Apr. 20, 2000


Professors Bogart And Strother Win Guggenheims

By Amy Callahan

Anne Bogart

Two Columbia professors have been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for the year 2000: Anne Bogart, associate professor of theater in the School of the Arts, and Zoe S. Strother, assistant professor of art history and archeology.

Bogart, an acclaimed director widely recognized as an innovative leader in contemporary theater, was cited by the Guggenheim board for her "essays on the theater." Strother was cited for her studies into "the relationship of art to power in central Africa."

The awardees in the 76th annual competition of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation are selected on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The foundation was created in the 1920s to recognize and reward promising young artists, scholars and scientists. Over the years, as its recipients went on to become some of the most prominent people in their fields (including Ansel Adams, James Baldwin, Martha Graham, Henry Kissinger and Eudora Welty), the Guggenheim became a prestigious and highly prized award.

Bogart's work as a director is innovative and cross-disciplinary. In the last two years alone, her productions have included Gertrude and Alice, performed at the Signature Theater in New York City; Short Stories, created and performed at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria; Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, (co-direction with Laurie Anderson) which opened the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) 1999-2000 season and toured nationally and internationally, and Cabin Pressure, which opened at the 1999 Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky, and toured nationally.

Bogart recently premiered a new play about the life of Orson Welles, War of the Worlds, by Naomi Iizuka, at the 2000 Humana Festival of New American Plays, which continued on tour to Edinburgh, Scotland and will open the BAM Next Wave Festival, Oct. 4-8, this year in New York.

Zoe Strother

Bogart is the co-founder and artistic director of Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI) and co-artistic director of Via Theater and the former artistic director of Trinity Repertory Theater. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Obie and a "Bessie."

Strother's field of specialization is the visual arts of Africa and its diaspora in the twentieth century. Her work has explored the questions of invention, agency and audience reception in masquerading, and the role of the visual arts in ethnic and national propaganda. Field projects have involved the role of the arts in multi-ethnic initiation societies in Central Africa, and she has conducted extended field work in Zaire, short projects in Mali and Senegal, and in Ethiopia, for a video on Ethiopian architecture. Strother is also very interested in Haitian painting and its relationship to voodoo.

Strother, who holds a Ph.D. from Yale, has been widely published, including "Display of the Body Hottentot" in Africans on Stage (ed. Bernth Lindfors, Indiana Univ. Press, 1999), and "Gabama a Gingungu and the Secret History of Twentieth-Century Art" in African Arts, 32:1 (Spring 1999), among others.