The Humanity and Genius of August Wilson with discussants Kenny Leon and Phylicia Rashad speaking at the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival. Anna Deavere Smith moderates.
In this, its third year, Aspen Ideas Festival once again gathers scientists, artists, politicians, historians, educators, activists, and other great thinkers around some of the most important and fascinating ideas of our time. As these thinkers present their provocative ideas, they engage a sophisticated and highly motivated audience.
Bio
Kenny Leon
Kenny Leon is a Broadway director whose credits include August Wilson’s Radio Golf and Gem of the Ocean and the Tony Award-winning revival of A Raisin in the Sun. He is also founding artistic director of True Colors Theatre Company, dedicated to diversity and the preservation of African-American classics. For more than a decade he was artistic director of the Alliance Theatre, and he has directed extensively at regional theatres throughout the country. Other directing credits include the world premiere of Toni Morrison’s opera Margaret Garner and the film adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun, to be released on network television. He will also be collaborating with the Kennedy Center to showcase all 10 of August Wilson's plays.
Phylicia Rashad
Phylicia Rashad is an actress and singer best known as Clair Huxtable from The Cosby Show. She has earned two Emmy Award nominations and a People's Choice Award for Favorite Television Female Performer during her eight years on the show. Rashad was the first black actress to win a Tony Award for a dramatic leading role in the Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun. As a singer, Rashad has shared the stage with Bill Cosby in Las Vegas and performed with the Dallas Symphony and the Oklahoma Symphony. She received a NAACP Image Award Nomination for her role in Once Upon A Time When We Were Colored.
Anna Deavere Smith
Anna Deavere Smith is an actor, playwright, teacher, and author. Known for her distinct brand of documentary-theater, she wrote and performed Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities which was the runner-up for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize and earned her an Obie and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 which received two Tony Award nominations, an Obie, and numerous other awards.
Currently a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Smith was the Ford Foundation's first artist-in-residence as well as a MacArthur Fellow. As of July 2009 she is the artist in residence with the Center for American Progress. Smith is also the founder of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue and has received honorary degrees from several universities. In 2006, Smith was the first Aspen Institute Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence. She also received the 2008 Matrix Award from the New York Women in Communications, Inc. and a Fellow Award in Theater Arts from United States Artists in 2009.