Emeriti

Miriam Gisolfi D'Aponte (The Graduate Center and Baruch College)
PhD. in Theatre, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 1973. MFA in Film, Radio & Television, Columbia University, 1965. BA in English Literature, Bryn Mawr College, 1959. After teaching at Russell Sage, Newark State (now Kean) and Queens Colleges, Mimi D’Aponte began a Baruch career in 1973 and was invited to join the Graduate Center faculty in 1984. At Baruch she directed several student productions and eventually chaired first the Speech Department and then the Department of Fine and Performing Arts. In 1998 she received the Baruch College Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Teaching.

The major part of D’Aponte’s work concerns Italian theatre, with special emphasis on the plays of Luigi Pirandello and Eduardo De Filippo. Her articles and chapters appear in leading scholarly journals and reference texts, and her translations have been published. A first, Shepherd’s Song (from Andrea Perrucci’s La cantata dei pastori) was written in 1984 with Aniello D’Aponte, her husband. Most recently, Theater Neapolitan Style: Five One-Act Plays by Eduardo De Filippo (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), received the Italian Government’s prestigious Translation Prize in 2006. She has produced four of the one-acts as professional staged readings at Manhattan sites; a favorite, Philosophically Speaking, also ran as a showcase production in 2004. In 2005 she presented Pirandello’s The Man with a Flower in His Mouth in a bilingual production at the Casa Italiana of New York University, and in 2006 produced Cece`, a one-act by Pirandello starring John Turturro, at the Players Club as a benefit for the Pirandello Society of which she is co-president.

Professor D’Aponte’s work also embraces Theatre of Color in the United States, the title of courses she established, both at The Graduate Center and Baruch College. The first in its field, she edited and introduced Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays (Theatre Communications Group 1999). Since retiring from full-time teaching in February 2004, she has continued to teach a Playwriting course at Baruch, and has written three plays: My Mother’s Front Porch, Staying Connected, and 8th Grade Reunion. She has begun work on a fourth, The Classroom, and looks forward to a staged reading of Staying Connected in October 2007.

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James Hatch (The Graduate Center and City College)
Ph.D. in Theatre, University of Iowa.  Professor Hatch is Co-founder/Administrator of the Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc.,  and archive of African American Cultural Arts, a not-for-profit Research Library chartered under the New York State Board of Regents.  The Collection's major public program, "Artist and Influence," has published 25 volumes of minority artists lives.  Copies of the journal series can be found in the Mina Rees Library at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.  He is an author of several volumes of African American theatre history and is also a play and screen-writer whose work has won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance  and two Obie Awards. His Academic and Administrative Positions: Co-founder/Administrator of the Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc., and archive of African American Cultural Arts, a not-for-profit Research Library chartered under the New York State Board of Regents (1973-2007; Professor Emeritus, Ph.D. Program in Theatre, CUNY (1996-2007); Professor, English Department, City College of New York, CUNY (1965-1996); Recognition of Faculty of Distinction, CUNY (1992 & 1985); Directed theatre workshops for U.S. Information Agency in the Philippines and India (1985); Fulbright Fellowship, Taiwan, Republic of China (1982-1983); Teaching Fellow, University of Hamburg (1976 & 1980); Assistant Theatre Professor, Theatre Department, UCLA (1958-1962).  Awards and Honors in Theatre, Film, and Books:   Theatre Library Association George Freedley Award for best theatre history (2004); Bernard Hewett Award for A History of African American Theatre (2004); Skowegan Governor's Award in the Arts (2000); "Obie Award" for distinguished contribution to Off-Broadway (1997); Elected to College of Fellows in American Theatre (1995); Best Documentary, Filmmakers Consortium, The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks (1994); Bernard Hewett Award for best theatre biography, Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One (1994); Grand Jury Award, Sundance Film Festival for Finding Christa (1992); Best Documentary, Atlanta Film Festival, Finding Christa (1992); New Directors Series, Museum of Modern Art, film, Suzanne, Suzanne (1983); Writing Fellowship, MacDowell Colony, Peterboro, N,H. (1975); U.S. Department of State, Theatre Specialist in Asia (1868); Fulbright Lecturer, High Cinema Institute, Cairo, Egypt (1962 -1965); Writing Fellowship, Huntington Hartford, Pacific Palisades, California (1962); Fly Blackbird, Obie Award for Best Musical  Off-Broadway, with C. Jackson (1962); Easter Song, Best Verse Drama, Thomas Wood Stevens Award, Stanford U (1958); George Washington Honor Medal Award, writer editor, This is Worth Remembering, film documentary on President Hoover (1958).  Publications:  A History of African American Theatre (with Prof. Hill) Cambridge University Press (2003); Black Theatre USA (with Prof. Ted Shine), The Free Press, Scribners (1996); Plays by and about Women (with Prof. Victoria Sullivan), Random House (1973); 25 volumes of Artist and Influence, (with C. Billops), Hatch-Billops Collection (1981-2007).

