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| Faculty
& Staff
Faculty & Staff Directory |
Office: 227 Scales Lynn Book is an innovative educator, internationally recognized performance artist, entrepreneur and creativity specialist who relocated from New York City to Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the fall of 2005 to accept a unique position as Faculty Fellow in Creativity at Wake Forest University. For over twenty years Book has inspired students, professionals, businesses and institutions in a broad range of settings to create new models of innovation for individuals, workplaces and cultural domains. She has contributed to the development of groundbreaking programs that foster innovations in performance and new media in Chicago: The School of the Art Institute (1985-95), in New York City: The Sidney Kahn Kitchen Summer Institute (2000-05) and in Austria at the Transart Institute, Europe’s first low-residency MFA program for new media, where she continues as an associate since it’s inception in 2005. Her 20 year teaching career in higher education has included institutions such as Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, Barnard College and Columbia College in Chicago, among others. Book has a deep history of interdisciplinary artistic practice that traverses boundaries between, experimental theater and performance, modern/postmodern dance, contemporary visual arts (she has a BFA in sculpture and an MFA in performance art and media studies) and cutting edge new music forms. A strong theoretical understanding and historical grounding in these disciplines and their social milieus couples with her prodigious practical knowledge to position her as a critical voice in the navigation of new technologies and hybrid forms of cultural production in the 21st Century. Critics from the New York Times and Village Voice have called her work “bold and inspired”, “strange and captivating“, while a recent writer had this to say: "[Book] blended stream-of-consciousness word jazz; novel utterances created by lips, lungs and diaphragm; and snatches of exquisite jazz and operatic singing into a unique aural confection... a beguiling thrill ride of a concept piece." (Michael Parrish, Chicago Tribune Metromix). Her performance career has included citations, fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts and MacArthur Foundation funding for the production of a radio drama based upon her original one-woman theater show, Gorgeous Fever. Her most recent projects include notes on desire, an evolving concert framework for a collection of voice/text compositions featuring extended and electronically processed and sampled voice in variations from solo to duet to ensemble with electronics, violin and accordion. Lynn Book will premiere a new interactive performance media project at SECCA (Southeast Center for Contemporary Art) in March 2007 and has just received the Archie Fund for Faculty Excellence at Wake Forest to support research for the project and was awarded an “Excellence in Entrepreneurship” for the most innovative course, spring 2006. Lynn Book’s belief in a critical creativity as the most essential ingredient in the vitality and sustainability of contemporary culture has led her to develop dynamic initiatives based on her vibrant interdisciplinary approach. Book founded Voicelab, an educational and cultural center, in New York City in 1999 through which she taught, coached and produced multifaceted events featuring innovative approaches to performance and new media. One of the programs she initiated included R & R (Release and Regenerate), an on-site service for internet and other small business start-ups in New York City. Her foray into the field of commercial voice work has included creative voice production for Steven Spielberg’s Men in Black and vocal interpretations of ancient Greek music for an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition, she has performed in and directed the radically joyful work of architect and writer Madeline Gins, has performed and toured with Ping Chong Company and was the subject of an independent film by Sharon Couzin which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For more info: www.lynnbook.com Wake Forest University Theater (336) 758-5294 fax (336) 758-5668 P.O. Box 7264 Reynolda Station, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27109 Theater Hompage compiled by Jonathan Christman 9/10/2005 |
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