#marcia sharif

[mariocki]

Le lac des morts vivants (Zombie Lake, 1981)

"Stories about the lake of the damned go back to the Inquisition. They used to celebrate Black Masses back in the Middle Ages: they would sacrifice children, which they threw into it so as to appease the spirits which otherwise rose out of their watery grave in search of blood. And we too, we've used it as an unholy grave during the war. But the soldiers we threw in were not a sacrifice... and they're coming back with a vengeance."

[gurumog]

Zombie Lake (1981) Le Lac des Morts Vivants Eurociné Dir. Jean Rollin

Marcia Sharif as Katya Moore, intrepid reporter.

Certain prints of Zombie Lake credit director Jean Rollin under the pseudonym of J.A. Laser. The film was co-directed by Julian de Laserna, who went uncredited.

[skippyv20]

Maryam Mirzakhani, the only woman to have won math’s highest honour

pxfuel - edited by Marcia Wendorf

In mathematics, the highest award you can receive is the Fields Medal. Created by Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, it is only awarded once every four years, to a maximum of four mathematicians, and all must be under the age of 40-years-old.

Fields Medal Source: Stefan Zachow/Wikimedia Commons

While the first Fields Medal was first awarded in 1936, the medal has only been continuously awarded every four years since 1950. Famous recipients include the physicist Edward Witten in 1990 and Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman in 2006, who ultimately declined the medal.

From 1936 and 2014, all the recipients of the Fields Medal had been men, that is until 2014. That’s when an Iranian woman along with Brazilian Artur Avila, Canadian Manjul Bhargava, and Austrian Martin Hairer received a Fields Medal. Meet Maryam Mirzakhani.

Maryam Mirzakhani was born in 1977 in Tehran, Iran. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a writer. During high school, Mirzakhani met her lifelong friend, Roya Beheshti Zavareh, who now teaches mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis. The two girls approached the principal of their all-girls school and asked that the same math problem-solving classes that were taught at the all-boys school be taught at their school.

In 1994, when Mirzakhani was 17, she and Zavareh made the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad team, and Mirzakhani received a gold medal. The following year, Mirzakhani achieved both another gold medal and a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad, which was held in Toronto, Canada that year.

Mirzakhani received a bachelor’s degree from Sharif University in Tehran in 1999, and she and Zavareh wrote a book together entitled, Elementary Number Theory, Challenging Problems, which was published in 1999.

Hyperbolic surfaces Source: Hamish Todd/YouTube

For graduate school, Mirzakhani traveled to Harvard University in the U.S. where she became interested in hyperbolic surfaces, the strange doughnut-shaped objects with two or more holes and saddle points. A curved surface can have a “straight” line segment, known as a geodesic, which is the shortest path between two points. On a hyperbolic surface, some geodesics are infinitely long, while others close up into a loop like the circles on a sphere.

Most geodesics intersect themselves many times before they close up, but a tiny fraction which are called “simple” geodesics, never intersect themselves. Mathematicians had been unable to determine how many simple closed geodesics of a given length a hyperbolic surface could have. Mirzakhani solved that problem in her 2004 Ph.D. dissertation in which she developed a formula for how the number of simple geodesics of length X grows as X gets larger. She also determined a formula for the volume of moduli space, which is the set of all possible hyperbolic structures on a given surface.

Mirzakhani teaching Source: Wired Science/YouTube

If that weren’t enough, Mirzakhani also provided a new proof of an old conjecture that had been proposed by Edward Witten concerning the topological measurements of moduli spaces as it related to string theory. Mirzakhani’s dissertation generated three influential papers which were published in the top mathematics journals. After a stint as a professor at Princeton University, in 2009, Mirzakhani became a professor at Stanford University.

In 2006, Mirzakhani began a collaboration with the University of Chicago's Alex Eskin. Eskin is a 2019 recipient of the Breakthrough Prize. He and Mirzakhani began analysing the range of behaviours of a ball on a polygon-shaped billiard table, where the table’s angles are a rational number of degrees. A rational number can be expressed as the quotient of two integers where the denominator is non-zero.

Mirzakhani and Eskin imagined deforming a billiard table by contracting it along the direction of a billiard ball’s trajectory. This transformed the original table into a succession of new ones which is the moduli space that is comprised of all possible billiard tables having a specific number of sides. At the 2014 Fields Medal award ceremony, American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg explained Mirzakhani’s research as:

“… she studies billiards … She considers not just one billiard table, but the universe of all possible billiard tables. And the kind of dynamics she studies doesn’t directly concern the motion of the billiards on the table, but instead a transformation of the billiard table itself, which is changing its shape in a rule-governed way; … the table itself moves like a strange planet around the universe of all possible tables … it’s what you need to do in order to expose the dynamics at the heart of geometry; for there’s no question that they’re there.”

In 2008, Mirzakhani married fellow professor of mathematics at Stanford Jan Vondrak, and the two went on to have a daughter, Anahita. Mirzakhani’s and Vondrak’s home was littered with large sheets of paper on which she would draw physical representations of the concepts she was thinking about. Her daughter called this “painting”.

