Visit to an Extinct City

Visit to an Extinct City, a theater piece inspired by Teresa Carson’s poems about Ostia Antica, explores how visiting an ancient archaeological site collapses the boundaries between different times, allowing the visitor to feel connected to the remote past, recent past, present, and future.

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Project Dates

• October 8-13 residency at the John Sims Studio in Sarasota, Florida

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Participating Artists

Gretchen Berg is a Maine-based performance artist/educator and poet. She has taught at Bowdoin College, Bates College and the Harvard Graduate School of Education and has created hundreds of collaborative performances with students and teachers in public schools. After twenty years of performing original material with Portland’s modern dance company Berg, Jones & Sarvis, Gretchen continues to focus on creating new physical theater performances and writing poetry. Her first poetry collection is So Far (Moon Pie Press 2022).

 

Teresa Carson, founder and CEO of Argument of Time, Inc., is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her latest collection, Re [Moved] [Used] [Covered, was published by Deerbrook Editions in June 2025. She was the co-founder and poetry curator of Art in Common Places (2020–24), which put art in public places such as laundromats and libraries so that everyone in the Sarasota County community could experience it in their daily lives. She holds an MFA in Poetry and an MFA in Theatre, both from Sarah Lawrence College.

 

Dan Hurlin’s work has been presented at multiple venues both nationally and internationally. He received a 1990 Village Voice Obie award for his solo adaptation of Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, and in 1998 he was nominated for an American Theater Wing Design award for his set design for his music theater piece The Shoulder. His suite of puppet pieces, Everyday Uses for Sight: Nos. 3 and 7 (2000), earned him a 2001 New York Dance and Performance award (also known as a Bessie), and his piece Hiroshima Maiden was given an Obie award for music by Robert Een and received a UNIMA-USA Citation of Excellence. Other works include Disfarmer (2009), premiered at St. Ann’s Warehouse, and Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed (2016), premiered at Bard Summerscape Festival. His visual artwork includes a large gallery installation called Motel, which was exhibited at 1056 Gallery in the Catskills (2022); La Mama Galleria, New York (2023); the Fine Art Building, Chicago (2023); and the Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, Connecticut (2026).  Most recently he was commissioned by Bådteatret in Copenhagen to design and develop an adaptation of Thoreau’s Walden and is currently working on a new theater project entitled Bismarck. Dan has received fellowships in choreography from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and fellowships in theater from the Alpert Foundation and USA Artists. In 2014 he won the Jesse Howard Jr. Rome Prize in visual art. He directed the puppet lab at St. Ann’s for nine years, was on the board of directors at MacDowell for twenty-three years, and until his retirement in 2021 was the director of the graduate program in theater at Sarah Lawrence College, where he taught theater making, solo performance, dance composition, and puppetry.

 

Paola Irún has had a twenty-five-year career in theater as a director, playwright, actress, and teacher. She holds a degree in communication from UCA in Paraguay and an MFA in multidisciplinary theater from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, which she earned as a Fulbright Scholar. She lived in New York for eight years, working as a theater artist. Paola is the founding creator of the Paraguayan experimental projects Enborrador: Teatro En Construcción and Enborrador Emergente, which involve students and artists trained in the enborrador method. She won the Arturo Alsina Award for best lead actress in 2005 and received a theater commendation as part of the Oscar Trinidad Grand Prize in 2006 for her work in the field. Since 2019, Paola has won eight Edda Awards in Paraguay, including two for best director, two for best drama, two for best play of the year, one for best actress, and one for best socially conscious play. She was recognized in the “Latin American Women Creators” segment of the 2021 Santiago a Mil International Theater Festival for her play Nombre. Currently, she is immersed in the world of music and the local live music scene, working with various rock-and-roll bands and musical artists across different genres on the conceptualization, scripting, and artistic direction of concerts and musical shows.

 

Thomas Lebioda is a music producer, audio engineer, songwriter, recording and touring musician, and educator. He specializes in analogue music production, audio research, and high-quality record making and has produced, engineered, or been musically involved with more than seventy albums to date. As the owner of the Epiphany Recording Studios, an all-analogue recording facility in New York City, he passionately fosters a network of skilled musicians, producers, engineers, and other music professionals across the globe. His record label Studio III Recordings partners with studios, vinyl record manufacturers, and distributors in North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe. His work is dedicated to the preservation of analogue production and manufacturing methods alongside cutting-edge contemporary digital audio technologies. Thomas grew up in Hamburg, Germany, and has a Polish immigrant background. He studied bass guitar and composition at the Hamburg College of Music and Theatre before moving to Sheffield, England, where he operated a recording studio and record label for almost two decades. As a live performer, mostly on bass guitar and vocals, Thomas has toured with multiple international bands and projects, notably Frogbelly and Symphony, Craig Sunders (also known as Kid Decker), Philipp Caspar Frederick, Dirty Cosmos, Liz Hanley, and Daniele Del Monaco.

 

Vinny Mraz is a multidisciplinary theater maker based in New York City. He earned an MFA in theater at Sarah Lawrence College, and his work has been seen at En Garde Arts, the Vineyard Theater, Golden Thread Productions, HERE Arts, La Mama, CoLab Theater Group, New Ohio, Object Movement Festival, the Tank, Dixon Place, Andy’s Summer Playhouse, Little Theater, and the Dallas Solo Festival.  Along with his frequent collaborator, Chris Carcione, he received the Dean’s Research Award from Towson University to study the Federal Theater Project and then create a multimedia performance. Vinny recently directed a production of Sister Act! The Musical with the women of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and worked with Jared Mezzochi and Sona Tatoyan on the world premiere of Azad (The Rabbit and the Wolf). He currently works as a teaching artist with Rehabilitation Through the Arts and is a clinical assistant professor of theater at Manhattanville University.

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