Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Helen Shaw

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: Brooklyn, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2014

Helen Shaw is a teacher and writer about the theater, focusing mainly on the experimental work coming out of New York's downtown and outer borough spaces. Criticism and reviews have appeared in Time Out New York, the New York Sun, New York Theater Review, Performing Arts Journal, Playbill, The Village Voice, and TheatreForum. Now the larger project is to issue context and invitation to the modern High Weird forms of playwriting, those heirs of both the American avant-garde and the American Realist project. Shaw’s current fellowship is part of an attempt to shape that criticism into a new configuration, one that allows a slower response to the art; a sense of curation and deep engagement across genres; and an intertwining of experimental theatrical history with the simultaneous histories of dance, poetry, and art.

Studios

Irving Fine

Helen Shaw worked in the Irving Fine studio.

Youngstown Studio was given to MacDowell by friends of Miss Myra McKeown in Youngstown, OH, where she promoted both art and music. It was renamed Irving Fine Studio in 1972 in honor of Irving Fine, a distinguished composer, conductor, and teacher who was a MacDowell Fellow during the 1940s and 1950s. The simple interior of the studio…

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