Learning from Performers

A student and artist Rob Shetterly discuss a portrait

The mission at the heart of the Learning from Performers program is that creativity and discovery are nurtured by engagement. To that end, the LFP visiting artist director Alicia Anstead, in conjunction with OFA director and many student co-producers, curates immersive programs that put students and professional artists in the room together in creative, exciting, intellectual exchanges.

Under the OFA directorship of Myra Mayman, Learning from Performers was the brainchild of Jerold Kayden ’75, now the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design. Kayden and Mayman worked together to establish the program in 1975, and Kayden ran it during its inaugural year, establishing the template for what would become a thriving enterprise that continues to this day. It was then fostered for many years by the former manager Tom Lee.

LFP hosts artists and artist ensembles annually in music, dance, theater, film, TV, visual arts and inter-disciplinary arts. These artists lead workshops, residencies, classes, seminars, offer coachings  and discussions and also engage in longer-term residencies that sometimes culminate in performances, exhibitions and new works. In recent years, LFP programs have increasingly and more deeply involved students, faculty and FAS curricular courses and other Harvard departments such as the Mignone Center for Career Success, JFK School of Government, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, the Department of Music, the Graduate School of Education, the Office of Culture and Community, the Harvard Ed Portal, Harvard iLabs, Harvard Business School and more.

Highlights from the 2024-2025 season include

  • Creative Career Conference speakers Kevin Lin '12, Juila Riew '22, James Caven '22, Veronica Leahy '23, Abraham E.S. Rebollo-Truijillo '20, Gabby Anderson '26. Read the Harvard Gazette story.
  • Development residency of The Human Comedy with Jack Viertel '71, Sammi Cannold EDM '16, Sam Willmott, Ian Chan '23 and 50 Harvard students.
  • ArtsBites with Phil Chan (Final Bow for Yellowface); Diane Paulus and Karina Cowperthwaite (American Repertory Theater); John Cariani (Almost, Maine); Professor Ibram X Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist); Sam Wu '17 and Elias Miller '16 (classical music)
  • OFA Ceramics Program residency with Roberto Lugo. Read the Harvard Gazette story.
  • Community Soundscape Hour, an improvisational music, movement and sound experience, with Jordan Clark (Harvard University Native American Program), DeShaun Gordon-King (flute, chimes, bowl), Toussaint Miller '25 (trumpet), Mya Johnson '25 (breakers), Salome Agbaroji '27 (spoken word), Carolyn Hao '26 (vocals) and Shrinivas Acharya (tabla).
  • Seeing Each Other: A Conversation between the Harvard Foundation Portraiture Project and American Who Tell the Truth, featuring Robert Shetterly '69 (Americans Who Tell the Truth), Stephen Coit '71 (Harvard Portraitist), with Brenda Tindal (Chief Campus Curator). Read the Harvard Gazette story.
  • William Cheung, composer, with Harvard Music Department.
  • Hispanic Heritage Month with Fuerza Latina guest artists from the multimedia company NTERTAIN.
  • OFA Dance Program student outings: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Graveyards and Gardens with Vanessa Goodman and Caroline Shaw

Highlights from the 2023-2024 season include

  • With the OFA theater program and Mignone Center for Career Success, hosted a screening and discussion of the Hulu streaming series The Other Black Girl, featuring members of the creative team Jordan Reddout ’10, Gus Hickey ’11, Adam Fishbach ’06 and Rashida Jones ’97.
  • With the student theater group BlackCAST, hosted playwright aziza barnes (BLKS) in covnersation with students, the creative team for the Harvard production of BLKS.
  • Produced Into the Wild, a drag show featuring Harvard students and affiliates, emceed by environmental activist drag queen Pattie Gonia with local Boston drag queen Lilly Rose Valore. Find out about Pattie Gonia's collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma '76
  • With Harvard College Opera, produced a two-day artist residency with opera star Lucas Meachem.
  • Hosted two undergraduate student luncheons with Norton Lecture Series speaker and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer).

Highlights from the 2022-2023 season include

  • CompFest (Harvard Student Composers Festival) visiting artists including Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway playwright and composer Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop), bassist and composer Linda May Han Oh and pianist and composer Vijay Iyer. Read the Harvard Gazette story.
  • John Cariani, the playwright (Almost, Maine) and Outer Critics Circle- and Emmy Award-winning actor (Caroline, or Change, The Band's Visit, Something Rotten!), offered an acting workshop, coachings for students, sat in on a rehearsal and met with the cerative team of a Hyperion Shakespeare Company production of Something Rotten!
  • ArtsBites luncheons with students and Hamilton actor Ashley LaLonde, jazz pianist and composer Anthony Davis, jazz vocalist Carmen Lundy, drag king Dr. Wang Newton, Paul Taylor Dance Company dancer Madelyn Ho (with Dance), contemporary dancer and co-founder of Ballet-X Christine Cox (with Dance), theatrical director Steve Broadnax, playwright and composer Michael R. Jackson, actor and playwright John Cariani.

