Ping Chong’s Inside/Out to Premiere at Kennedy Center

Award-winning director Ping Chong will present his latest world premiere, Inside/Out…voices from the disability community at the Kennedy Center, June 27-29.

The work, commissioned by VSA arts, explores first-hand experiences from the disability community, and is part of Ping Chong & Company’s ongoing series of oral-history theater works.

The cast will include Josh Hecht, a New York director whose mother had multiple sclerosis; Monique Holt, a performing artist and adjunct theater professor at Gallaudet University; Christopher Imbrosciano, a young actor with cerebral palsy; Zazel-Chavah O’Garra, a dancer, cover model, and disability advocate who is a brain tumor survivor; Vivian Cary Jenkins, a former healthcare administrator who became legally blind later in life; Matthew S. Joffe, an actor as well as director of the Office for Students with Disabilities at a New York community college who was born with Moebius Syndrome; and Blair Wing, who has and MFA in acting from Ohio State University, and was paralyzed in a car accident at the age of 18.

Chong has created more than fifty multidisciplinary works for the stage, including Humboldt’s Current (Obie Award, 1977), A.M./A.M. – The Articulated Man (Villager Award, 1982), Nosferatu (Maharam Design Award, 1985), Kind Ness (USA Playwrights’ Award, 1988), and Brightness (two 1990 Bessie Awards). He is a 2008 recipient of the Urban Artist Initiative/NYC Fellowship for artists of color. In 2006, he was awarded a USA Artist Fellowship in recognition of his contribution to American arts and culture, and in 2000 he received an OBIE Award for Sustained Achievement.

For more information, visit www.kennedy-center.org, www.vsarts.org, or www.pingchong.org.