SARATOGA SPRINGS - Skidmore College will bestow honorary degrees upon award-winning director, playwright, and activist-in-art Moisäs Kaufman and noted novelist, literary scholar, and philosopher Charles Johnson during the College’s 111th Commencement Exercises on Saturday, May 21, at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs.
Skidmore will honor Kaufman for his contributions to theater and to international conversa-tions about social justice. Kaufman is the founder and artistic director of the Tectonic Theater Pro-ject, a company that creates new plays and reimagines existing scripts using the company’s trade-marked theater-making method, Moment Work™, and through a rigorous process of research and collaboration in a laboratory environment. Kaufman was awarded the 2015 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, among others.
The author of 26 books and arguably one of the most important African American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries, Johnson’s impactful career includes work as a short-story writer, phi-losopher, cartoonists, and illustrator, author of children’s literature, and screenplay and teleplay writer. A MacArthur fellow, Johnson is an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Lit-erature winner and a National Book award winner for his novel “Middle Passage‚ (1990), which chronicles the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and debuted as a play adaptation at Chicago’s Lifeline Theater in 2020.
Lisa Grady-Willis, Teaching Professor and Associate Director of the Intergroup Relations Program, as well as affiliate faculty member in Black Studies, has been selected as the Skidmore Faculty Commencement Speaker. An educator, administrator, and artist, her work in intergroup relations is informed by a background in Africana Studies and Arts for Social Change.
Skidmore College President Marc Conner, Skidmore Board of Trustees Chair Nancy W. Hamilton ’77, Alumni Association President Robert F. Resnick ’88, and Class of 2022 President Mark Alcantara will join Kaufman, Johnson, and Grady-Willis in offering their congratulations to the graduating class.