Highlights from the 2021-2022 season include

  • ArtsBites conversations with best-selling YA novelist Angeline Boulley (Firekeeper's Daughter), in partnership with Harvard Native American Program; international mezzo-soprano opera star J'Nai Bridges, in partnership with Harvard College Opera; playwright Jocelyn Bioh (School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play), in partnership with Harvard BlackCAST; playwright and actor John Cariani (Almost, Maine), in partnership with Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club.
  • Learning from Performers conversations with Joey and Faith Soloway (collaborators on the TV series Transparent), in collaboration with the BGLTQ Office of Student Life; composer Matthew Aucoin '12 and soprano Erin Morley, in partnership with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and Harvard Music Department.
  • Off Camera Series with Nicky Weistock '91 with actor Eduardo Franco (Booksmart); actor and singer Tika Sumpter (The Haves and the Have Nots).
  • Entrepreneurship in Creative Careers Wintersession program with Jim Augustine '01, COO of Zuckerberg Media and Resident Artist in Drama at the OFA First-Year Arts Program.
  • Inclusions, a public art installation by students, in partnership with  Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science, the OFA Ceramics Program, the Presidential Initiative on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, housed at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and The Monument Project, as well as Inclusions: Envisioning Justice on Harvard's Campus, a public forum with the installation creators and Professor Tracy K. Smith and moderator Professor Stephen Gray.
  • 36th annual Cultural Rhythms Artist of the Year ceremony with Lady Gaga, in support of the Harvard Foundation.
  • Harvard Student Composers Festival – CompFest – with Harvard College student musicians, salsa icon Rubén Blades LL.M. '85, composer Chaya Czernowin, composers Kris Davis and Stew Stewart, featuring journalist Ed Yong (The Atlantic).

Highlights from the 2020-2021 season include 

  • Off Camera series with Nicky Weinstock: Jameela Jamil, Ben Schwartz, Orlando Bloom; arts administrator Aaron Dworkin, choreographer Claudia Schreier '08; Harvard Jazz Band artists Cécile McLorin Salvant, Camille Thurston, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Ingrid Jesen,  Henry Threadgill, Gerald Clayton, Luis Perdoma; theater artists Michael R. Jackson, Lydia Diamond, Paul Oakley Stovall, Tiffany Mellard, Bill Rauch, Lynn Nottage; fashion artist: Chromat founder Becca McCharen-Tran; Ceramics Program artists Fabio J. Fernandez, Roberto Lugo, Rebecca Hutchinson, Ruth Easterbrook, Paul Andrew Wandless, Syd Carpenter, Shawanda Corbett, Sanam Emami, Salvador Jiménez Flores, Donté K. Hayes; opera singers Lawrence Brownlee and Morris Robinson; AfroFlow Yoga founders Jeff and Leslie Salmon Jones; ARTS FIRST Festival artists: Yo-Yo Ma, Mira Nair, Peter Sellars, John Lithgow, Tracy K. Smith, Margaret Atwood, Tonya M. Foster.
  • Harvard Student Composers Festival – CompFest – featuring original works by more than 30 students and conversations with visiting artists composer Tania León, sax player and composer Joshua Redman '91, composer Vijay Iyer, composer Yvette Janine Jackson and composer and percussionist Terri Lyne Carrington, and young alumni composers Phillip Golub ‘16, Zoe Sarnak ‘09, Sam Wu ‘17
  • a conversation and workshop, in partnership with Harvard College Opera, with tenor Lawrence Brownlee

Highlights from the 2019-2020 season include

  • a conversation and performance with Mamma Mia! Broadway star Mary Callanan
  • a residency with actor BD Wong
  • a workshop and conversation with Broadway music directors Isaac Alter '16, Cynthia Meng '15 and Madeline Smith '14
  • a conversation and workshop with actor and director Adriana Colón '12
  • a residency with opera bassist Morris Robinson
  • a residency with jazz trumpeter Bria Skonberg

Students also enjoyed luncheon meetings with authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman HLS '91, fashion designer Walé Oyéjidé (whose work featured in Black Panther), In the Dark staff writer Daniel Rogers ’12, musician Rhiannon Giddens and others.

All artist residencies are planned in close consultation with the artist, and most are open to the general public. We encourage student participation, suggestions and partnerships. For more information, contact Alicia Anstead.