innovative, impact driven arts projects that link the humanities and sciences to solve global challenges. In 2015 she became the first Research Associate for Science and Arts at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), since 2018 she leads the Science and Art Project. She explores how artistic and scientific processes can be connected to tackle global challenges more effectively and support transformations to sustainability. Recent performance and speaking engagements include the Kennedy Center, Washington DC; Carnegie Hall, the European Culture Forum, Brussels; the European Forum Alpbach; the Bridging Europe Festival, Budapest; the European Commission’s Joint Research Center, Ispra; the Forum on European Culture, Amsterdam; the Stockholm Act, ESOF Toulouse, the International Conference on Sustainable Development, New York, the UNESCO Forum, Moscow, and the Sustainable Brands Conference, Detroit.   www.gloriabenedikt.com   IIASA

CURATORS

Chantal Bilodeau is a Montreal-born, New York-based playwright and translator whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change. She is the Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle, an organization that uses theatre to foster conversation about our global climate crisis, create an empowering vision of the future and encourage people to take action; the founder of the blog and international network Artists & Climate Change; and a co-founder of Climate Change Theatre Action, a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented in support of the United Nations COP meetings. She has co-organized several national and international gatherings focused on theatre and climate change, and has presented on the same subject at conferences and universities for over a decade. She is an artistic collaborator in the Science & Arts Project at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna (IIASA), and is currently writing a series of eight plays that look at the social and environmental changes taking place in the eight Arctic states.   www.cbilodeau.com   The Arctic Cycle

Lanxing Fu is a Chinese-American theater artist and co-director of Superhero Clubhouse, uniting ecology and theater to enact justice, cultivate hope, and inspire a thriving future. With SHC: she is the playwright and co-creator of Mammelephant (The New Ohio / HERE Arts Center) the program director of The Living Stage NYC (University Settlement), and a co-creator of PLUTO (no longer a play), (The Brick) and JUPITER (a play about power), (La MaMa). She is also a lead teaching artist with Big Green Theater, a SHC & Bushwick Starr after-school eco-playwriting program. Recent performances: The Space Between The Letters (UTR at The Public), some higher glimmer in a landscape of flat (Collapsible Hole), 36 Peaks (Baryshnikov Arts Center), and Holidays In/Coyote (The Tank). In Virginia, she worked with the ensemble Building Home on theater and civic engagement in the New River Valley. Her essays “Building Possibility in the Age of Climate Change” and “The Birth of a Climate Commons” are published on HowlRound. She has been a workshop facilitator and speaker with Asian American Arts Alliance, The New School, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, TCG National Theater Conference, Cultivating Ensembles, and more. Virginia Tech: BA Humanities, Science, Environment & BA Theatre Arts.   Superhero Clubhouse

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Jeremy Pickard founded Superhero Clubhouse in 2007 as a homebase for experimenting with the intersection of theater and environmental crises. His first play, URANUS (a play about waste), launched what would become the Planet Plays, a series of nine interconnected stories about the Anthropocene. In 2009 Jeremy became the program and production director of Big Green Theater, the eco-playwriting program for Bushwick youth that Superhero Clubhouse runs annually in partnership with The Bushwick Starr. Jeremy is the co-creator of dozens of works of eco-theater including Mammelephant, Flying Ace and the Storm of the Century! and Salty Folk: An Oyster Musical. He is a 2019 STEAMplant resident artist with Pratt Institute for which he is creating Core of Me: A Hike-Play, a performance/hike confronting climate anxiety and perceptions of nature through the dual lens of people and witness trees. His essays “On Eco-Theater” and “Temporary Communities in the Era of Climate Change” are published by TCG and No Passport, edited by Caridad Svich.   Superhero Clubhouse