Meet the Faculty

SCHOLARS

 Julie Crawford and Mario DiGangi will serve as lead scholars for the program. Dr. Crawford is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Dr. DiGangi is Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.  Both scholars have published widely on Shakespeare and his contemporaries as well as the broader contexts of English Renaissance drama and culture. In addition to these pursuits, both scholars are committed teachers. Dr. Crawford recently won a Lenfest Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award. DiGangi has published works such as Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama, which is designed to give teachers practical guidance on introducing students to the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Dr. Crawford and Dr. DiGangi were lead scholars for Theatre for a New Audience’s 2015-2022 Summer Institutes, and Dr. DiGangi also served as lead scholar in 2011.

K-12 SPECIALIST

Maria Fahey is a member of the faculty at Friends Seminary, where she has taught English to middle and high-school students for more than thirty years.  She is the author of Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award.  Dr. Fahey has written a series of student guides to reading Shakespeare’s plays.  It has been her privilege to work with other teachers, most recently at the Taktse School in Sikkim, India.

THEATRE PRACTITIONERS

Master teaching artists, Krista Apple and Claudia Zelevansky, will contribute the perspectives of actor and director. In addition to her extensive work as an actor, Ms. Apple is currently on the teaching faculties of the University of the Arts, Muhlenberg College, Drexel University, and the National High School Institute (NHSI/Northwestern University). She has been recognized by the National Foundation for Advancement of the Arts for her work as a teacher and mentor. Ms. Zelevansky received her Master of Fine Arts in Directing from Yale University and has directed over 35 theater productions, both off-Broadway and regionally. She has taught at Oberlin College, Bard College, City University of New York, as well as her two alma maters:  Northwestern University and Yale University.  She was also a Fellow in Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC Service in Schools Initiative. Both Ms. Apple and Ms. Zelevansky served on the faculty for Theatre for a New Audience’s 2011 and 2015-2022 NEH Summer Institutes.

PROJECT DIRECTOR

Project Director Lindsay Tanner is the Director of Education at Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA). Her commitment to arts programming that advances a just, equitable, and liberatory education system is informed by her experience as a program leader, teacher, teaching artist, and theatre practitioner. Before joining TFANA, Lindsay served as Senior Program Manager for Urban Arts Partnership’s Everyday Arts for Special Education program, a federally-funded research project investigating arts-based professional development for teachers of students with disabilities; completed graduate work on trauma-informed systems of care in early childhood with Sesame Workshop and inclusive arts-integrated teaching with VSA Massachusetts (now Open Door Arts); directed the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s Shakespeare Summer Camp; co-founded the Accidental Shakespeare Company; and served as the founding Head of Expressive Arts at a trauma-informed independent school. Lindsay has facilitated workshops for educators and artists nationally and internationally on embodied inquiry, applied theatre, and collaborative artmaking for social change. She holds an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.F.A. from NYU. She proudly serves on the steering committee of the Arts for All Abilities Consortium.

TFANA’s NEH Summer Institute is made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.

Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Pictured above: A participant in the 2022 NEH Summer Institute examining a text from the 1600s in Columbia University’s Rare Book Room. Photo by Hollis King.