Carla Blank is an American writer, editor, educator, choreographer, and dramaturge. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, for more than four decades she has been a performer, director, and teacher of dance and theater, particularly involved with youth and community arts projects.
Blank is editorial director of the Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, and has also lectured at such educational institutions as the University of California–Berkeley, Dartmouth College, and the University of Washington. She has written and edited a number of books, including Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, 1900–2000 (2003), Pow-Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience, Short Fiction, From Then to Now (2009), Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel: Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North America (2014), and Bigotry on Broadway (2021).
Background
Education and early career
Carla Blank grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and after attending Carnegie Mellon University transferred to and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. Having begun her career as a performer while still a child, after graduation she moved to New York City, where she studied ballet and made her debut as a choreographer in 1963, participating in the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater workshops.
Collaborations
She collaborated for many years with Suzushi Hanayagi (1928–2010), and in 2009, with director Robert Wilson and others, created a multidisciplinary live performance portrait of Hanayagi entitled KOOL, Dancing in My Mind, which had its premiere at New York City's Guggenheim Museum. A related 26-minute documentary film by Richard Rutkowski and Wilson, with the same title as the live work and including excerpts from the Guggenheim performance, premiered on Arte TV in France and the Sundance Channel in the U.S. in 2010, and an hour-long documentary, The Space in Back of You, including an interview with Blank, premiered in January 2012 at Lincoln Center's film festival, Dance on Camera, where it was nominated for a jury prize.
From 2003 to 2011, Blank was involved with developing The Domestic Crusaders, Wajahat Ali's play about three generations of a Pakistani-American family in the wake of 9/11. Beginning with a staged reading at Mehran Restaurant in Newark, California, in 2004, productions she directed include a 2009 showcase at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and its Off-Broadway debut, on September 11, 2009, at the Nuyorican Poets Café, an appearance at the 2010 MuslimFest in Mississauga, Canada, the Kennedy Center's Millennium Hall in Washington DC, on November 14, 2010, and as anchor of the 9/11 Performance Project at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in New York, in September 2011.
In 2013, Blank directed an Al-Kasaba Theatre production of Philip Barry's Holiday, performed in Arabic by a cast of Palestinian and Syrian actors. Premiered in their home theater in Ramallah, Palestine, its six-city West Bank tour ended at the Palestinian National Theatre in Jerusalem. In 2016, Blank directed a production of Ishmael Reed's play Mother Hubbard in Xiangtan, China. She directed the multidisciplinary work by Yuri Kageyama, News From Fukushima: Meditation on an Under-Reported Catastrophe by a Poet, which was premiered at the off-Broadway theater La MaMa in 2015 and developed further in 2017 at Z Space in San Francisco. The 2017 performance became the basis for a 2018 film of the same title, receiving multiple film festival honors internationally including at the New Vision International Film Festival in Amsterdam, Berkeley's Video and Film Festival, the Oniros Film Awards in Italy, and ARS X SDGS.
Blank directed and choreographed The Slave Who Loved Caviar by Ishmael Reed, which premiered at Theater for the New City in New York on December 23, 2021, running until January 9, 2022. Most recently, she directed two showcase productions of Reed's Living Newspaper styled play, The Conductor, at Theater for the New City, in March and August/September, 2023.
Performance art teaching
Blank has taught Performance Art at Dartmouth College, Harvard's Office of the Arts, and the University of Washington at Seattle, and has lectured on 20th-century art history at the University of California, Berkeley's departments of Dramatic Arts and Interdisciplinary Field Studies. She has lectured and given workshops at the University of Bologna in Italy, Université des Antilles–Guyane in Martinique, Charles University in the Czech Republic, the Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the Research Institute for North American Studies of the University of Alcalá, in Spain, and Beijing Normal University in China.