Mirzakhani’s “paintings" Source: Hamish Todd/YouTube

In 2013, Mirzakhani was diagnosed with breast cancer, and on July 14, 2017, she died of the disease. Mirzakhani was only 40-years-old.

Mirzakhani without a headscarf Source: Hamish Todd/YouTube

Following her death, Iranian newspapers, along with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, broke with tradition and published photos of Mirzakhani where she isn’t wearing a head covering. To allow Mirzakhani’s daughter to be able to visit Iran, the Iranian parliament sped up passage of an amendment that allows the children of Iranian mothers who are married to foreigners to receive Iranian nationality.

Before her death, Mirzakhani had become a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, and following her death, the International Council for Science declared May 12th, which is Mirzakhani’s birthday, International Women in Mathematics Day. Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology named their College of Mathematics library after Mirzakhani, and a conference hall in the Iranian city of Isfahan is named after her. The satellite firm Satellogic named a satellite after her.

In November 2019 the Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced a $50,000 prize in Mirzakhani’s honour to be awarded to outstanding women mathematicians. Asteroid 321357 Mirzakhani was named in her memory.

In February 2020, on International Day of Women and Girls in STEM, Maryam Mirzakhani was honored by UN Women as one of seven female scientists, dead or alive, who have shaped our world. Had she lived past the tender age of 40, who knows what Maryam Mirzakhani could have accomplished. Still, she has left a lasting legacy for all women and girls in the fields of mathematics and science.

https://interestingengineering.com/maryam-mirzakhani-the-only-woman-to-have-won-maths-highest-honor

Thank you😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

[xemidatwospirit]

On Womxn of Color Directing DC Theatre

As an artist, a feminist, and a Non-Binary Trans Womxn of Color Director and theatre artist working in the DC Metropolitan theatre scene, my experience working with Womxn of Color Directors has been very limited. My curiosity about the inclusion of womxn of color directors has led me to a little bit of research on the topic.

How many womxn of color have been nominated for the Helen Hayes Award in Directing and Music Direction since it’s beginning? How many womxn of color have won the Helen Hayes Award for Directing or Music Directing? Is there a lack of female directors being nominated? Is there a lack of directors of color being nominated? Or is this simply another example of the double hurdle womxn of color must jump over very often in order to receive recognition? How many womxn of color were actually given the opportunity to direct for the 2016-2017 season?  Using HHA Nominees & Recipients advanced search options on TheatreWashington’s website,  DCTheatreScene’s season reveal, and other online resources, I found some answers to these questions.

Since 1985, only three womxn of color have been nominated for the award for “Outstanding Director”. There have been zero womxn of color nominated for “Outstanding Musical Director”. In 1997, Marsha A. Jackson-Randolph was nominated for “Outstanding Director, Resident Musical” for Studio Theatre’s HIP 2: BIRTH OF THE BOOM. In 1999, Seret Scott was nominated for “Outstanding Director, Resident Play” for Studio Theatre’s THE OLD SETTLER. In 2004, Regina Taylor was nominated for “Outstanding Director, Resident Musical” for Arena Stage’s CROWNS, becoming the first and only womxn of color recipient of the honor. There have been zero Womxn of color who have been nominated for the Helen Hayes in Direction or Music Direction since Taylor’s win, including the 2017 Helen Hayes Awards.

(Photo Credit: Regina Taylor)

Non-POC (white) womxn have actively, though sparingly at times, been competitors in the Director categories since the inception of the Helen Hayes Awards in 1985 when four of the six nominees for “Outstanding Director, Resident Production” were non-POC womxn. In 1988, Zelda Fichandler became the first womxn to win the award. Several womxn have won since then including: Allison Arkell Stockman, Kasi Campbell, Yaël Farber, Mary Hall Surface, Marcia Milgrom, Toby Orenstein, Regina Taylor, Jane Wagner, Mary Zimmerman, and Joy Zinoman. Mollly Smith and Joy Zinoman have both been nominated 10 times for the award. The most nominated non-POC womxn for Director is Toby Orenstein, who has been nominated 11 times for the award.

For the 2017 Helen Hayes Awards, five non-POC womxn have been nominated for Musical Direction or Director of a Play or Musical. In the “ Outstanding Musical Direction-HELEN”  category, Karen Hansen earns her 2nd Helen Hayes Nomination for her work in MOXIE: A HAPPENSTANCE VAUDEVILLE at Happenstance Theater. In the “Outstanding Director of a Play-HELEN Production” category, Sabrina Mandell earns her 4th  Helen Hayes Nomination, her first in Direction, for her work in MOXIE: A HAPPENSTANCE VAUDEVILLE at Happenstance Theater. In the “Outstanding Director of a Play-HAYES Production” category, Joanie Schultz earns her first Helen Hayes Nomination for her work on HAND TO GOD at Studio Theatre. In the “Outstanding Direction, Musical-HAYES”, Molly Smith earns her 10th Helen Hayes Nomination for her work in CAROUSEL at Arena Stage. In the “Outstanding Direction, Musical-HELEN” category, Allison Arkell Stockman earns her 2nd Helen Hayes Nomination for her work on URINETOWN at Constellation Theatre Company. Of the 30 nominees in the 6 directing categories, only 5 of those nominated were non-POC womxn: 16% non-POC womxn, 81% men, and 3% non-POC Non-Binary Trans-masculine.

