Event time:
Wednesday, March 7, 2018 - 11:45am to 1:15pm
Location:
HGS 105
Event description:
Critical Encounters, Conversations in American Studies presents: William Glasspiegel.
Visualizing Chicago Footwork is a talk and screening by documentarian and scholar Wills Glasspiegel. Wills will discuss his use of photography and filmmaking
with dancers as a form of research and collaboration, screening several short films related to the critical methodology shaping his PhD dissertation, “Geometry of a
Ghost: Chicago Footwork 1985- Present,” in African American and American Studies at Yale. Wills will also premier a short film, I am the Queen, which highlights the history of women in the world of Chicago footwork.
Wills Glasspiegel is a documentarian, radio journalist and visual artist writing about the cultural history of Chicago footwork music and dance for his dissertation in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Wills has produced radio segments for NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition, focusing on a range of topics from women in Nollywood to Detroit techno. He was recognized as a co-recipient of a Peabody Award in 2014 for his contributions to the radio program Afrop op Worldwide. Musical albums by international and local Chicago artists have featured Wills’ photography and collages as cover art, and museums and galleries including MANA Contemporary and the Minneapolis Institute of Art have exhibited his films. Wills received his undergraduate degree in English from Yale, and holds a master’s degree in Media, Culture and Communications from New York University. In 2017, he co-founded Open the Circle, a nonprofit organization devoted to channeling financial resources into marginalized communities through the arts.
Wills received the Crossing Boundaries Arts Prize from the University of Chicago in 2015, and was recognized among Fader Magazine’s “cultural organizers of the year” in 2016 for his work with The Era Footwork Crew.