Usually running in April, this year’s festival will take place May 13-20 and will feature 115 films — from narratives to documentaries, international, independent, animated films, shorts and more. The lineup was announced Friday, and single tickets are now on sale at wifilmfest.org. Viewers can buy tickets for particular works for $10, a series for $50 or an entire festival pass for $140.
I’m not the only one who thinks dislikes can be every bit as interesting as likes, either: While the internet and social media are full of praise for fandoms and stans, there’s a deep well of content honoring profound dislikes.
–Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In 1957, when Marvin Kalb joined CBS Radio in New York to write local news, television was called “electronic journalism,” and the backdrop for the “CBS Morning News” was a cardboard sign hanging above a desk on the fifth floor of the Grand Central Terminal building. The United States had yet to recognize what it referred to as “Red China” diplomatically, and Edward R. Murrow still worked for CBS
-Kathryn J. McGarr is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of “The Whole Damn Deal: Robert Strauss and the Art of Politics.” Her forthcoming book is about Washington foreign policy reporters in the early Cold War.
A few lines above hers in the table of contents, Pickens saw the name of Sami Schalk, another colleague. Schalk, who studies race, gender, and disability in American literature as an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, also did not know she was going to be included in the reader. She messaged several of the other authors and soon formed a group text, which migrated to Facebook, then an email chain.
After last year’s canceled events, Moda Magazine prepares mostly-virtual fashion week with Porchlight donation drive, revamped website.
Quoted: When a national tour of the musical came to Madison, Wisconsin, in 2019, Lori Kido Lopez — a media and cultural studies professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison — protested outside of the theater. As she told TODAY over Zoom, “Miss Saigon” embodies “the classic story of the self-sacrificing Asian woman.”
Kim, the protagonist, is a sex worker who falls passionately in love with an American GI — a romance that is, as Lopez pointed out, “already extremely uncomfortable because there’s a power dynamic where he’s paying her for sex.” He promises to take her back to the states; she promptly becomes pregnant. But the plan fails, leaving her languishing in war-torn Vietnam with a child to raise on her own.
As if classical musician Sarah Brailey weren’t already accomplished enough, the doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music can now add a Grammy Award to her list.
Johanna Wienholts, a Lecturer of Harp at UW-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music spoke about major stereotypes art students face. She also touched upon wealth disparities within musicians and common misconceptions that plague the passion and future of art students, specifically at UW-Madison.
After majoring in speech and comedy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he joined the American Indian Theatre Ensemble Company. He portrayed the Nez Perce trickster figure Coyote in a production called “Coyote Tracks.” The ensemble went on a six-week tour of Germany but infighting and an inability to receive regular payments led to the end of the troupe. When Hill returned to the United States, he began hanging out at new comedy clubs like Catch a Rising Star and the Improvisation in Greenwich Village.
Sarah Brailey already hosts a Madison radio show, runs a music competition, co-founded a popular local live performance series, and is a month away from finishing her doctorate at UW-Madison.
The list speaks to many parts of the Latino experience, including people who are native to the United States and its territories and those who migrated to the country because of its politics and interventions in Latin America, Theresa Delgadillo, a Chicana and Latina studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview.
Noted: Ruffalo had been nominated for Golden Globe awards three times before: for best actor in a comedy or musical for the 2014 movie “Infinitely Polar Bear”; best actor in a TV movie or miniseries for “The Normal Heart”; and best supporting actor in a movie for 2014’s “Foxcatcher,” as former University of Wisconsin-Madison wrestling coach David Schultz.
The book, which came out in early 2020, has added resonance in Madison because it was inspired by Taylor’s experiences here. He was a biochemistry Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before he left to pursue a writing career in 2016.
Even though she is teaching at University of Wisconsin-Madison this semester, the author of “Milk Blood Heat” has managed to keep warm.
Essay by Professor Beth Nguyen
Lunar New Year might bring to mind festivals and fireworks, but I’ve always associated it with a kind of isolation. Long before the pandemic, long before the rest of America learned about sriracha and pho, I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee family in a mostly white town in Michigan.
Born and raised in Compton, Calif., he is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs the M.F.A. program in creative writing. His latest collection, ‘‘Imperial Liquor,’’ was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2020 and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.
Today, in the era of a 78-year-old president, a veritable Rip Van Biden, Americans and the rest of the world are, it seems, waking up in a new age. It could well be a daunting one.Invest your way with Schwab.From automated investing to financial consultants, get tools and resources that match your needs.
-Alfred McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power and Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State.
Nathans has roots in Madison. He said he “began playing guitar and writing songs when I lived in Madison roughly two decades ago. I worked for The Capital Times covering the (University of Wisconsin) System, and I remember sitting at the Board of Regents meetings at the top of Van Hise Hall and scrawling song lyrics in my reporter’s notebook.
