Community Engagement

Our Community Conversations series offers our patrons the opportunity to engage with and explore our shows beyond our staged performance through post-show discussions moderated by our Artistic Director, Jenny Wales and featuring the artistic teams alongside community leaders and UVA faculty members and experts. Note: A ticket to the performance is required to attend our post-show discussions.

The Heart Sellers

• Saturday, July 12 at 7:30 PM – Post-show discussion featuring cast and creative team members, Associate Director of Global Recruitment at Darden Jannatul Pramanik; moderated by Professor Sylvia Chong.
• Thursday, July 17 at 7:30 PM – Post-show discussion featuring cast and creative team members, School of Law Professor Kevin Cope, Department of Music Professor Bonnie Gordon; moderated by Professor Shilpa Davé.

Panelists & Moderators

Sylvia Chong, Associate Professor of English and American Studies, Director of Minor in Asian Pacific American Studies
Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Program in American Studies. Her research focuses on film and media representations of Asians and Asian Americans, in particular the Southeast Asian refugee diaspora in the wake of the Vietnam War. She is the author of The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Duke, 2012), which investigates the social and political uses of visual mass media representations of the Vietnam War in the U.S., and co-editor of (Re)Collecting the Vietnam War, a special issue of the Asian American Literary Review (Fall 2015) focused on Southeast Asian / American artistic responses to the 40th anniversary of the Vietnam War. She is currently working on a history of cinematic yellowface performance in U.S. cinema.

Kevin Cope, Associate Professor of Law & Director, Immigration, Migration and Human Rights Program
Kevin Cope’s research uses empirical, comparative, and formal theoretical methods to explore issues related to law and political economy. Substantively, he is interested in political-legal decision-making, immigration, human and civil rights, and judicial ideology. Cope is a fellow of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies and a co-editor of the inaugural Oxford University Handbook on Comparative Immigration Law. He has served as a visiting professor at the Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II).

Shilpa Dave, Associate Professor of Media Studies and American Studies and Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia
Professor Davé researches and teaches about representations of race and gender in media and popular culture, American cultural narratives of immigration and border crossings, comparative American studies including Asian American and South Asian American Studies, and film, television, and literary studies. She has published on topics ranging from the intersections of sound and race such as “Apu’s Brown Voice: Cultural Inflection and South Asian Accents,” to the Spelling Bee to teaching Asian American studies to comic series such as Ms. Marvel and Spider-Man India.

Bonnie Gordon, Department of Music Professor
A music historian who works across disciplines and creative practices Bonnie Gordon has published widely on Early Modern music and gender and Early American Sound. Her latest book Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano and other strange sounds was published in 2023.  Monteverdi’s Unruly Women appeared in 2004 and The Courtesans Arts; a co-edited essay collection appeared in 2006.  She is currently working on a new book on sound in Early America. A 2024 Shannon fellow at UVa, she  is a founding faculty member of the Equity Center at UVa and a co-director of the Sound Justice lab and a co-founder of C-Ville Tulips.

Sharath Patel, Sound Designer
Sharath was raised between Appalachia and India while spending the following years studying across Europe and New England. Before arriving in the Pacific Northwest, he spent nearly a decade as a lead sound designer in New York City. Sharath recently completed a year long Visiting Assistant Professorship at Reed College and co-led the Light and Sound Training Program in Vietnam in conjunction with the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Consulate, and World Learning Inc. He has previously served as a lead designer, guest artist, instructor, or lecturer at Yale, Fordham, Columbia, Willamette, Ohio, Portland State, and Butler Universities.

Jannatul Pramanik, Associate Director of Global Recruitment at Darden
Jannatul (she/her) was born in Bangladesh & has lived in Virginia her whole life, now calling Charlottesville home for more than a decade. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Spanish Literature and Culture and her Master of Public Health with Concentration of Health Policy, Law & Ethics at the University of Virginia. Professionally, Jannatul currently works at the Darden School of Business. Prior to Darden, she was at Multicultural Student Services in Student Affairs at UVA where she worked specifically to support students of diverse marginalized backgrounds and provided University wide social justice educational opportunities. In her free time, Jannatul is a foodie, traveler & professional photographer. She also enjoys spending time with her pets, Senna (her cat) & Maru (her husky pup)!

Our Spotlight on Service program provides complimentary tickets to area nonprofits, allowing us to both acknowledge the incredible work of our partners and engage with new and diverse communities by distributing over 200 tickets each year to individuals in our community who otherwise would not attend.

If you are an area nonprofit interested in learning more about our Spotlight on Service program, please reach out to Katie Kenny, kak6zb@virginia.edu.

In 2024, VTF engaged with 35 different local organizations through Spotlight on Service and a total of 202 tickets were distributed to 14 area nonprofits, including: International Rescue Committee, Bennet’s Village, Cville Tulips, Jefferson Area Board of Aging, and Cultivate Charlottesville.

Quotes from participating organizations:

“Thank you for always inviting us to see these shows! It is not something we normally would get the chance to do but every time we’ve gone through Virginia Theatre Festival it has been a magical experience. We are so grateful for the opportunity for our volunteers and participants have to see the show and how powerful the theatre is.”

“The actors were fabulous, the dancing, the singing and the acting overall. Thank you again for your generosity with LNE and in the community!”

Thank you to the UVA Arts Council for their support of VTF’s Community Engagement efforts.