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Judith Sloan

Part-time Faculty
jls9@nyu.edu
429 - 1 Wash Pl

Office Hours
Monday 2:00 TO 6:00

B.A., Theatre Studies, SUNY Empire State College, 1999
M.A., Documentary Theatre, SUNY Empire State College, 2002

Judith Sloan is an actress, oral historian, writer, and audio artist/radio producer whose work is informed by oral history and combines humor, pathos, and a love of the absurd. Her works include YO MISS!; Denial of the Fittest; Responding to Chaos; A Tattle Tale; Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America (Norton, 2003); and It Can Happen Here. She collaborated on a multimedia project about new immigrants and refugees with Warren Lehrer which won the Brendan Gill Prize. After premiering at the Queens Museum, the Crossing the BLVD exhibition of photographs and sound stations traveled to over 20 different museums and galleries throughout the United States from 2004 through 2013. Sloan has received numerous grants and awards for her work in theater and radio which focuses on voices often ignored by the mass media, including a 2022 New York State Council on the Arts Theater Commission; a 2017 Mellon Foundation Diversity Grant; a 2013 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Music and Sound; awards from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts; the Brendan Gill Prize 2004; the BAXten Artists Award 2005; the Third Coast International Audio Festival 2005, short doc competition; and first place in the 2008 and 2009 Missouri Review National Audio Competition. A frequent college guest lecturer on issues of diversity, human rights, and the arts, Sloan's work has been published by Second Story Press, W.W. Norton, and the New York Times. Her theater and radio works have been produced throughout the U.S. and abroad at venues including La Mama, The Public Theatre, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and The Smithsonian Institution, and on National Public Radio, WNYC, and listener-sponsored radio stations nationwide. She is co-founder, along with Warren Lehrer, of EarSay, a non-profit dedicated to documenting and portraying the lives of uncelebrated individuals, and she directs Cross-Cultural Dialogue through the Arts, a mentorship project creating collaborations between disparate communities and the workshop Transforming Trauma into Art with immigrant and refugee teenagers in Queens, New York.  

Performances, Productions, Exhibitions & Releases

2023

Nuyorican Poets Cafe: Refuge and Finding Home

Judith Sloan will host performances in New York City at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe: Refuge and Finding Home on May 6th and 20th.

2020

It Can Happen Here

Judith Sloan had a reading/performance on March 7 at the Queens Theater of the work-in-development of It Can Happen Here, a play with music written by Sloan.  

Teaching and Research Interests

theatre; solo performance; oral history; humor and social satire; immigration and the changing face of America; documentary arts: radio and multimedia  digital art on the web; community projects; trauma studies; dialogue across race  ethnicity  class and gender 

Recent News

Professor Judith Sloan has received 2017-2018 Artist Commissioning Program grant from the Queens Council on the Arts for her play “It Can Happen Here.” The ACP program supports Queens choreographers, playwrights, and composers by offering $10,000 towards the creation and production of a new, original work to be interpreted for dance, theater, or music.

On September 29, 2016, Professor Sloan performed and was interviewed by WNYC's Brian Lehrer in The Greene Space about Yo Miss!  

In October 2015, Sloan performed Crossing The BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in A New America at City Lore in New York, New York, for the 50th anniversary of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

Sloan was the keynote performer at two national conferences in October 2015, the National Biennial Conference on Trauma at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and the National Oral History Association Conference in Tampa, Florida. At both conferences, she performed excerpts of her one-woman show Yo Miss!

In June 2015, Sloan was a featured artist at the Apollo Theater and, in March 2016, in the Southbank Centre London’s Women of the World Festival in London, UK.  

Sloan received a 2015 Queens Council on the Arts Individual Artist grant to create a new piece focused on gentrification and housing for her collaborative work with Frank London and Warren Lehrer, 1001 Voices: A Symphony for a New America. She was also the recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts grant through EarSay for EarSay Youth Voices, Cross-Cultural Dialogue Through the Arts, an immigrant youth theater, radio, and multi-media project that she undertook in collaboration with the International High School at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York.

She received a short residency grant from the Stonington Opera House in Stonington, Maine to begin work on a new project inspired by gathering stories from people in various parts of Maine in the summer of 2015 working title: “Who Belongs?” She was also the recipient of a Network of Ensemble Theatre travel grant to explore partnerships in theatre and literacy with Ellsworth Adult Education in Ellsworth, Maine.

In 2016, she received funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs to support public programming including Yo Miss! and EarSay Youth programs.

Sloan hosted a dialogue with four Gallatin graduate alums called Artists as Global Citizens which took place in March 2016. Her Gallatin Arts Workshop “Talk to Me” launched a live radio show in The Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts in May 2016.

In March 2016, Sloan's Yo Miss! premiered in full at La MaMa in New York, New York.