Noted: Meek knows a thing or two about the symbols and rhetoric associated with the African American race dialogue. She earned her MFA at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which she calls “the Whitest place in the world.” In the 1960s, the university was a hotbed of civil rights activism. By 1971, when Meek arrived on campus, the administration had purged the campus of “most of the so-called radical element,” she says. “And I had gone to that school because of the radical element.”
Another $5 million grant, awarded to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, focuses on antiracism literacy in the sciences and medicine. “Over the summer in response to Black Lives Matters protests, my history of science colleagues and I were talking about how we could ramp up the teaching we do on histories of race in the sciences and medicine,” said Elizabeth Hennessy, the project leader and an associate professor of history and environmental sciences at Madison. “A typical education in the sciences doesn’t include a history of your own discipline. It rare that is an emphasis in scientific training, but I think it’s a really important emphasis.”
Noted: From there, Spangler became an art professor for the University of Wisconsin in Madison, then, aspiring to make more money for his family, started doing work for some commercial firms in Milwaukee.
The clever farmer’s son from Yorkshire, Nick Hitchon, defied social class determinism and became a physics professor: He left for America at an early age and taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As people continue to become more accustomed with working during the pandemic, musicians have started to experiment with technology and find new ways to collaborate with one another. While the process has not been easy, there are positives to these changes.
André De Shields — best known for his work in “Play On!,” “The Full Monty,” “The Wiz” and most recently, “Hadestown” — will star as Anton Ego in “Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical.”
Noted: They spent their formative years in Madison, living here from age 17 to 23. Smith participated in the nation’s premier Hip Hop Arts scholarship program First Wave at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A statue of the first Black woman to become secretary of state in Wisconsin could go up in front of the state Capitol building as early as next summer.
Noted: This past September, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies offered a new grant program called East Asia in Wisconsin Library Program as part of their mission to promote better understanding of East Asian histories and cultures.
A University of Wisconsin- Madison singing troupe are sharing the spirit of the holidays virtually this year by posting their productions online.
Now 28, the University of Wisconsin First Wave alum has won a Chicago Emmy for her three-part music video series, “The Light,” produced with PBS Wisconsin, with her sights set on launching a career in television and music.
Wisconsin Union Theater presents virtual events like their concert series, performances from Christian Sands Trio, Jeremy Denk.
Only 46 out of 4,035 books for children and teens reviewed in 2019 were by Indigenous authors, according to data compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
James Gavins, the creative director of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has taken to making music, dance and comedy videos during the COVID pandemic. Performing is nothing new for Gavins — an alum of the UW’s First Wave performing arts scholarship with a degree in theater, he worked with the Youth Arts Initiative and mounted a one-man show before returning to UW to join OMAI.
“The comedy and the sketches, and things like that, I’ve been doing that for a while, but as far as the music … that really started once quarantine hit, because I was an artist at home figuring this all out for myself, this is how I communicate. You try to communicate, and this is how I relate to most people,” he said in an interview Wednesday.
On Wednesday evening, the artists behind three of those murals gathered virtually for a panel discussion with Chazen Museum of Art director Amy Gilman and University of Wisconsin-Madison art professor Faisal Abdu’Allah, hosted by UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities.
According to a news release, University of Wisconsin- Madison alumna Shasparay Irvin, an artist and slam poet, co-produced the festival along with the Wisconsin Union Theater. Irvin created the festival while she was a student and debuted it in 2019.
Around the same time, her high school friend Lucy Tan, author of What We Were Promised, got into the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s MFA program. “I remember when she told me, I was like, ‘What is an MFA program?’ When she explained it to me, I just remember being so inspired, but also shocked.” Yang was surprised to learn there was a professional track for literary writers.
As an educator, actor, director and author, Kelly has built his career on making lasting connections. This fall, Kelly joined the UW-Madison Department of Theatre and Drama, where he earned a Ph.D. in theatre research in 2003. He’s teaching a small, upper-level Shakespearean performance course this fall.
The standard biography of the man is the fascinating “Spinoza: A Life,” by Steven Nadler, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin. A revised edition of this much-admired book has recently appeared.
Back to School – To embody Rodney Dangerfield this autumn, you’ll need to get in a car and drive through Wisconsin’s stunning changing foliage. End up at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (called “Grand Lake University” in the 1986 film) to see the lakeside college dressed in fall colors. Bonus points if you take this trip wearing a cardigan or find time to drink champagne in a hot tub.
The 24-year-old rapper grew up in Rochester, Minnesota and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His song “Mr. Clean” blew up when he had two semesters left, leading him to drop one of his majors and graduate a semester early. Although “Mr. Clean” was released in August 2016, he only revealed his identity later on in the song’s music video, released in March 2017.
