On April 16, PMA graduate student Jayme Kilburn was presented with the $1500 award from Engaged Cornell for her community-engaged scholarship through the Women’s Performing Workshop. Kilburn was recently awarded the Engaged Graduate Student Grant for the same project, a community-based theatrical model designed to empower women and trans individuals to “create their own public performance based on personal narratives.”
Kilburn is a graduate of the University of Santa Barbara, where she completed her undergraduate degree in Dramatic Art and Psychology. In 2014, she completed an interdisciplinary master's degree in Humanities and Social Thought at NYU, and she is currently working towards her PhD in Theatre Arts at Cornell University. Kilburn is the Founding Artistic Director of the Strand Theater Company in Baltimore City, Maryland, a company which she sites as her primary partner for the WPW. Regarding the Strand Theater, Kilburn says, “as its founder, I have an investment in its continued growth and am thrilled to introduce community-engaged programming into their season.” Kilburn is also an accomplished director, performer, writer, and instructor. She has won two Best Production Awards for her work in the Baltimore Playwright's Festival, and her plays Ding! Or Bye Bye Dad and Garbage Kids received their world premiere productions at Venus Theatre in 2014 and 2016. Kilburn has won three first-year writing seminar awards as an instructor at Cornell University and has directed over thirty productions, the most recent of which is Mr. Burns: a post-electric play by Anne Washburn, running at Cornell University’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts April 27–28 & May 4–5, 2018.
The Women’s Performance Workshop, a practice-based research project two years in the making, explores the question, “How can this traditionally hierarchal discipline be mobilized to complement rather than hinder community-based work and empower participants in the process?” The collaborative workshop combines applied theater methodologies including story-circles, group work, and reflective listening with improvisation, movement techniques, and writing exercises, creating theatre that stages participants’ own personal narratives and encourages them to lead the group by taking on the role of director. Through community-engaged theatre, the workshop strives to “[challenge] industry norms and [offer] more inclusive pedagogical approaches to directing, thereby shifting the artistic biases that delegitimize community-engaged work” in an industry historically dominated by men.
Bryan Hagelin '20 is a communications assistant for the Department of .