"Creativity and the Arts in Social Justice, Repair, and Forgiveness"
For our final Rounds of the fall semester we are honored to welcome Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Bamuthi), poet, dancer, playwright, and actor, who will speak to us about his work and about the role of creativity and the arts in social justice, repair, and forgiveness.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice Initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. Formerly the Chief of Program and Pedagogy at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco, Mr. Joseph currently serves as Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. He is also the winner of the 2011 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In the Spring of 2022, he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mr. Joseph’s work investigates cultural erasure and Black Dignity through performances that range from opera to film. His opera libretto, “We Shall Not Be Moved,” was named one of 2017’s Best Classical Music Performances by The New York Times. His piece “The Just and The Blind” examines fatherhood in the age of mass incarceration and premiered at a sold-out performance at Carnegie Hall in March 2019. His latest opera, “it all falls down” premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2022, and his next operatic commission, “Watch Night,” premieres at The Perelman Center in New York in 2023 under the direction of Bill T. Jones. A proud alumnus of Morehouse College, Bamuthi received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the California College of Arts in the Spring of 2022.
Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Rounds are supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We will do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them. A recording of our Virtual Narrative Medicine rounds will be made available following the live session on the Narrative Medicine YouTube channel, and you can watch other recent Rounds events there.