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Marion Peter Holt (The Graduate Center)
Marion Peter Holt, Professor Emeritus (Theatre, Graduate Center, and Spanish, College of Staten Island). He has been a visiting professor at the Yale School of Drama, Hunter College, and Barcelona’s Institut del Teatre. Ph.D. University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign. Publications include: The Contemporary Spanish Theatre: 1949-1972 (1975), Antonio Buero-Vallejo: Three Plays (1985) (a Choice Outstanding University Press selection), DramaContemporary: Spain (1985), and Magical Places: the Story of Spartanburg’s Theatres and Their Entertainments: 1900-1950 (2004). His translations of contemporary Spanish and Catalan plays have been staged in New York and London, in Australia, and by regional and university theatres throughout the United States. Recent published translations include: José M. Rodríguez-Mendez’s Autumn Flower (2001), Sergi Belbel’s Blood (2004), Jaime Salom’s Behind the Scenes in Eden (2004), and Àngels Aymar’s Magnolia Café (2007). In 1986 he was elected a corresponding member of Spain’s Real Academia Española.

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Samuel Leiter, Distinguished Professor Emeritus (The Graduate Center and Brooklyn College)
Ph.D in Dramatic Art, New York University. Major publications: The Art of Kabuki: Famous Plays in Performance (1979; rev. ed. 2000); Kabuki Encyclopedia: An English-language Adaptation of Kabuki Jiten (1979); The Encyclopedia of the New York Stage: 1920-1930 (1985), 1930-1940 (1989), and 1940-1950 (1992); Ten Seasons: New York Theatre in the Seventies (1986); From Belasco to Brook: Great Directors of the English-speaking Stage (1991; Choice Outstanding Academic Book); From Stanislavsky to Barrault: Great Directors of the European Stage (1991); The Great Stage Directors: 100 Distinguished Careers of the Theatre (1994); New Kabuki Encyclopedia: A Revised Adaptation of Kabuki Jiten (1997); Frozen Moments: Writings on Kabuki, 1966-2001 (2002); Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre (2006); Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre (2006). Books he edited include Shakespeare Around the Globe: A Guide to Postwar Revivals (1986); Japanese Theatre in the World (1997); Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World (1998), with Benito Ortolani; Japanese Theatre and the International Stage (2000), with Stanca Scholz-Cionca; A Kabuki Reader: History and Performance; Kabuki Essays: 1966-2001; Kabuki Plays On Stage: Vol. 1 Brilliance and Bravado: 1697-1767; Vol. 2 Villainy and Vengeance: 1773-1799; Vol. 3 Darkness and Desire: 1804-1864; Vol. 4 Restoration and Reform: 1872-1905 (2003-2004), with James R. Brandon; and Masterpieces of Kabuki: Eighteen Plays On Stage, with James R. Brandon (2004). He also translated/adapted Shiro Okamoto’s The Man Who Saved Kabuki: Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censorship in Occupied Japan (2001). He edited the Japanese entries in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Modern Drama and “back translated” the Broadway musicals The Lion King, Aida, and Wicked prior to their Tokyo productions. He has been a Fulbright Research Scholar (Japan, 1974-1975), received a Claire and Leonard Tow Award (1997), held a Claire and Leonard Tow Professorship (1997-98), received a Wolfe Fellowship (1999-2000), and was Broeklundian Professor (2001-2002). He has been Visiting Scholar at Waseda University, Tokyo, and Scholar in Residence at Seikei University, Tokyo. He was founding editor of the Asian Theatre Bulletin (1971-1978), was Japan book review editor for Asian Theatre Journal from 1983, and was that journal's editor-in-chief (1992-2004). He also served on the editorial board of Theatre Symposium. He was on the executive committee of the American Society for Theatre Research (2000-2002). His memberships include Phi Beta Kappa and the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. He received the 2005 ATHE Excellence in Editing Award. In 2007, he retired from Brooklyn College, where he had been Chair of Theatre.

