On Tuesday, 3/25, Karin Shankar’s Introduction to Performance Studies class went to watch “Sumo” at The Public Theater, a play by Lisa Sanaye Dring, co-produced by Ma-Yi Theater Company and La Jolla Playhouse, directed by Ralph B. Peña. The play presented a range of themes and questions central to Prof. Shankar’s class this semester. These themes included: sport, ritual, Non-Western performance traditions, performance and nation, and performances of masculinity. The play was a visually stunning piece of theatre, including live demonstrations of Sumo, Taiko drumming, multimedia projections, and stage combat: https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2425/sumo/

Karin Shankar’s “Postcoloniality and Aesthetics” class went on a field trip to watch Pulitzer Prize-winning play “English” by Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toosi, at the Todd Haimes Theatre. The play deals with the politics of foreign language learning, translation, accented English, exile, displacement, and being strangers (and friends) in a strange language. The production was directed by Knud Adams.

Thursday, March 13, 5pm, ARC-E02, Pratt Brooklyn Campus On behalf of the Cultural Research and Practice Lab, Dalia Davoudi and Shayla Lawz invite you to a talk by Shirine Saad on the Poethics of Dissonance and Disorder in Feminist and Queer Arab* Art. Please register via the QR code. Poethics of decolonial resistance are a potent attack on Western systems of knowledge and power, a deployment of anarchic tactics targeting all dominant forms. In a decolonial, feminist, queer global solidarity movement, glitch, noise and failure echo the terror of necropolitics, recycle remnants from the wreckage, and alchemize waste into “other ways of knowing and doing, existing otherwise” (Denise Ferreira da Silva) , demanding the return of everything. The breakdown is a feminist, queer tool of rebellion and experimentation, a new rhythm of life amidst total violence. We will look at various forms of resistance in interdisciplinary feminist and queer cultural movements from the Arab* world and diaspora to trace the interconnected maps of struggle and insurgence infiltrating empire, articulating demands from the frontlines of the uprisings, deploying the cyborg poet and “queer ballistic body” (Jasbir Puar ) as a disassemblage, a movement of disorder and upheaval. These poethics mess up lethal Western ontology, phenomenology, metaphysics, and epistemologies, upsetting time and space in a reclaiming of alternative cycles and ecologies after the end of the world. As technodystopias ravage the living, the poet and martyr stands on the edge, chanting, steadfast and defiant, forever rooted into the land.    CRP Lab centers work within the fields of Cultural Studies, including Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Media Studies. Our programming aims to generate cross-disciplinary conversations among artists and researchers, highlighting work at the intersection of creative and scholarly practice.

Mujeres Atrevidas with director Cynthia Tobar Thursday, March 6, 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm Library 3rd Floor, Alumni Reading Room 200 Willoughby Ave., Brooklyn NY 11205 Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfRGdKHng2hqx0tEvxYdXvhYFOs-ERkiYVjramaK-PPEfZoog/viewform Mujeres Atrevidas chronicles the strength and persistence of Latine female app delivery workers, construction workers and domestic cleaners in Brooklyn as they confront harsh working conditions and fight for their rights through involvement with the Workers Justice Project. Weaving together interviews and footage of these women in action, the film spotlights the impact of Workers Justice Project’s advocacy campaigns to ensure female worker safety and dignity, centering a labor movement built around female empowerment. We’re thrilled to be partnering with the Department of Humanities and Media Studies as well as Social and Cultural Studies for this event and grateful to Pratt Institute for hosting us! We’ll start the evening with a screening of the short documentary Mujeres Atrevidas, followed by a panel discussion moderated by cinema studies scholar and educator Gina Marchetti with film director Cynthia Tobar, scholar and editor Mónica-Ramón Ríos and the Workers Justice Project. Cynthia Tobar is an artist, activist-scholar, filmmaker and oral historian passionate about creating participatory stories documenting social change. A first-generation Ecuadorian American born and raised in NYC, she strives to blend rigorous research with diverse artistic mediums to shed light on marginalized narratives and forgotten histories. Cynthia’s multimedia art, storytelling & film work has been exhibited widely in NYC. She has published on inclusive archiving practices, student activism in higher education, housing justice, & counter-narratives of historical exclusion in monument culture. This film was made possible, in part, thanks to the Greater New York Arts Development fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.

Wednesday March 5, 2025, 6:30pm -7:30pm Library 3rd Floor, Alumni Reading Room 200 Willoughby Ave., Brooklyn NY 11205 Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe0eA6gIE6yAfJxsY0OgM0i5FjWL51g3aDVx-ey78IXL2m57g/viewform With Director Christopher Radcliff and Writer/Producer Cathy Linh Che, moderated by Kyle Lucia Wu Based upon the poems of Cathy Linh Che, “We Were the Scenery” is a documentary short that tells the story of her parents, Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che, who fled from Vietnam by boat in 1975. While staying in a refugee camp in the Philippines, they were hired to play extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. https://festivalplayer.sundance.org/sundance-film-festival-2025/play/6764dacf452a8fc935599492/675659e0c847b819245f46bc Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). She is working on a creative nonfiction manuscript on her parents’ experiences as refugees who played extras on Apocalypse Now. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. Christopher Radcliff is a New York–based Chinese American filmmaker whose first feature film The Strange Ones was released theatrically in 2018. It was named by John Waters as one of the top ten films of the year in Artforum magazine. His short films, including The Strange Ones, Jonathan’s Chest, and Lost Episode, have screened worldwide including at the Sundance, SXSW, Rotterdam, and Clermont-Ferrand film festivals, and online via the Criterion Collection, Short of the Week, Vimeo Staff Picks, and Le Cinéma Club. He received his MFA from Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program and currently teaches in the undergraduate Film/Video Department at Pratt Institute.

Andu Radu will visit @emestudiofilms’ HMS440S-03 Resonant Bodies in Art Films Feb 18th at 2pm by zoom. Image from @andu_radu_colour IG “colour palette for one of my favorite shots in @r.m.n._filmul, the latest feature directed by @cristian_mungiu and shot by @tudorpanduru on @arri alexa LF selected in @festivaldecannes official competition 2022 graded at @abator.eu”

In the summer of 2024 when the performance of Towards a Different Earth in Thrissur (India) ended, the mixed-abilityteam—Blind/VI, Deaf/hard-of-hearing, other disabilities, and non-disabled—broke down into tears of joy. Emerging from a powerful convergence of personal experience, community engagement, classical Indian theatre, such as Kutiyattam, and contemporary cross-media artistic expressivities, our project on mountains and climate change had made Kerala history as the first accessible performance of its kind. Braiding Earth Stories will consider how Accessible Theatres, from my own work to that of others such as Blind Opera and Jana Sanskriti, can offer a radical opening towards translocal intimacies and new forms of scoring the land. Thursday, February 13, 20255:00pm-6:30pmLibrary, 3rd flr. Alumni Reading Room200 Willoughby Ave., Brooklyn NY 11205 Registration: https://forms.gle/XAQ2tVCPTccYq4iZ6

Pratt Institute’s Graduate Program in Media Studies is hosting a Virtual Open House for students who are interested in theMaster of Arts in Media Studies program. Join us to meet the faculty, current students and alumni, andlearn about the application requirements, program curriculum and the current campus events. Wednesday, February 12, 6:00pmRegistration: https://forms.gle/ARbubeg4meCSMixu9 Join Zoom Meeting: https://pratt.zoom.us/j/94660525103?pwd=kKA16P1knggdepQ3LQpCWRxzaFUrA4.1 Meeting ID: 946 6052 5103Passcode: 652656

Thursday, February 6, 2025 5:00pm - 7:30pm ARC E-02 200 Willoughby Ave., Brooklyn NY 11025 Moderated by Professor Evans Chan Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScyGdIzdG2affqbb5C1w3fu0t7EPdEu4ifkp_Me00aPh-13Ng/viewform Yi CUl is a Chinese filmmaker who works between her homeland and North America. Her practice embraces a process-driven methodology, allowing her to explore the intersections of diverse cinematic forms. She has developed a body of work centred on the theme of ‘Migrating Cinema,’ delving into the connections between Indigenous cinema, auto-ethnography, traveling film projection, and ancient screen arts such as the shadow theatre. She currently teaches at Colgate University in New York state, USA. Since 2013, CUl has been working with communities in Eastern Tibet, facilitating the creation of films by herdsmen, monks, and young students. Reflecting on her experiences living and working within these Tibetan communities, CUl created the experimental nonfiction film ‘To Alexandra’ which represents a collaborative effort between herself and local Tibetan filmmakers.