PASJ 20th Future of Performing Arts Panel
PASJ 20th Anniversary Festival
Future of Performing Arts Closing Panel
Recorded Sat May 1 at 11am-12:30pm (PST)
Leticia Duarte, Deborah Eliezer, Rodney E Jackson Jr, and Eric Ting in dialogue, curated by Nicky Martinez
COMMUNITY & PROFESSIONAL ENGAGEMENT
Beyond our USF zoom-rooms, another focus of the festival is community engagement that reaches beyond our campus and embodies a radically inclusive vision for artistic social practice. From teaching music and dance to 1st graders online, to movement and storytelling projects with local elders, USF teams have been “changing the world from here” by leading online engagement initiatives from their homes around the world. From an accessible online PASJ Open Mic featuring original works by student and alumni artists, to a Future of the Performing Art panel featuring high-profile leaders in the field, we are bringing people together to broaden the scope of artistic practice here and now.
PANELISTS
Leticia Duarte
Leticia Duarte (they, them) is a Bay Area director, actor, playwright, activist and teaching artist whose recent projects include: Real Women Have Curves with SF Playhouse, Particle of Dread with Anton’s Well, Helen! With Theatre of Yugen, Into the Beautiful North & The King of Cuba with CentralWorks. They have also worked with Willows Theatre Co, Berkeley Rep., Crowded Fire, Playwrights Foundation, Playground, Bay Area Children’s Theatre and various others. Duarte is a graduate of UCLA, UCSC, and has trained with A.C.T. and Shakespeare & Co. They are also TBA Titan Finalist and a former San Francisco Shakespeare and Women’s Will Teaching Artist.<
Duarte is a founding member of Latinx Mafia, a Bay Area collective of Latinx Teatristas, who work to ensure Latinx stories are valued and accurately represented. Duarte works with a homeless advocacy response group, The Village and is an original member of Redwood Height Indivisible Group and several other organizations over the past three decades.
They are represented locally by Talent Plus. Catch Duarte on Season 2 of www.thenorthpoleshow.com and in Livermore Shakespeare’s summer production of Comedy of Errors.
Eric Ting
Obie Award-winning director Eric Ting’s work lives at the intersection of art and community practice. Artistic Director of California Shakespeare Theater since 2016, Ting has remained deeply committed to the development of new and diverse voices for the theater. Ting’s work has been seen across the United States, as well as internationally, including Singapore, France, UAE, Holland, Canada, Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Bali. He is a multiple-grant recipient, including a TCG New Generations Future Leaders fellowship, a Jerome & Roslyn Milstein Meyer Career Development Prize, a NEFA National Theater Project grant, a MAP Fund Award, and one of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ 2019 YBCA100. He has served on numerous grant and fellowship panels including the Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, the Jerome and McKnight Foundations, the NEA, TCG, PONY and the Alpert Awards. Ting is a proud member of the SDC Board.
Rodney Earl Jackson Jr.
Rodney Earl Jackson Jr. is a Co-Founder of SFBATCO. He made his Broadway debut in “The Book of Mormon” and was last seen at American Conservatory Theatre’s west coast premiere of “Toni Stone”. Jackson built his love and foundation for art and theatre in public city organizations such as SFartsEd, SF Recreation and Park’s Young People’s Teen Musical Theater Company, and the Ruth Asawa SF School of the Arts, where he graduated from the theatre department. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Other theatre credits: Berkeley Repertory “Ain’t Too Proud: the life and times of the Temptations”, first National tour of “Motown: The Musical.” SFBATCO’s “I, Too, Sing America”. @rodneyearljacksonjr
Debórah Eliezer
Debórah Eliezer (she/her), is a white/MENA theater maker and cultural activist. She is the newly-named sole Artistic Director of foolsFURY Theater, and a Resident Artist with Golden Thread. Passionate about the power of human transformation, her work focuses on disrupting assumptions about art, human values and society. She has created and performed in numerous world premieres, working with playwrights Katie Pearl, Kate Tarker, Fabrice Melquiot, Angela Santillo, Sheila Callaghan, Doug Dorst, Yussef El Guindi, Denmo Ibrahim, Torange Yeghiazarian and Ben Yalom. With foolsFURY, Eliezer wrote and tours (dis)Place[d] which is featured in Michael Malek Najjar’s forthcoming book, Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures and Artists. She holds a BA Cum Laude from SFSU and a certificate from CIIS. Eliezer is an artEquity arts facilitator alumna, serves on the MENA Alliance of Theatre Makers committee (MENATMA) and is on the board of the Alliance of Jewish Theatre.