Alexandra Chasin & Zishan Ugurlu

ZISHAN (ZISAN) UGURLU has worked extensively both in New York and abroad as a theater artist since 1995. She is an actress and director-in-residence at La MaMa and Great Jones Repertory Company. She has performed in numerous productions with Great Jones Repertory Company, including Panorama directed by Italian company Motus as part of the Under The Radar Festival 2018. Panorama has already presented in Italy, Belgium, Spain, Austria and Germany. She is the founding artistic director of “Actors without Borders-ITONY.” Her recent directing credits include Franca Rame Project by Dario Fo, Franca Rame, Agamemnon by Aeschylus, Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare, Not About Nightingales by Tennessee Williams, She Talks to Beethoven by Adrienne Kennedy. She graduated from Columbia University with an MFA degree and holds a Ph.D. She is an Associate Professor at Lang College, The New School University. She is the recipient of the prestigious Fox Foundation Fellowship granted by Theater Communications Group.

ALEXANDRA CHASIN is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Lang College, The New School. Chasin currently holds a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She is a past recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY, and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. Chasin is the author of four books, most recently Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs. She was Founding and Artistic Director of Writing On It All, a public participatory writing project in New York City (writingonitall.com), 2013-2017. Trained as a scholar (PhD, Stanford) and an artist (MFA, Vermont College), Chasin works at the crossroads of scholarship, performance and creative textual practice. alexandrachasin.us