In response to the budget fallout of COVID-19, UW-Madison’s Division of Continuing Studies is cutting support for community art programs.
Formats and preoccupations change, but comics never lose their power to communicate, criticize and entertain.
“Wisconsin Funnies: Fifty Years of Comics,” presented through Nov. 22 by the Museum of Wisconsin Art in two locations, surveys our state’s role in the great hurly-burly of funny words and pictures, especially from underground and alternative points of view.
Sometimes people would say things — though I don’t think they’re meant to harm or even be insulting, but they came out condescending. You know, calling the University of Wisconsin a state school, which totally blew me away.
The proposed legislation, which stems from a summit Bell organized in 2017 with the S.C. Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Law School, would create an independent use-of-force advisory board that includes members of law enforcement organizations, legal scholars, mental health professionals and criminal defense attorneys.
Johnson, a UW-Madison doctoral candidate in interdisciplinary theater studies, was a spectacular interviewee. I was impressed with her experience and her clear-eyed description of the challenges of being a Black artist transplanted to Madison. She is a polymath, seamlessly shifting between academic research, writing, singing, activism and poetry. In her hands, the lines between these areas blur.
Noted: Developed by University of Wisconsin students in 2018, the music discovery streaming app launched for Apple’s iOS In July 2019, growing to about 100,000 users, 200,000 song uploads and 15 full-time employees in the year since.
Noted: At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Greene earned his Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees, he was deeply influenced by jazz piano teacher Joan Wildman, who died this year. “It hit me pretty hard,” says Greene. “She was fiercely creative and always encouraged me to do my own thing.”
I think of the frictions in my life, too. Legos underfoot. Track changes. Heavy books. Grading. Laundry. Emails. Cardio. Recycling. Which frictions are about privilege, and which help me move in the world with weight and worry, using that friction to open the jar, to pay attention, to feel the potential in the things around me?
Sarah Anne Carter runs the Center for Design and Material Culture at UW-Madison. She writes about museums and making sense of the world.
The morning of Friday 24 July 2020 was a day of mixed emotions in Tanzania. Many were saddened by the news that former President Benjamin William Mkapa had passed away. But his death triggered negative emotions too.
Noted: When they were at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker and future ComedySportz founder Dick Chudnow launched the Kentucky Fried Theater comedy troupe.
TIME asked 21 historians, including Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology Nan Estad, to weigh in with their picks for “worst moments” that hold a lesson—and what they think those experiences can teach us.
“Most of the general public in the U.S. has no understanding of the very long history of slavery in the northern colonies and the northern states,” says Christy Clark-Pujara, a professor of history and Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island.
In 2018, according to the Children’s Cooperative Book Center at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Education, fewer than a third of all children’s and young adult books in the United States featured a person of color as a main character. Only around one fifth were written or illustrated by a person of color, despite the fact that now most young children in this country are nonwhite.
At the end of the credits, Stewart thanks Rockport and Polk County, in Georgia, and Kathy Cramer. The former were the locations where “Irresistible” was filmed. Cramer is the University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor whose 2016 book “The Politics of Resentment” explored the role of disaffected rural voters in Wisconsin’s shift to the right. In 2017, Stewart reached out to Cramer, spending a day with her in Wisconsin, visiting some of the places and people she visited while researching her book.
In 2015, Gardiner and two other friends, Khoa Tran and Kelly Montgomery, founded an online publishing company called JKX Comics. At the time, the three were pursuing Ph.D.s in different fields at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. And they knew how tough it can be to explain research or engage students in the nuances of science.
Data collected in 2018 by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, a University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education program, showed that approximately six percent of children’s books worldwide were written by African or African American authors; Latinx authors claimed roughly five percent of the lot.
FARM GIRLA Wisconsin MemoirBy Beuna Coburn Carlson216 pp. University of Wisconsin. Paper, $21.95.
Raised in Madison, her dad played basketball for the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1970s. Her parents later moved back to Wisconsin Rapids, where they grew up, after a period in Los Angeles so Brey could pursue acting.
Noted: “The Coyotes of Carthage” (Ecco), by Steven Wright. In a UW-Madison law professor’s satirical debut, a political operative tries to save his career by masterminding a dark money campaign for corporate mining interests.
Last summer, UW–Madison alumna Taren Mansfield had just two weeks to pack her belongings and relocate to Los Angeles after finding out about the opportunity of a lifetime. She left Madison to spend the next four months in Shondaland — Shonda Rhimes’s television production company — working on alongside actors such as Viola Davis on the hit TV show How to Get Away with Murder.
This year, those students lost the opportunity for the annual performance at “Africa Night” amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The program, part of the UW Community Arts Collaboratory, or Arts Collab, will instead try to bring the arts community together with several virtual performances.
