Artist and CHRA Director Tania El Khoury participated in the Spring 2023 lineup of the University of Michigan Stamps School of Arts Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series. The event, on Thursday, January 26, at 5:30pm at the historical Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, took the form of an interview conducted by writer, dramaturg, and curator Tom Sellar, editor of Yale’s international journal Theater and professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale. El Khoury’s appearance in the series was in tandem with the opening of her interactive installation Cultural Exchange Rate at the University of Michigan’s The Stamps Gallery, and runs through January 29, 2023.
The Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series brings respected leaders and innovators from a broad spectrum of creative fields to speak about their work at free, public events.
Cultural Exchange Rate examines the universal, never-ending story of migration through a complex family diary of borders, and the recognition that the cruelest of borders are invisible to the eye and yet present in everyday life. Based on El Khoury’s family memoirs of life in border villages between Lebanon and Syria, the audience is invited to explore family secrets and more than a century of border crossings.