Booking and details
Dates Sun, Aug 25, 2024
Join the Folger as we kick off our 2024–2025 season, Whose Democracy? which challenges perceptions and ignites conversations about power and civic participation.
Explore political highlights from our current exhibitions, tour the galleries with Takoma Park poet laureate Taylor Johnson, enjoy readings from OB Hardison Poetry Series Manager and acclaimed poet Teri Ellen Cross Davis, listen to a selection of 17th-century songs, and hear from Folger leadership about how we are activating our season theme across the institution, and more
Schedule of events:
All Day
- Gallery Guides in the Exhibition Halls who will highlight items from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the special exhibition Imprints in Time related to our season’s theme
- Costume display of past productions in the Carriage Gallery highlighting rulers from Shakespeare’s plays
- Dress-up box in the Great Hall, allowing visitors of all ages to see how they look in crowns, robes, and other royal regalia
‘a more perfect Union’ with Poet and OB Hardison Poetry Manager Teri Ellen Cross Davis
12–12:30pm in the Reading Room
Join poet Cross Davis in the Folger Reading Room as she shares her own work, an exploration of motherhood, pop culture, and more as a contemporary poet living, writing, and mothering in the U.S.
Book signing to follow.
Musical Performance: Political Broadside Ballads
1:15-1:45pm in the Reading Room
Instrumentalist Mark Cudek and vocalist Kristen Dubenion-Smith perform a selection of 17th-century political broadside ballads as a preview of Folger Consort’s May concerts, Kings and Commonwealth.
Institute Fellow Spotlight: Poetry Promenade with Taylor Johnson
2–2:30pm in the Shakespeare and Stuart and Mimi Rose Exhibition Halls
Poet Laureate of Takoma Park and 2024– 2025 Folger Institute Whose Democracy? Fellow Taylor Johnson shares his series of American Song poems while taking listeners on a journey through the Folger’s exhibition spaces to visit the collection pieces that inspired him.
Please note space is limited; this is a moving reading and will require traversing through the exhibition spaces.
“Whose Democracy?”: A Yearlong Exploration of Power and Participation at the Folger
3–4pm in The Reading Room
Departmental leaders from Programming and Performance, Collections, and the Folger Institute offer a preview into the upcoming Whose Democracy? season and explore power and politics from the early modern world to today.
Program Participants
Dr. Patricia Akhimie
View full biography
Mark Cudek
Mark Cudek (Cittern) is a Professor at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University and the former Chair of Peabody’s Historical Performance Department. He is also Artistic Director of the Indianapolis Early Music Festival and a founding member of the Baltimore Consort. In recognition of his work as Founder/Director of the Peabody Renaissance Ensemble and the High School Early Music Program at the Interlochen Arts Camp, Mark received from Early Music America the 2001 Thomas Binkley Award and the 2005 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Early Music Education. Mark is the 2014 recipient of the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Association’s Global Achievement Award. He has performed with Apollo’s Fire (Cleveland Baroque Orchestra), Catacoustic Consort, Folger Consort, and Hesperus, and in his youth, worked as a café guitarist in the Virgin Islands. Mark is also director of the Peabody Consort, an ensemble consisting of alumni from Peabody’s Early Music program, which has toured Rome, Taiwan, Japan, and the Dominican Republic. Selected festival appearances are the Boston Early Music Festival, Glasgow International Early Music Festival, Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival, and Tage Alter Musik/ Regensburg, with appearances at the Kennedy Center, Metropolitan Museum, National Theatre of Panama, and Vienna Konzerthaus. Mark has recorded on the Dorian, Eclectra, Koch International, Linn, and Windham Hill labels.
Karen Ann Daniels
Karen Ann Daniels is the Director of Programming/Artistic Director of Folger Theatre. A native San Diegan, she is an accomplished actor, director, playwright, vocalist, musician, and community organizer. Prior to joining the Folger, she was director of the Mobile Unit at The Public Theater in NYC, producing tours around all five boroughs of NYC bringing the tools of theater to incarcerated community through Mobile Unit In Corrections (MUiC).
Teri Cross Davis
Kristen Dubenion-Smith
Kristen Dubenion-Smith (Vocalist) Recognized for her “velvety legato and embracing warmth of sound” (Washington Classical Review) and “lyric-mezzo of uncommon beauty” (The Washington Post), mezzo-soprano Kristen Dubenion-Smith enjoys an active performing career in oratorio and sacred vocal chamber music, specializing in music of the medieval, renaissance, and baroque eras.
Recent solo engagements include concerts with the Washington Bach Consort, Apollo’s Fire, TENET, Opera Lafayette, Arts on Alexander, Ensemble Altera, The Washington National Cathedral Baroque Orchestra, and Bach Collegium of San Diego as well as an international tour of Handel’s Solomon with The Clarion Choir and The English Concert (Solomon understudy).
Taylor Johnson
is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a 2024 Whiting Award. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He is the Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland. With his wife, Elizabeth Bryant, Taylor curates the Green Way Reading Series at People’s Book in Takoma Park.
Dr. David McKenzie
David McKenzie works as Head of Exhibitions at Folger Shakespeare Library. Before coming to Folger in 2022, he worked in four different roles at Ford’s Theatre, two different roles at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington (now Capital Jewish Museum), and at The Design Minds, Inc. and the Alamo. He holds a Ph.D. in U.S., Latin American, and digital history from George Mason University; a M.A. in Museum Studies from The George Washington University; and a B.A. in History and Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.