This symposium will bring together scholars and artists to evaluate, interrogate, and celebrate the achievements of the largest arts funding project in the history of the United States, Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. The experiment that was the WPA provides us with an historical moment in which the work of the artist was valued as central to the life of a healthy society.

The two-day symposium will explore the fundamental issues affecting the arts in times of crisis: censorship, race as a defining characteristic of American national identity, the value of arts funding, and memory in cultural production. It is our hope that by exploring the WPA we will encourage innovative thinking about arts funding in the United States and foster a national dialogue on cultural work.

Betsy Cooper (Associate Professor of Dance, UW) is chair of the Dance Department, and has published articles on dance in Dance Research Journal and The International Dictionary of Modern Dance. She will evaluate the impact of the Federal Dance Project upon Modern American Dance.

Susan Duffy (Professor in Liberal Studies California Polytechnic State University) has published four books, including American Labor on Stage: Dramatic Interpretations of the Steel and Textile Industries in the 1930s and The Political Left in the American Theatre of the 1930s: A Bibliographic Sourcebook. She has written several important articles about Living Newspaper productions.

Mark Fearnow (Professor of Theatre, Hanover College). A distinguished scholar, Dr. Fearnow is the author of numerous articles and books on 1930s American Theatre including The American Stage and the Great Depression (1997).

Rena Fraden (Associate Dean of the College and Professor of English, Pomona College) has been central to a discussion of African-American involvement in the Federal Theatre Project. In particular, her text Blue Prints for a Black Federal Theater, 1935-1939 (1994) has inspired scholarly debate on the “Negro Units” of the Project.

Ira Levine (Dean, Faculty of Communication and Design, Ryerson University). A scholar with nearly 20 years of experience as an arts and university administrator, Dr. Levine’s text Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre is central to discussion of the role of politics in the WPA.

Tina Redd (Assistant Professor of English, Portland Community College) has done extensive research on the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project, which resulted in her dissertation The Struggle for Administrative and Artistic Control of the Federal Theatre Negro Units . She has published several articles on the Federal Theatre Project, and is currently researching the work of the African-American playwright Hughes Allison.

Sonnet Retman (Assistant Professor of African-American Studies, UW) is currently working on a manuscript entitled "How Was It We Were Caught?": Race, Nation and the Real in 1930s Documentary and Satire, which includes a case study chapter on the taxonomies of race and region in the Federal Writers' Project's Florida guidebook (1939).

Jochen Wierich (Curator, Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art) is an expert on the Federal Arts Projects, with a particular interest in the work of the painters of the Federal Art Project. He is currently assembling a catalogue of WPA art in the Northwest.

Barry Witham (Professor, School of Drama, UW). An expert in 1930s theatre and the Federal Theatre Project, Witham has published numerous books and articles on the subject, including The Federal Theatre Project, A Case Study (2003) and Uncle Sam Presents: A Memoir of the Federal Theatre (1982), written with Tony Buttitta. His keynote speech will address the principal concepts behind the symposium: evaluating, interrogating, and celebrating the WPA experiment.

Sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the School of Drama, and the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington.