Tony Award-winning director, playwright to speak at UW–Madison

Chicago theater luminary Mary Zimmerman will give a public lecture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 6, in Room L160 of the Chazen Museum of Art.

Famous for her theatrical adaptations of ancient classics, Zimmerman won a Tony Award in 2002 for Best Direction of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” Zimmerman is also known for her groundbreaking collaborative work in opera, including at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

Zimmerman is a member of Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company, long known as the “theatre without a net” for its artistic risk-taking. She is artistic associate at Goodman Theatre, the oldest active nonprofit theater association in Chicago. Zimmerman is also professor of performance studies at Northwestern University.

Born in Nebraska, Zimmerman received her bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She fuses her Midwestern sensibility with a formidable grasp of epic, ancient texts to create riveting works for contemporary theater. Among her productions are “The Odyssey,” “The Arabian Nights,” “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Secret in the Wings” and “Mirror of the Invisible World.” In addition to her public lecture, Zimmerman will join a departmental colloquium open to members of UW–Madison’s Department of Theatre and Drama.

“We welcome hearing her thoughts on anything to do with theater, collaboratives and devising work,” says Norma Saldivar, executive director of the UW Arts Institute. “We are just very excited to have her with us.”

As a guest of the UW–Madison Center for the Humanities, Zimmerman will launch the center’s Humanities Without Boundaries series of public lectures for 2011-12. The Center for the Humanities initiates cross-disciplinary dialogue on campus, and throughout the community, by hosting speakers, scholars-in-residence, filmmakers and artists throughout the year.