INFECTION MELODIES + SILENCE: Theodore (ted) Kerr & Michael R. Jackson

Wednesday September 27th at 8pm, as part of the 2023 Brooklyn Book Festival, ISSUE presents writer / organizer Theodore (ted) Kerr and Tony award winning playwright, composer, and lyricist Michael R. Jackson for this informal and far-reaching conversation. Together, they will explore their shared love of 1990s female songwriters, tackle the limits and possibilities of using culture to discuss social issues, and examine the role silence plays in their work. This year marks the 20th Anniversary of ISSUE and will be celebrated with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events. As part of these celebrations, ISSUE invites past Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellows (SFCF) to perform and present work on programs in collaboration with important members of the community who inspire their practice. Invested in questions around power, community, knowledge, and consumption in the 21st century, 2022 SFCF Theodore (ted) Kerr curated THE BODY POPULAR, a series of gatherings and broadcasts propelled by artists, podcasters, writers, and others in NYC and across the U.S. His continued AIDS activism has drawn inspiration from a number of sources including the work of Michael R. Jackson who will join Kerr in conversation.

Across 20 years of programming, ISSUE has sustained a thriving Artists-In-Residence program, encouraging generations of NYC-based artists to take creative risks in reaching the next stage of their artistic development. ISSUE has also inaugurated the Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship, assisting emerging curators to realize ambitious new projects. The organization has bolstered close partnerships within NYC’s cultural ecology, collaborating with like minded nonprofits, galleries, theaters, and non-traditional spaces as we’ve embarked on a period of off-site programming. Bringing commissions, premieres, and rare performances to new contexts and spaces throughout NYC, including The Invisible Dog, ISSUE has doubled down on its commitment to artists whose work eludes convention. Join us in recognizing this important milestone in our history.

Theodore (ted) Kerr was ISSUE Project Room's 2022 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. He is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022, with Alexandra Juhasz). In 2021 he curated AIDS, Posters and Stories of Public Health: A People's Pandemic for the National Libraries of Medicine, and in 2017 he was one of 4 oral historians who worked on Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project for the Smithsonian, Archives for American Art. He is a founding member of the international collective What Would an HIV Doula Do?. Additionally, Kerr is an adjunct instructor at The New School and Manhattan College offering classes on HIV, memorialization, media, literature, sociology, and New York City.

Michael R. Jackson is one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people of 2022. His Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle winning A Strange Loop (which had its 2019 world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions) received 11 Tony nominations in 2022, and was called "a full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul, and loins" as well as a "gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies" by Ben Brantley for The New York Times. In The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham wrote, "To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost real, then draws another hand, which returns the favor."  In addition to A Strange Loop, he also wrote the book, music and lyrics for White Girl in Danger. Awards and associations include: a New Professional Theatre Festival Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, an ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, a Whiting Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk Award, an Obie Award, an Antonyo Award, a Fred Ebb Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a Dramatist Guild Fellowship and he is an alum of Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers Group.