Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts presents the next event in the 2024-25 Atelier@Large conversation series that brings guest artists and intellectuals to campus for public discussions on the challenges they face in making art in the modern world. On October 8, Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Princeton Atelier Paul Muldoon will be joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker and experimental music/contemporary opera composer Kamala Sankaram. The event begins at 4:30 p.m. in Richardson Auditorium on Princeton’s campus and is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. Richardson Auditorium is an accessible venue with assistive listening devices available. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
The Princeton Atelier, currently directed by Muldoon, was founded in 1994 by Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at the University. The Atelier, celebrating is 30th year this season, brings together professional artists from different disciplines and Princeton students to create new work in the context of a semester-long course that culminates in the public presentation of that new work. Recent artists have included Stew, Laurie Anderson, the improv group Baby Wants Candy, and the Wakka Wakka Puppet Theatre. The Atelier@Large series, established in 2021, is an extension of the Princeton Atelier that brings guest artists and intellectuals to campus to speak on art’s role in the modern world. Guests in the series have included David Bellos, Hernan Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Joy Harjo, Sarah Hart, Jennifer Homans, Bridget Kearney, Andrey Kurkov, Alan Lightman, Michael J. Love, Jonathan Majors, Kyle Marshall, Dinaw Mengestu, Lorrie Moore, Darryl (Run DMC) McDaniels, Anais Mitchell, Suzanne Nossel, Lynn Nottage, Claudia Rankine, Cara Reichel, and Tom Stoppard. This year’s series is cosponsored by Labyrinth Books.
“Being an artist is tough enough at the best of times,” says Muldoon, “but it’s particularly difficult just now. Artists are coming under pressure from numerous orthodoxies to both left and right, as to what they must or must not do. Most insidious, perhaps, is the form of self-censorship that has artists second guessing themselves. In addition to honoring some of our finest minds, The Atelier@Large series provides a rare enough forum in which some of these ideas may be aired.”
Annie Baker. Photo by Ella Pennington
Annie Baker received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting for The Flick, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons. She also won the Obie Award for Best New American Play for both Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens. Baker’s other plays include Infinite Life at Atlantic Theatre Company and National Theatre, nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Best Play; The Antipodes at Signature Theatre and National Theatre; John, winner of a 2016 Obie Award; and an adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at Soho Rep, for which she also designed the costumes. Her works have been performed at over 100 theaters across the U.S. and in England, Australia, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, Latvia, Sweden and Russia. Baker is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Steinberg Playwriting Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. For A24 and BBC Film, Baker also wrote and directed the 2023 film Janet Planet, which premiered at the Telluride, New York and Berlin Film Festivals. She is an associate professor of practice at the University of Texas, Austin.
Kamala Sankaram. Photo by Dario Acosta
Kamala Sankaram moves freely between the worlds of experimental music and contemporary opera. Praised as “one of the most exciting opera composers in the country” by The Washington Post, she is known for pushing the boundaries of form and style. As a 2023 artist-in-residence, she created work for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; other recent creations include an opera for the trees of Prospect Park, a techno-noir featuring live datamining of the audience and a chorus of 25 singing tablet computers, and the world’s first virtual reality opera. Sankaram has been commissioned by Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, the Prototype Festival, Creative Time, and by the Glimmerglass Festival as a 2022 artist-in-residence. She is currently a composer-in-residence at Minnesota Opera as part of their new works cohort. As a biracial Indian American and trained sitarist, Kamala has drawn on Indian classical music in many of her works, including Thumbprint, A Rose, Monkey and Francine in the City of Tigers, and a newly expanded version of the Jungle Book which will premiere in December 2024 at Washington National Opera. Also an accomplished performer, Sankaram has collaborated on works with Anthony Braxton, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Wooster Group, among others. She is the leader of Bombay Rickey, an operatic Bollywood surf ensemble. Dr. Sankaram holds a Ph.D. from the New School and is currently a member of the composition faculty at the Mannes College of Music.
This fall along with Muldoon, Sankaram is co-teaching the Princeton Atelier course, “Custom of the Coast: Creating a Small-Scale Opera.” Along with creating their own works of musical storytelling, students in the course are helping to develop Custom of the Coast, a new opera intercutting the life stories of an 18th-century Irish pirate sentenced to death, and an Indian-born, Irish-based dentist who died in 2012 having been denied an abortion.
Paul Muldoon is the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton, as well as the founding chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. As an internationally renowned Irish poet, Muldoon has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.” Muldoon won the Pulitzer Prize for his ninth collection of poems, Moy Sand and Gravel (2002). His 15th volume of poems, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, was published earlier this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The series will continue on November 12 when Muldoon will be joined by writer Jennifer Finney Boylan, composer/director/choreographer Meredith Monk, and Russian poet Maria Stepanova with translator Sasha Dugdale.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Princeton Atelier, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
