Philippe Petit has performed on the high wire more than eighty times around the world; he is also a magician, street juggler, visual artist, builder, lecturer, writer and subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary, Man on Wire (2008), and the feature film The Walk (2015).

 

He is the author and illustrator of several books, including Why Knot: How to Tie More than Sixty Ingenious, Useful, Beautiful, Lifesaving, and Secure Knots! (2013) and Creativity: The Perfect Crime (2014), a manifesto about the creative process. Translated and introduced by novelist Paul Auster, Petit’s new book is On the High Wire (2019), first published in French in 1972 when the author was only 23 years old.

A Creative Life Series event presented in collaboration with the University Art Museum and UAlbany Performing Arts Center.  

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Teenage inventors from India, Indonesia, Mexico and the USA, attempt to find solutions to the world’s most urgent environmental problems—including climate change, water and air pollution, and mass extinction— in this award-winning documentary, nominated for the 2018 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called it “inspirational and invigorating” and said “the young scientists… have a passion and enthusiasm that’s a tonic to the soul.”  

Laura Nix received the 2018 Chicken and Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker Award, a prestigious honor bestowed annually on five women filmmakers. She also received the Sundance Institute/ Discovery Impact Fellowship in 2017. Her previous films include THE YES MEN ARE REVOLTING (2014), THE LIGHT IN HER EYES (2011), and WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT: THE STORY OF HEDWIG (2003).
Screened in association with UAlbany’s new Department of Environmental and Sustainable Engineering, now offering the first Bachelor of Science degree of its kind in the United States.  

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(United States, [official date], [length] minutes, color) Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. 

Starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Gregory Hines, Lonette McKee, Bob Hoskins, Fred Gwynne, Nicolas Cage, Tom Waits and Laurence Fishburne.

With a screenplay by William Kennedy, who replaced original screenwriter Mario Puzo, THE COTTON CLUB returns to the big screen in a new director’s cut more than 30 years after its original release. A labor of love funded by half a million dollars of Coppola’s own money, the restored and re-edited film features several high-energy music and dance numbers cut from the 1984 original. An honor for Albany, the event will mark only the third public screening since the new film’s completion.     

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Nikki Giovanni, activist, mother, professor, firebrand, healer and sage, is one of the leading poets of her generation, a seven-time NAACP Image Award winner, and the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award. She presents her new book, A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter (paperback, 2018), a wide-ranging memoir about the joys and perils of aging; the violence of her parents’ marriage and her early life; the people who have given her life meaning; the grandparents who took her in and saved her life; the poets and thinkers who influenced her; and the students who gave her life purpose.

Sponsored by the University at Albany’s Department of Africana Studies in partnership with the NYS Writers Institute to celebrate the Department’s half century of excellence. The first in the SUNY System to grant the master’s degree in Africana Studies, the Department ranks first in its field nationally for graduate degree conferrals and in the top ten for undergraduate conferrals.

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(Singapore/USA, 2018, 96 minutes, color) Directed by Sandi Tan. Starring Sandi Tan, Sophia Siddique Harvey, Georges Cardona.

While still a teenager in 1992, Sandi Tan and her friends made one of Singapore’s first indie feature films, SHIRKERS, under the mentorship of a strange and shady American film teacher, Georges Cardona, who suddenly vanished with the film stock before it could be finished and released. Her same-titled 2018 documentary SHIRKERS reflects on her shattered creative dreams, and explains what happened when the footage was unexpectedly returned to her two decades later. Released as a Netflix original documentary, the film received a Directing Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. The New Yorker called it “vastly imaginative and ambitious…. gloriously, gleefully idiosyncratic, a blend of punk energy and local documentation.”

Cosponsored by the University at Albany’s Center for International Education & Global Strategy (CIEGS), and Intensive English Language Program

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Cass R. Sunstein, author of Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide and professor at Harvard University, will discuss "Impeachment: A Guide to the Legal Process and Its History." Co-sponsored by the NYS Writers Institute and the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA).

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Robert Boyers is the author of The Tyranny of Virtue (2019), a provocative collection of essays about the decline of civility and academic freedom promoted by excesses of political correctness at America’s colleges and universities.

 

Boyers, who defines himself as a liberal, decries the intolerance of his fellow liberals for political and intellectual diversity. Writing in advance praise, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy called it, “Instructive and inspiring…” and said, “Boyers has written a probing meditation on his experiences within the left-liberal cultural bubble.”

 

Director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College since its creation, Boyers founded the program in 1987.

