Date: Friday, January 28, 2011
Time: 8pm
Venue: Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Celeste Bartos Forum (Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788)
Ticket: $15
About the featured artists
REZA ASLAN is an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, whose first book, No god but God was an international bestseller. Aslan is Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, a mini-motion picture and media company focused on entertainment about the Greater Middle East and its Diaspora communities. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. His latest book is Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization.
SALMAN AHMAD is a Pakistani rock star whose band Junoon has sold over 25 million albums. A medical doctor by training, Salman currently travels the globe as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, spreading a message of harmony and reconciliation between the West and the Muslim world. He currently teaches a course on Muslim music and poetry at the City University of New York. His latest book is Rock & Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star’s Revolution.
FABRICE HADJADJ is a philosophy teacher and a playwright who writes for the Figaro littéraire and Art Press. He published several non fiction books, including La Profondeur des sexes. Pour une mystique de la chair (The depth of the sexes. In favor of a mystic of flesh); La Foi des démons ou l’athéisme dépassé (The demons’ faith: obsolete atheism). His most recent book is Le Paradis à la porte. Essai sur une joie qui dérange.
ALICIA JO RABINS is a poet, composer, and classically trained violinist. Her poems have been published in Ploughshares, The Boston Review, 6 x 6, Court Green, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, and Horse Poems. As a violinist, singer, and composer, Rabins tours internationally; her most recent release is “Girls in Trouble,” is an art-pop song cycle about women in the Old Testament.
SHIRIN NESHAT is an internationally acclaimed photographer, videographer, and filmmaker who first came to prominence in the mid-1990s when she exhibited her series the Women of Allah. Since then, the Iranian-born artist has continued to explore difficult subjects: the boundaries between East and West, men and women, the sacred and the profane, exile and belonging.
DAMIEN POISBLAUD came to Gregorian chant as early as 1980 and has been singing in a choir on a regular basis for more than 15 years. His passion for medieval art and thought, which he studied along with philosophy and theology, combined with his opening to different kinds of traditional music from over the world, gradually led him to a completely renewed approach of his traditional church repertoire. He created the Choeur Grégorien de Méditerranée.
