Judith Sloan

Judith Sloan is an actress, writer, radio producer, human rights activist, oral historian, poet, and audio artist whose work combines humor, pathos and a love of the absurd. For over twenty years, Sloan has been producing and presenting interdisciplinary works and sharing voices often ignored by the mass media. Her solo performances include: Denial of the Fittest (nominated for best comedy performance at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival), Responding to Chaos, Peace is Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Kill, A Tattle Tale: eyewitness in Mississippi, The Whole K’Cufin World and a few more things and Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America. Her commentaries, plays, poetry and documentaries have aired on National Public Radio, New York Public Radio, WBEZ Chicago, Public Radio International, BBC, and listener sponsored stations throughout the U.S. Her work has been produced in theatres and festivals throughout the U.S. and abroad including: LaMama E.T.C, The Public Theatre, The Theatre Workshop (Edinburgh, Scotland), The Smithsonian Institution, the Knitting Factory, the Jewish Museum (NY), the Market Theatre (Johannesberg, SA), etc. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Theatre Week, The London Stage, San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Awards include: 2009 First Place Missouri Review National Audio Competition and First Runner-Up; 2008 First Place, Missouri Review National Audio Competition; 2005 BAXten Artist Award; 2005 Special Merit Award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters; Along with Warren Lehrer she co-wrote the Crossing the BLVD book (W.W. Norton) and received numerous awards for the entire multi-media project including the 2004 Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of New York, the 2003 Innovative Use of Archives Award, a Media That Matters Award; grants from Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Franklin Furnace, New York State Council on the Arts among others. Collaborators in theatre, audio, books, music and exhibitions include: Frank London, Warren Lehrer, Elise Knudson, Teresa Kochis, Michael Dinwiddie, Laura Sydell, Terry Park, Scott Johnson, Gogol Bordello and David Krakauer, among others. Her articles and editorials have been published in the New York Times, the Forward, Movement Research Journal and on public radio. Sloan has produced and co-produced several documentaries (video and audio) including: Reclaiming A Past about her work with older European Jews and Holocaust survivors; a documentary featuring excerpts from the play A Tattle Tale: eyewitness in Mississippi was broadcast on National Public Radio and aired on over 250 stations nationwide. She has appeared on Comedy Central and PBS and is a member of the faculty at Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU where she teaches Oral History and Interdisciplinary Arts, and advises students on projects that cross the boundaries between artist and scholar. Sloan has been a guest performer and lecturer at Dartmouth College, Columbia University, Yale University, SUNY Purchase, University of Hawaii, University of Massachusetts, among others. She conducts workshops for teachers on immigration and diversity, in using theatre arts with young people, (in the classroom and on stage) and performs and teaches from time to time in New York City schools, youth correctional facilities and jails. She is the director of Cross-Cultural Dialogue Through the Arts, an arts mentorship and training program creating collaborations between disparate communities that grew out of EarSay’s Crossing the BLVD project. She is currently consulting with several organizations, training teachers and caregivers about interviewing refugees and people at risk. A survivor of serious trauma, Sloan has been working with immigrant and refugee teenagers, many who come from war-zones, since 1998. Her work at the International High School at LaGuardia Community College in Queens garnered her the Partnership in Education Award in June 2009. In September 2009, Sloan started a new initiative Transforming Trauma Into Art, to provide theatre, music, and hip hop education to teenagers from war-zones and immigrant youth who have been displaced by natural disasters and poverty. The program provides an internship opportunity for college students and emerging teaching artists. Along with Warren Lehrer she is co-artistic director of EarSay, a non-profit organization that creates art which crosses the boundaries between expressive and documentary forms.

Available on Amazon by Judith Sloan: Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, From Memory to Transformation includes the script of Denial of the Fittest.