Family Matters

ACTORS & ARTISTS

Bruce Altman’s numerous film and television credits include Glengarry Glen Ross, Matchstick Men, Arbitrage, Touched with Fire, the Peabody Award-winning Nothing Sacred, The Sopranos, Blue Bloods, Modern Family, Mr. Robot, Madoff, Fifty Shades Darker, Ozark, Chicago P.D., Fifty Shades Freed, Orange Is the New Black, The Sound of Silence, NOS4A2, City on a Hill, and HBO’s Emmy Award-winning films Recount and Game Change. His extensive theater career includes productions at Yale Rep, Long Wharf, the American Conservatory Theater, and the Theater for the New City. Altman will appear in the forthcoming films Chemical Hearts and Kingfish.

John Cheever (1912 - 1982) was the author of four novels, a novella, and more than 100 short stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award, and The Stories of John Cheever was awarded both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Cheever was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Edward MacDowell Medal, and the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among numerous honors.

Hope Davis has appeared in the films About Schmidt; American Splendor; Synecdoche, New York; Captain America: Civil War; and Rebel in the Rye, among others. On television, Davis’s credits include In Treatment, The Newsroom, The Special Relationship, Allegiance, American Crime, and Wayward Pines, and recent recurring roles in the series For the People and Strange Angel. Her theater credits include Ivanov, Two Shakespearean Actors, Spinning Into Butter, Food Chain, Measure for Measure, God of Carnage, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award, and The Red Barn. She will appear in the forthcoming miniseries Your Honor.

Jennifer Ikeda’s stage appearances, both on and off-Broadway, include As You Like It, Seascape, Top Girls, Titus Andronicus at the Public Theater, Vietgone, Linda at City Center, and most recently, Today Is My Birthday at New Ohio Theatre. She has also been featured in the television series Smash, Blindspot, Elementary, Madam Secretary, Maniac, and Tell Me a Story, and the short films 80/20, Advantageous, Swing, and The Root of Happiness, among others. Ikeda has narrated dozens of audiobooks, most recently for the young adult fantasy series A Court of Thornsand Roses and All Souls, and is a two-time Audie Award winner.

Viet Thanh Nguyen received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for his debut novel The Sympathizer. Additional works include the short story collection The Refugees and the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. His writing has appeared in Time, The Guardian, and The Atlantic, among other publications. Nguyen is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and serves as the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Kaneza Schaal is a New York City-based theater artist. She has worked on stage with Elevator Repair Service, The Wooster Group, Richard Maxwell/New York City Players, and New York City Opera. This work brought her to venues including Centre Pompidou, Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh, The Whitney Museum, BAM, and MoMA. On screen, she recently appeared in the film The Indiscernables. Schaal directed Go Forth, which premiered at Performance Space 122’s COIL Festival, and Jack &, a multimedia performance piece she created in collaboration with Cornell Alston, co-commissioned by PICA, Walker Arts Center, REDCAT, On The Boards, and Center for Contemporary Art Cincinnati. Her latest work, Cartography, was workshopped through New Victory Theater Lab, NYU Abu Dhabi, and premiered at The Kennedy Center in January 2019. For her performance in Petra at The Performance Space, Schaal was nominated for a 2018 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer.

Lauren Schenkman's fiction has been published in The Hudson Review, Granta, TED Ideas, and The Kenyon Review, and she was formerly a reporter and editor at Science magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Schenkman recently spent nine months in Nicaragua on a Fulbright grant, researching a novel.

Maulik Pancholy is best known for his roles on the award-winning NBC comedy 30 Rock and on Showtime’s Weeds. Additional television credits include Whitney, Web Therapy, The Comeback, The Good Wife, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, The Sopranos, and the animated series Sanjay & Craig and Phineas & Ferb. He currently appears in Star Trek: Discovery. His film credits include 27 Dresses, Hitch, and Friends with Money, among others. He recently starred in It’s Only A Play on Broadway and has performed at The New Group, Culture Project, Samuel Beckett Theatre, and the Summer Play Festival at the Public Theatre. Pancholy appeared at the Williamstown Theatre Festival this past summer in Bess Whol’s Grand Horizons; the show will open in December at Second Stage Theater.

Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-born poet and literary translator. She is the recipient of the 2014 PEN/Heim Award, 2013 Midwest Book Award, and 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize. Her works include the poetry collections Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, Cómo Escribir una Canción de Amor, and The Outsider, and a modern translation of The Conference of the Birds by the 12th century Iranian mystic poet Attar, and its subsequent stage adaptation, which premiered in 2018 at the Ubuntu Theater in California. Wolpé has taught poetry and literary translation at UCLA, where she also served as the Inaugural Author in Residence in 2018.