Photo by Samer A. Khan / Fotobuddy
On October 22, theater faculty members Chesney Snow and Aaron Landsman earned awards at the Keller Center’s 2024 Innovation Forum, a competition and networking event that showcases Princeton University research with commercialization, cultural, or societal potential. In the division of Humanities and Social Sciences, Snow was awarded first place for his project, Performing the Peace, which aims to enrich law enforcement training to foster empathy and build community trust through the arts. Landsman placed second with his project Perfect City, a toolkit, curriculum and network that centers joy and creativity in organizing and civic engagement, using tools from theater, design and popular education. Both share a portion of $50,000 in prize money divided among the four winners across STEM and Humanities.
Performing the Peace lies at the intersection of performing arts and therapeutic practices including applied drama, dance therapy, and storytelling activities rooted in the choreopoem. The project aims to utilize leading scholars, researchers, and practitioners in neuroscience, social sciences, computer science, gaming design, theater arts, and community grassroots organizations in order to develop sustainable and profitable products while working towards enriched law enforcement training that centers the health and safety of both law enforcement and community members. Snow is collaborating on this research with Associate Professor of Sociology at Princeton Dr. Janet Vertesi; Dr. A.J. Khaw; Princeton undergraduate student research assistants Ava Kronman ’26 and Johana Lara ’25; and Alexandria Edwards, Duke University Class of 2025. Snow and his team propose working with artificial intelligence and virtual reality developers to create immersive experiences and training methods rooted in theater and dance training. These creative methods offer significant benefits for mental and physical health while fostering empathy among participants, Snow notes. Drawing inspiration from successful programs like Playback Memphis and Storytellers Lab at Fortune Society, the team aims to develop products specifically designed to enhance empathy, support mental health, and improve deescalation practices for law enforcement, ultimately strengthening community trust.
In March 2024, Snow organized two events at Princeton that highlighted the power of theater to bring together police officers and members of communities that have historically been impacted negatively by policing practices in the U.S. With support from the Lewis Center’s Program in Theater & Music Theater and Princeton’s Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship and Prison Teaching Initiative, Snow brought to campus a screening of Melissa Anderson Sweazy’s film, Performing the Peace, and a live performance by Playback Memphis that demonstrated the use of theater as a tool for breaking down trust barriers, building authentic relationships, and learning active listening and empathy skills.
Photo courtesy of Chesney Snow
Snow is a Drama Desk Award-winning interdisciplinary artist who works as a performer, composer, lyricist, sound designer, and teaching artist. His recent collaborations include Skeleton Crew on Broadway, Walks of Life at La Jolla Playhouse, Upstream at Syracuse Stage, which he wrote and starred in, as well as Soil Beneath off-Broadway at Primary Stages, and Crowns and Princeton and Slavery Plays at McCarter Theatre, among others. Considered a pioneering figure in American beatbox culture, Snow co-founded the American Beatbox Championships, where he served as the executive producer for seven years. He has performed live with KRS One, Kayah, Eternia, Hasan Salaam, Kate Havnevik, and Nile Rodgers, and he has opened for legendary performers including Snoop Dogg, MC Lyte, Pharoah Monch, Immortal Technique, Gloria Gaynor, Sister Sledge, Hot Chocolate, and the Village People. For over two decades, Snow’s work as an educator has centered on engaging the arts as a vehicle for social change and empowerment. He has taught workshops and masterclasses in countless prisons, hospitals, public and private schools, for the U.S. Department of State, and universities including New York University, Juilliard, Yale University, and Harvard University.
Landsman’s project, Perfect City, offers tools for civic engagement drawn from theater, ethnography, philosophy and community education, based on more than a decade of research and practice in the field. Landsman shares, “We believe the entry point for stronger community participation in local policy and government should be creative. From the block to the neighborhood to cities across the US, our work includes short and long-term residencies, strategic exchanges among cities, and ongoing local hubs that place creative innovation at the center of democratic power.” Perfect City stems from a five-city theatrical performance called City Council Meeting, Landsman and Mallory Catlett’s recent book The City We Make Together, and a curriculum developed to uplift existing community leaders and build the next generation. “In the long term, we envision a network of creative civic hubs that work together to build more robust democracies that our current and future challenges call for,” notes Landsman.
Photo by Maria Baranova-Suzuki
Landsman is a New York-based playwright, performer, teacher and organizer. His awards include a Creative Capital Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Gammage Residency at Arizona State University, and a Princeton Arts Fellowship. His current and recent theater works include: Night Keeper, which premiered at The Chocolate Factory Theater last year and will be released as an album on the Hallow Ground label this November; the libretto to Follow, commissioned and premiered by Gaudeamus in The Netherlands; and All The Time in the World, a game-based devised performance about collective self-regard and social media. Landsman’s artistic projects have been presented in NYC, regionally and abroad. He also started and co-directs Perfect City, a 20-year multigenerational, multi-racial collective working on gentrification, city planning, urban design and safety for women and non-binary people. A 2014-16 Princeton Arts Fellow, Landsman has been a lecturer in the Lewis Center’s Program in Theater since 2017.
Princeton University’s Keller Center annually hosts the Innovation Forum, designed to highlight the groundbreaking research of Princeton University’s Humanities and STEM faculty, researchers, postdocs, and graduate students. The event aims to emphasize the broader societal impact of their work beyond academia.
This year, the Forum opened with a dynamic panel discussion between academic and industry experts exploring Princeton’s role in fostering a robust innovation ecosystem and what it means to ‘innovate in the service of humanity.’ John Payne, Head of Design at Public Policy Lab, a nonprofit service design consultancy focused on improving government services for all Americans, delivered the keynote talk on Innovation and the Public Interest. Other activities at the Forum, which is open to the public, included a demo station and networking reception that offered unique opportunities to engage directly with cutting-edge researchers and innovators.
Forum judges this year included the city of Trenton’s Principal Planner Stephani Register; axio Co-Founder & Managing Director Sashank Rishyasringa; Chief Scientific Officer at IndieBio Sabriya Stukes; Michael Graves Design Chief Design Officer Rob Van Varick; and Grant Warner, the Bank of America Endowed Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director of the Center for Black Entrepreneurship at the Keller Center.
At the event, Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science Andrea Goldsmith emphasized the Forum’s unique role in supporting and elevating advancements in all disciplines across the Princeton University campus. She stated, “Collaboration between innovators in STEM fields, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities is essential to developing technology that significantly benefits society.”
Read more about the 2024 Innovation Forum at the Keller Center
