Check out the panelists coming to Thacher for Friday evening’s discussion:
WHITNEY DOW
Whitney Dow is an award-winning filmmaker whose directing credits include Two Towns of Jasper, I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown vs Board of Education, Unfinished Country, and When the Drum is Beating. His work been screened and broadcast all over the world and received numerous honors including the Peabody, a Columbia DuPont, Gotham, and Beacon awards. Dow’s producing credits include Freedom Summer, Banished, and The Undocumented, all directed by Marco Williams; and Toots, directed by Kristi Jacobson.
MELISSA ETHERIDGE (P ’15)
Melissa Etheridge is one of rock music’s great female icons. Her critically-acclaimed eponymous debut album was certified double-platinum. Etheridge’s popularity built around such memorable songs as “Bring Me Some Water,” “No Souvenirs” and “Ain’t It Heavy” for which she won her first Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal. Etheridge hit her commercial and artistic stride with her fourth album, Yes I Am featuring the massive hits “I’m the Only One” and “Come to My Window,” a searing song of longing that brought her a second Grammy. The six times platinum album spent more than two and a half years on the album chart. Etheridge is also an Oscar winner for Best Original Song in 2007. In 2011 Melissa made her Broadway debut as St. Jimmy in Green Day’s rock opera, American Idiot, where she replaced Billie Joe Armstrong for one week, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her most recent album, 4th Street Feeling was released in 2012. When Melissa is not on tour, she records her syndicated Melissa Etheridge Radio Show.
JAMES NEWTON HOWARD (CdeP 1969, P ’12, ’16)
James Newton Howard is an American composer best known for his scores to motion pictures. He is one of the most popular and respected composers for cinema, having scored over 100 films. The recipient of eight Academy Award nominations, some of Howard’s best known film scores include The Prince of Tides, The Fugitive, Dinosaur, The Village, King Kong, Batman Begins (with Hans Zimmer), I Am Legend, The Dark Knight (also with Zimmer), and, most recently Green Lantern, The Hunger Games, Snow White and the Huntsman, and The Bourne Legacy. He is known for his frequent collaborations with director M. Night Shyamalan, having scored all of his films since The Sixth Sense.
SULEIKA JAOUAD
Suleika Jaouad is an Arab-American journalist, blogger, women’s health advocate and cancer survivor. She is the author of the Emmy Award-winning New York Times series “Life, Interrupted”. Suleika’s career aspirations as a foreign correspondent were cut short when, at age 22, less than a year after graduating from Princeton with highest honors, she was diagnosed with leukemia. But cancer didn’t stop her from pursuing her dreams to become a writer. At age 23, in the Spring of 2012, she became one of the youngest New York Times journalists, and began writing her column from the bone marrow transplant unit at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
MALIKA NDLOVU
Malika Lueen Ndlovu is a Durban-born performer-word-weaver-story-lover, mother of four children and several multi-media productions. Her words and visions have flown far from the nest, making their appearances on pages and stages in Austria, USA, UK, Holland, Ireland, Germany and the Philippines. She is constantly nourished by collaboration with other artists and motivated by her personal mantra ‘healing through creativity.’
BILL PAXTON (P ‘12,’16)
Bill Paxton is an American actor and film director. He gained popularity after starring roles in the films Apollo 13, Weird Science, Twister, Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic. Paxton starred in the HBO series Big Love and was nominated for an Emmy Award for the miniseries Hatfields & McCoys. Paxton has also directed a number of short films, including Fish Heads, which aired during Saturday Night Live’s 1980-1981 season; he also directed the feature films Frailty and The Greatest Game Ever Played. Most recently, Bill teamed up with local Ojai artist Mick Reinman to present a new graphic novel, Seven Holes for Air.
SARA THACHER (CdeP 2000)
Sara Thacher designs and produces interactive stories and adventures that leap between physical and digital platforms. Coming from a studio art background, she brings her aesthetic sense to bear in transmedia experiences that encircle participants in the story letting them inhabit the narrative. Sara has served as creative producer on a diverse range of projects from the recent Disney Imagineering alternate reality game, The Optimist, to indie projects like Nonchalance’s The Jejune Institute. She has also contributed her experience design expertise to projects for clients including: Greenpeace, musician Thomas Dolby, the San Francisco Exploratorium, the Zero1 Art and Technology Biennial, the Providence Public Library, and the Go Game.
J.B. WHITE (P ’01, ’03, ’06), Moderator
J.B. WHITE (center, left) has been a story teller most of his life, as an actor, songwriter, singer and screenwriter. He reveres popular art, believing all great stories that endure–in theater, literature, music, the visual arts–do so because of their power to touch and inspire the most people possible. That’s why he writes and performs pop songs, and writes and produces television entertainment.