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(United States, 2019, not rated, 83 minutes, English)
 

Film historian Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman argues that Hollywood is beginning a new “golden age for black horror films.” HORROR NOIRE, a documentary based on Coleman’s same-titled book, features interviews with leading figures of Black horror cinema, including Jordan Peele (GET OUT), Tony Todd (CANDYMAN), and Tina Mabry (MISSISSIPPI DAMNED). The film also explores the history of the genre, shedding new light on how African American characters and creators were used — and misused — across a century of cinema. HORROR NOIRE is the very first documentary produced by AMC Networks’ new horror video streaming service, Shudder.

Twenty-something director Xavier Burgin is an Emmy nominated filmmaker, Sundance Lab Fellow, HBO Finalist, and a director on the Emmy nominated series, Giants, produced by Issa Rae Presents.

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Cosponsored by “400 Years of Inequality at the University at Albany,” part of a national observance of the 400th Anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans to be sold into bondage in North America— in 1619 at Jamestown. Support provided by the Diversity Transformation Fund through UAlbany’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
 

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Jade  Solomon Curtis, celebrated dance artist and choreographer, integrates classical and African-American vernacular movements with mixed-media and Hip Hop culture. Black Like Me: An Exploration of the Word N _____ is her multidisciplinary evening length work that explores the reverb of a single word in a global community.    

Advance tickets: $15 general public / $10 students,seniors, UAlbany faculty-staff. (518) 442-3997 or tickets@albany.edu

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Sharon Olds, former New York State Poet under the auspices of the NYS Writers Institute (1998-2000), received the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Stag's Leap (2012), a poignant account in poetry of her experiences when her husband left her after 30 years of marriage. Her work, often autobiographical in nature, is renowned for its treatment of marriage, motherhood, intimacy, and the human condition. Michael Ondaatje says, “Sharon Olds’ poems are pure fire in the hands, risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up.” Other honors include the 2016 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Lamont Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A professor at NYU, she is cofounder of the NYU Goldwater Hospital Writing Workshop for the severely physical challenged, and the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her new collection is Arias (Oct. 2019), poems about intimate life, political conscience, race and class, delivered with operatic passion, anguish and solo force. She is the author of 13 previous collections including The Father (1992), The Unswept Room (2002), and Odes (2016).
 

Born in Saigon, Ocean Vuong spent a year in a refugee camp as a baby and migrated to America when he was two years old. Widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation, he is celebrated for poetry that explores immigrant experience, queer life, and the lingering impact of the Vietnam War. His debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, has been named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Publishers Weekly, Oprah.com and more. Ron Charles of the Washington Post said that the book, “explode[s] the very structure of traditional narrative, and the pages break apart into the lines of an evocative prose poem — not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” Vuong's debut poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, was named a “Top Ten Book of 2016” in the New York Times, and became only the second debut collection to win the T. S. Eliot Prize.

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Award-winning playwright Kate Fodor has also served as writer, story editor, executive story editor and producer on the Amazon Prime runaway hit series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the story of a 1950s Upper West Side housewife who discovers a previously unknown talent:  stand-up comedy.  The show received numerous awards, including Primetime Emmys in 2018 for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Writing, a 2019 Golden Globe for Best Television Series, and a 2019 Writers Guild Award.

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Fodor received wide acclaim for her debut play, Hannah and Martin (2004), based on the tumultuous love affair between Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt and major philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. Her other plays include Fifty Ways; RX, a New York Times Critics’ Pick: 100 Saints You Should Know, named one of the best plays of the year by Time Out New York, Entertainment Weekly, and Theater Yearbook.

Funded by the Jarka & Grayce Susan Burian Endowment, and cosponsored by the University at Albany Theatre Program.

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William Michael Griffin Jr., better known by his stage name Rakim, is “near-universally acknowledged as one of the greatest MCs – perhaps the greatest – of all time within the hip-hop community” (Steve Huey, AllMusic.com). His new memoir, Sweat The Technique: Revelations On Creativity From The Lyrical Genius, described as “part memoir, part writing guide,” follows his career from his beginnings as a teenage rapper in Wyandanch, Long Island and offers insight into how he thinks about words, music, writing and rhyming as it teaches writers of all levels how to hone their craft. Rakim began his career as the emcee of the rap duo Eric B. & Rakim, “the most influential DJ/MC combo in contemporary pop music, period” (Tom Terrell, NPR). 
 

Major support for The Creative Life is provided by The University at Albany Foundation with additional support from the UAlbany Office of Intercultural Student Engagement, Alumni Association, College of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Provost and University Auxiliary Services. A Creative Life Series event presented in collaboration with the University Art Museum and UAlbany Performing Arts Center. 

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