We are delighted to welcome the Center’s first Pew Fellows-in-Residence to Philadelphia. New York-based playwright and director Tina Satter and California-based poet and musician Julian Talamantez Brolaski are now living, working, and embedding themselves in the city’s arts community through June 2022.
The Center introduced the Pew Fellows-in-Residence program in fall of 2019. In addition to our longstanding annual fellowships for Philadelphia-based artists, the residency program brings artists from outside the region to Philadelphia to live and work for one year, fostering creative exchanges between the visiting artists and the city’s vibrant arts scene.
Satter and Brolaski are using their time in Philadelphia to develop new work and engage with the region’s artists and residents. Learn more about the artists’ plans below.
If you are interested in connecting with or offering research resources to our Fellows-in-Residence, please reach out to the Pew Fellowships program assistant Jordan Garlic at jgarlic@pewcenterarts.org.
Tina Satter
Satter’s (she/her) plans for living and working in Philadelphia as a Pew Fellow-in-Residence are informed by the ongoing pandemic and her continuing work on the play Is This A Room. Satter created the production from a verbatim transcript of an FBI interrogation of Reality Winner, a former American intelligence specialist charged with leaking classified information. These prompts have ignited her interest in working with various populations in Philly—both artists and not—to create live performance from real documents. During her residency, she plans to lead her modular workshop on writing and directing, which begins with found text and helps participants begin to conceive of and experiment with ways they can craft performance work and stories from their own lives, news headlines, and other sources.
“In a moment when discourse, fact, and fiction have become more complicated, emotionalized and intellectualized than ever,” Satter says, “my recent experience with this type of content and ongoing conversations with other artists and non-artists has made this a holistic way to engage as an artist in a new community at this time.”
As artistic director of Half Straddle, an Obie Award-winning theater company based in Brooklyn, Satter has created ten original full-length plays, including the aforementioned Is This A Room, which had a Broadway run in 2021. Read more about Satter’s work in this July 2021 interview.
Julian Talamantez Brolaski
Brolaski (it/its) is drawn to Philadelphia’s vibrant poetry community and array of reading series and resources that make the city “a really exciting place for literary art.” While in residence in Philadelphia, the poet is “excited for the opportunity to engage with local communities—of poets, queers, two-spirit and Native people, musicians—and finding ways that these might intersect,” it says.
Brolaski is currently engaged in a mini-residency with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, which includes a community workshop, public reading, and visits to University of Pennsylvania classes. Brolaski will also be writing a series of talks on the art of poetry as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, commissioned by Wave Books, and will continue to research “the relationship between biological vision and visionary experience” for an in-progress poetry book titled Horse Vision.
Brolaski is working on several other creative projects, including recording a full-length album of original music with local collaborators David Laganella (electric guitar), Boaz Kim (harmonica and harmony vocals), and Liz Keough (upright bass). The group will perform at the Country Soul Songbook Summit, a BIPOC- and LGBTQIA-led festival of Country and Americana music, December 9-11, 2021.
Learn more about Brolaski’s poetry, which draws from multiple languages, literary traditions, and modes of expression to explore how linguistic differences can inform multifaceted identity and experience.
