The Department of Theatre welcomes Dr. Lynne Conner as its new chair. Dr. Conner comes to UNC Charlotte from Colby College, where she served as a professor and former chair of the Theatre and Dance Department.
Dr. Conner is a theater and dance historian, cultural policy theorist, and playwright. Her publications include the books Audience Engagement and the Role of Arts Talk in the Digital Era (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), Pittsburgh in Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theater (University of Pittsburgh Press 2007), In the Garden of Live Flowers, co-authored with Attilio Favorini (Dramatic Publishing Company 2003), Spreading the Gospel of the Modern Dance: Newspaper Dance Criticism in the United States, 1850-1935 (University of Pittsburgh Press 1997), and the monograph Project Brief: The Heinz Endowments’ Arts Experience Initiative (The Heinz Endowments 2008).
She has also published numerous chapters, articles, and essays, most recently “Taking Back the Arts: 21st Century Audiences, Participatory Culture and the End of Passive Spectatorship” in l’ordinaire des Ameriques, 220, 2016. A frequent and internationally respected speaker on topics in the cultural policy field, she maintains a featured blog at ArtsJournal.com, "We the Audience."
Dr. Conner’s plays and adaptations have been produced in venues across the country and have received multiple awards. In the Garden of Live Flowers, co-written with Attilio Favorini, won the 2002 Kennedy Center David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award and an honorable mention prize in the 2002 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award contest and is published by Dramatic Publishing Company. Nina won the Gemini Theater New Play Festival competition and the Smith College New Play Reading Series and was named a finalist in the Dorothy Silver Playwriting Award and the Oglebay Institute Towngate Theatre Playwriting Contest. American Humbug received a Creative Heights grant award from the Heinz Endowments in 2007 and was produced by the Three Rivers Arts Festival. In January 2013 she was awarded the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Region I award for Excellence for her original adaptation of Lysistrata at Colby College.