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Glenn Loney (The Graduate Center)
Contracted to teach English & Communication by the University of Maryland Overseas in 1956, Dr. Loney taught & traveled in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle-East. From these vantage points, he began sending reports to the New York Herald-Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, & Theatre Arts. During this four-year period, he also began regular summer visits to such major European Festivals as Edinburgh, Bayreuth, Munich, Bregenz, & Salzburg. On his return to the United States, he began dual-careers of writing/photography and university-lecturing. He has taught Theatre, Speech/Communications, & English at Hofstra, Adelphi, & the City University of New York: Brooklyn College & CUNY Graduate Center.

Dr. Loney earned his PhD in Theatre-History & Dramatic Literature at Stanford University, before serving in the US Army—1953-55—during the “Korean Police-Action.” His BA degree was awarded with “Highest Honors in Speech” at UC/Berkeley in 1950. He completed his MA in Speech & Theatre in 1951, at the University of Wisconsin/Madison. His reports & interviews—often illustrated by his photos—have appeared in LIFE, Smithsonian, The Reporter, Commonweal, Commentary, Andy Warhol's Interview, Dance Magazine, Ballet News, Musical America, Opera News, Opera Monthly, Theatre Week, After Dark, Ramparts, The Saturday Evening Post, Dramatics, Players, Modern Drama, Educational Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Design & Technology, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, Newsday, Other Stages, The Westsider, & Western European Stages. Travel-features have appeared in Recommend & other magazines.

He has been writing & photographing for Theatre Crafts since its debut, and later in its new incarnation as Entertainment Design. During this time, he has engaged in special projects such as touring the United States to report on all the Outdoor Historical Dramas. For a Circus Special, he spent time with the artists & technicians of the Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey Circus. One summer was devoted to studying the North American Shakespeare Festivals. This resulted in a special issue of Theatre Crafts and also a book, The Shakespeare Complex. Other books include a biography of the director/choreographer/dancer Jack Cole, Unsung Genius; as well as Peter Brook, Oxford to Orghast; California Gold-Rush Plays, Your Future in the Performing Arts, Creating Careers in Musical Theatre, Musical Theatre in America [ed], Staging Shakespeare [ed], and Briefing and Conference Techniques.

Professor Loney is Founder/Advisor for Modern Theatre.Info, currently being developed by Lightning New Media, a not-for-profit entity. This includes day-by-day listings of important events & developments in American, Canadian, & British Theatre from 1900 into the future. It will also feature photo-documentation, as well as audio and video-records of theatres, productions, artists, & technology. It is using as a data-base Dr. Loney's 20th Century Theatre [2 vols.], a day-by-day chronology of American & British Theatre activity from 1900 up to 1980. This was originally published by Facts-on-File, but only about one-fifth of the prepared entries were used, to keep the costs down. The Lightning New Media project will not only make all the entries—published & unpublished—available, but also draw on the historical records of collaborating Canadian & British Theatre Archivists. Dr. Loney provided Head-Notes for each drama in the Houghton-Mifflin series: Tragedy, Comedy, & Form in Drama [ed. Robert Corrigan]. He also created the Official Production Books for the Royal Shakespeare's Peter Brook "Midsummer Night's Dream"; and for the Young Vic's Frank Dunlop/Jim Dale "Scapino."

Having grown up in California's Mother Lode Country, he has long been an ardent Historical Preservationist. He is a member of the Municipal Art Society in New York and a nominator for the Society's Brendan Gill Prize. He created, wrote, & edited Art Deco News and its successor, The Modernist, for fourteen years. This led to the creation of the website, NYMuseums.com, for which he is the Principal Correspondent. he is also PC for the companion-website, NYTheatre-Wire.com.

As a Professor Emeritus of Theatre, at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he remains a member of various professional organizations. He is Historian of the Outer Critics Circle and a nominator for the Outer Critics Annual Awards. He is also a member of the Drama Desk, the American Theatre Critics Association, the International Association of Theatre Critics, as well as the Dance Critics Association, and the Music Critics Association of North America. Not to overlook the Theatre Historical Society, the American Society for Theatre Research and its international affiliate. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the American-Scandinavian Foundation.

Under the title of INFOTOGRAPHY™, Dr. Loney has organized into album/volumes more than 50 years of photography worldwide and has computer-indexed this 300,000 color-slide & print archive of Art, Architecture, Design, Historic-Theatres, Landmarks, Celebrated Sites, Graffiti, Famous Monuments, Museums & Galleries, Exhibitions, World’s Fairs, Performing-Arts, Posters, Nature, & Special-Subjects. These photos are now in the process of becoming digitally-available for research, study, editorial, & promotional-use on the Lightning New Media website, Infotography.biz

