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 February 11, Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Princeton Atelier Paul Muldoon will be joined by Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Rosanne Cash, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Peter Gizzi, Grammy Award-winning musician, producer, and songwriter John Leventhal, and Oscar-nominated filmmaker and artist RaMell Ross, director of Nickel Boys. 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.”

Rosanne Cash. Photo by Pamela Springsteen

Rosanne Cash has released 15 albums that have earned four Grammy Awards and 12 additional nominations. Rolling Stone has called her “one of the most ambitious and literary songwriters of her generation.” Cash is also an author of four books including the best-selling memoir Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.” Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Oxford American, and others. A new book, Bird on a Blade, combines images by artist Dan Rizzie with Cash’s lyrics. In addition to touring, Cash has partnered in programming with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Library of Congress. She was awarded the SAG/AFTRA Lifetime Achievement Award for Sound Recordings in 2012 and the 2014 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in the Performing Arts. She was a Carnegie Hall Perspectives artist in 2015-16 and was a 2015 Artist-In-Residence at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at New York University. She is one of only a handful of women to be elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Cash was recently elected as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2021, Cash was the first female composer to receive the MacDowell Medal, awarded since 1960 to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture. In 2023, Cash and her husband, John Leventhal, the Grammy-winning songwriter, producer, and her lifelong creative partner, launched RumbleStripRecords, an initiative to reexamine and reissue her early work, originally released on Columbia / Sony Music, and beyond. The first release was a deluxe remastered version, and first vinyl pressing, marking the 30th anniversary of Cash’s album The Wheel. Her current work includes The Essential Collection, a 40-song, two-CD compilation highlighting Cash’s catalogue of songs, including ten number one hits. The album coincides with the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum exhibit, Rosanne Cash: Time Is a Mirror. The exhibit, running through March 2026, explores Cash’s more than 40-year journey as an artist, songwriter and storyteller, and how she has embodied both tradition and innovation across her musical career.

Peter Gizzi. Photo courtesy of Peter Gizzi

Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award; Now It’s Dark (2020); and Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. In the United Kingdom, Carcanet published Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (2020) and, in 2024, Penguin U.K. published an expanded edition of Fierce Elegy, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2018 Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. Currently a senior global fellow in poetry at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, Gizzi teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

John Leventhal. Photo by Wes Bender

John Leventhal has worn many hats during his 45-year journey as musician—producer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, and recording engineer. Rumble Strip, the six-time Grammy-winner’s debut solo album that showcases some of the most adventurous work of his career. Born in New York City, Leventhal began his career in the late 1970s playing guitar in dozens of New York City-area bands, including those led by Billy Vera, Steve Forbert, and Levon Helm. By the early 1980s he had developed songwriting partnerships with Shawn Colvin and Jim Lauderdale, which led to his producing their debut albums. This was followed by albums he produced for Rosanne Cash, Marc Cohn, Sarah Jarosz, William Bell, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Joan Osborne, and many others. As a guitarist he has recorded and performed with Jackson Browne, Bruce Hornsby, Willie Nelson, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Ry Cooder, Elvis Costello, Donald Fagen, and recently, The National. He’s been a Grammy winner in five consecutive decades, including as a co-writer and producer on Shawn Colvin’s 1998 hit song “Sunny Came Home,” Cash’s The River and the Thread, and Stax legend William Bell’s 2016 album This Is Where I Live. Cash and Leventhal are currently writing the music for the theatrical production of Norma Rae.

RaMell Ross. Photo by Maya Krinsky/Sundance Institute

RaMell Ross is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and documentarian. His feature experimental documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and a 2020 Peabody Award. It was nominated in 2018 for an Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards and an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film. His recent film Nickel Boys was nominated last week for two Oscars at the 97th Academy Awards. He has been awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, Howard Foundation Fellowship, a U.S.A. Artist Fellowship and was a 2022 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University. Ross holds degrees in sociology and English from Georgetown University and is an associate professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department. His work is in various public and private collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the High Museum.

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 in 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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.