Men of Color have long been competitors in the Direction categories as well.  In 1988, the first man of color to be nominated (and win) the award was Lloyd Richards for his work on Arena Stage’s JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE. Since then, Richards has been nominated 2 more times, and won once more. Several other men of color have been nominated and have won as well, such as: Thomas W. Jones II, who has harnessed a total of 8 Directing Nominations and 2 wins; William Knowles who has received 5 nominations and one win; and Anderson Edwards & William F. Hubbard who have both been nominated and won once.

For the 2017 Helen Hayes Awards,  two men of color have been nominated for “Outstanding Musical Direction-HAYES”: Darius Smith for his work on JELLY’S LAST JAM at Signature Theatre, and Markus Williams for his work on THE CHRISTIANS at Theater J; and one man of color was nominated for “Outstanding Direction, Play-HELEN”: Psalmayene 24 for his work on WORD BECOMES FLESH at Theater Alliance.

Of the 30 nominees in the 6 directing categories, only 3 of those nominated were men of color: 10% MOC, 90% non-MOC (including white men, white womxn, and white Non-Binary folx). (Additional note: Non-womxn Non-POC directors, José Luis Arellano Garcia and Will Davis, both made history as the first Spanish-speaking director and Non-Binary Trans-Masculine director, respectively, to win the award at the 2016 Helen Hayes Awards. They both received a 2nd nomination for the 2017 Helen Hayes Awards.)

It’s clear that womxn of color have not fared as well as non-POC womxn nor men of color in Direction. But why? Why have womxn of color not been able to achieve the amount of recognition that their non-female, non-POC peers have? Perhaps opportunities aren’t as readily available for womxn of color, and therefore the chances of being nominated are much lower.

Looking at the 2016-2017 season, it’s clear opportunities are not given to womxn of color. 

Only 1 in every 6 DC professional theatre company gave an opportunity to womxn of color to direct this season. 

Of over 300 shows this season, 15 are directed by 13 womxn of color. 

Less than 5% of the productions this season were directed by womxn of color.

Those productions are: ************************************************************************************* 1st Stage - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom Directed by Deidra LaWan Starnes 

************************************************************************************* Ally Theatre Company - Think Before You Holla Directed by Taylor Reynolds

************************************************************************************* Arena Stage - Smart People Directed by Seema Sueko 

************************************************************************************* Avant Bard - The Gospel at Colonus Directed by Jennifer L. Nelson

************************************************************************************* Center Stage - Les Liaisons Dangereuses  Directed by Hana S. Sharif

************************************************************************************* Center Stage - The White Snake Directed by Natsu Onoda Power

************************************************************************************* GALA Hispanic Theatre - Seneca: Library Mouse Directed by Cecilia Cackley

************************************************************************************* Kennedy Center - Debbie Allen's Freeze Frame Directed by Debbie Allen

************************************************************************************* Live Garra Theatre - A Matter of Perspective Directed by Wanda Whiteside

************************************************************************************* Mosaic Theatre - Milk Like Sugar Directed by Jennifer L. Nelson

************************************************************************************* Mosaic Theatre - Charm Directed by Natsu Onoda Power

************************************************************************************* Mosaic Theatre - A Human Being Died that Night Directed by Logan Vaughn

************************************************************************************* Shakespeare Theatre Company - Macbeth Directed by Liesl Tommy

************************************************************************************* Theatre Alliance - brownsville song (b-side for tray) Directed by Paige Hernandez 

************************************************************************************* Theatre Alliance - Black Nativity Directed by Princess Mhoon

************************************************************************************* These thirteen successful, phenomenal womxn deserve our applause. They are an inspiration to all the womxn of color in our area who wish they could direct a professional theatre production, but simply don’t think it possible. Even those that know it is possible for them, it is a very nice sight to see someone representing for the black and brown girls. 

It’s important for the DC Professional Theatres to support the diversification of the community. Artistic Directors can help by picking plays by diverse playwrights and hiring diverse directors for those productions. Diverse directors will in turn hire diverse actors and designers. 

Providing opportunities for womxn of color to direct will bring forth a stronger community, and a wave of artistic resurgence. This goes without mentioning, inclusion of Transgender Womxn of Color in these theatre companies is specifically important. While it is sad that only 15 WOC had the opportunity to direct this season, it is further unfortunate that all of those womxn are not out trans womxn.

To all the black and brown girls: keep doing and improving your art. You are the present of DC theatre and you deserve to be heard.

Hopefully one day, many brilliant womxn of color could follow in the footsteps of Regina Taylor, break that barrier that prevents WOC directors from recognition, and win the esteemed award for our community once more.