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Vera Mowry Roberts  (The Graduate Center and Hunter College)
Ph.D in Theatre, American Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.  Early in her career she maintained a desk in the stacks of the Library of Congress and was active in the theatrical life of the District and nearby Virginia.  Variously, she taught and directed at Rose Robinson Cowen's Children's Studio, directed at the Little Theatre of Alexandria, the Crossroads Theatre and other venues.  Her most significant association during this period was with the Mount Vernon Players.  Its Producing Director was Edward Magnum  and the theatre was at the Mount Vernon Place Methodist Church.  Out of this association emerged the Arena Stage:  the first fully professional resident theatre in the Nation's Capitol. Professor Roberts was one of its founding members.  In late 1954, Vera, at the invitation of Dr. Mina Rees visited her at Hunter College, CUNY where she was based.  The next year she started her teaching career as Instructor in Theatre at Hunter College - a career that lasted fifty (50) years.  It was here that she became a "full" Professor in 1969.  At this time The Graduate Center of the City University of New York was being constituted with Dr. Mina Rees as President.  At Dr. Rees's invitation, Prof. Roberts chaired a committee to draw up plans for a Ph.D program in Theatre and from thence forward served on the faculty of The Graduate Center as well as Hunter College. 

By 1970, there was a separate Department of Theatre and Cinema, with Vera Roberts as its Chair - a position she held until 1980.  In addition to her teaching at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, she served on a committee of the Division of Humanities and the Arts, under Dean Gerald Freund that attracted a million-dollar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed for much innovative team teaching and eventuated in the publication of a book called Exploration in the Arts.  In early 1980, she conceived, planned, and implemented a program at Hunter College called Junior Year in New York.  It brought students from schools across the country to study at Hunter College and serve internships in various arts organizations in the city.  Professor Roberts also served a term as Executive Officer of the Ph.D Program in Theatre at The Graduate Center.  She retired from full-time teaching at the end of 1984 but continued teaching part-time at Hunter College until the end of 2004.  Her association with The Graduate Center continued, she advised doctoral dissertations, and, in 1989, conceived, implemented and edited the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) which was published by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center. At Hunter College, Professor Roberts endowed a scholarship fro an incoming graduate student and, at The Graduate Center, a Dissertation Fellowship.  In 2003, on her 90th Birthday, she was feted at a grand reception and dinner at The Graduate Center and on this occasion Vera (as she is fondly called) announced the endowment of a Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre.

For her various contributions, Professor Roberts was awarded three Presidential Honors:  one from Hunter President Donna Shalala (1984); and a Presidential Medal each from Graduate Center Presidents Harold Proshansky (1990) and Frances Degan Horowitz (2004).  During her long career she was also active in national and international levels of theatre education. She was the International Liaison Officer for the American Educational Theatre Association (AETA) and was also one of a group of five people who conceived and implemented the American College Theatre Festival (ACTF) - she was ultimately awarded three medals for her work in this area.  She has been the recipient of career achievement awards from both ATA  and the American Society for Theatre Research and in 1972 was elected a Fellow of the prestigious College of Fellows of the American Theatre, which has informal ties to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.  In 1973, she was elected President of the American Theatre Association (successor to AETA) and traveled 80,000 miles during that year throughout the US visiting college campuses, regional meetings and symposia, lecturing and consulting. It was at ATA that Vera established a Women's Program (still promising today), a Senior Adult Theatre Program, and Theatre for the Handicapped Program.

Over the years, in addition to many articles in professional publications, Vera has written five books (notably two published by Harper and Row:  On Stage:  A History of Theatre, 1962, second edition, 1974 and The Nature of Theatre, 1972.  She has also been active in the civic and religious life of New York City serving on the boards of the YWCA, Playwrights Horizons, Direct Theatre, Teatro Espanol and Presbyterian Senior Services.  In 1975, she was the first woman ever to be elected Moderator of the Presbytery of New York City, a division of the Presbyterian Church (USA).  She wrote, in 1998,  for the bicentennial celebration of the Rutgers in Manhattan (where she has been a member since 1961) its history entitled, The Story of Rutgers Church (hard-cover volume, 205 pages).  Both professionally and personally, Vera Mowry Roberts has has a long and fruitful career on many fronts.

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Pamela Sheingorn (The Graduate Center)
Ph.D in Art History, University of Wisconsin, Madison. She spent an NEH postgraduate year studying medieval and renaissance drama at the University of Chicago and is a member of the history faculty both at Baruch College and The Graduate Center. Her research centers on ways of situating the cultural artifacts of the European Middle Ages within their complex religious, social, and political milieux. She is the author of The Eastern Sepulchre in England (Medieval Institute Publications, 1987); The Book of Sainte Foy (Penn, 1995); co-author of Writing Faith: Sign, Text, and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy (Chicago, 1999), and Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan's Epistre Ohtea (U Michigan, 2003) and co-editor of Studies in Iconography.  Her current projects include a study of illustrated medieval French play manuscripts and an interdisciplinary study of representations of Joseph the Carpenter.

