John D. Mitchell

John Mitchell of the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Theatre Arts used his position in New York to draw awareness to theatres of style including jingju, Sanskrit drama, and kabuki. He invited masters of Asian traditional theatre to work with American artists, hoping to inculcate full appreciation of the power of stylized approaches to performance. Samuel L. Leiter is distinguished professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, CUNY and the Graduate Center, CUNY He has written or edited twenty-five books and is a former editor of Asian Theatre Journal (1992-2004). In 2009 he became the first theatre scholar to receive an Andrew W Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship, which is supporting his research for a book on the history of kabuki after the Occupation from 1952 to 1965.