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Gloria Waldman (The Graduate Center and York College)
Ph.D. in Spanish Language and Literature, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 1979. M.A.. from Cornell University and B.A.. from The City College of New York. Major publications include: Argentine Jewish Theatre, A Critical Anthology, (with Nora Glickman, Bucknell University Press, 1996); Spanish Women Writers, A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book (with L. Levine and E. Marson, Greenwood Publishing Group,1993); Borges In/And/On Film by Edgardo Cozarinsky, translated with R. Christ (Lumen Press, 1989); Luis Rafael Sánchez: Pasión Teatral, (Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, 1989); Teatro Contemporáneo: Nine Latin American Plays (with E.Paz, Heinle & Heinle Publishers, 1983); Feminismo ante el franquismo: Entrevistas con feministas de España (with L Levine, Ediciones Universal, 1979). She has published articles and translations in anthologies and encyclopedias and in the following journals: Latin American Theatre Review; Journal of Popular Culture; Poder y Libertad, (Spain); Estreno:Cuadernos del teatro español contemporáneo; Hispamérica; La Torre, Revista General de la Universidad de Puerto Rico; Revista/Review Interamericana; Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña; El Urogallo (Spain); Argentine Cinema. Her research and teaching specializations include contemporary Latin American theatre, especially that of Puerto Rico, and Latino/a theatre in the United States. She has also published in the area of contemporary feminist drama from Spain. She was Drama Critic for the daily newspaper, El Nuevo Día in Puerto Rico and for El Diario/La Prensa in NYC. In 1994 she first introduced the areas of Latin American theatre and Latino/a theatre into the Ph.D Theatre Program curriculum. She also directed graduate students in several productions of contemporary Latin American and Latino/a plays performed in the Segal Theatre at the Graduate Center. Her latest book, Papo Márquez: obrero de la cultura (Terranova, Puerto Rico, 2008) chronicles the life and work of Puerto Rican popular theatre practitioner José Papo Márquez (1952-1988).

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Stanley Arnold Waren (The Graduate Center)
The author of innumerable articles and short publications, Professor Waren earned his Ph.D and MA degrees in Theatre at Columbia University. From 1953 to 1970 he worked in the US and abroad as an Academic Administrator in a Performing Company and Executive Producer and Director in theatre. He was Chairman in the Department of Speech and Theatre at the City College of New York (CCNY), CUNY from 1967-1972 also serving as the Executive Officer in the Theatre Program at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (1972-1981).  He was also Vice President and Provost in the Department of the President from 1981-1984.  He was the founder and Director of the Center for Advanced Study of Theatre Arts (now renamed the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center)  for periods - 1979 to 1982, 1984 to 1986.  Professor Waren also worked as a reviewer at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 1978-1991; a Member Advocacy Counsel at the Roundabout Theatre, NYC, 1985-1993; Special Education Counselor at the  Double Image Theatre, NYC, 1982-1990; a USIS grant Lecturer in Hong Kong (1988); Advisor at Humanities.com, Brooklyn Academy of Music, NYC, 1980-1981; a Fulbright-Hayes Visiting Professor at the National Taiwan University and a Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Drama Institute, 1986-1988.  He also lectured at the Center for Living and Learning at the Marymount Manhattan College from 1998-2000; and the New School University from 2000-2003.  His musical director credits include The Chess King (Taiwan) in 1987; Old B  Hanging on the Wall (Shanghai) in 1988; Judas Mexico (N.Y.) in 1989; at the Seasoned Citizens Theatre Company from 2003-2007.  Professor Waren has also served on the Board of Directors for both the Women's International Art Center in NYC from 1978-1982, and the Frank Silvera Workshops for Writers from 1979-1981. He was a member of the grants panel for New York City's  Department of Cultural Affairs in 1979.   Among Professor Waren's other professional accomplishments are, Grants from the NY Council of Humanities; USIA/Arts Am., Singapore, 1990; the Herman Goldman Foundation, 1980-1982; National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from 1980-1981.  He is also a member of ASUP; the Association for Theatre in Higher Education; Social Stage Directors and Choreographers,; and the Professional Staff Congress, CUNY.  Professor Waren joined The Drama League awards nominating committee in 1997 and was awarded the Presidential Medal at The Graduate Center in 1986.

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