PLEASE NOTE: This event is sold out! We are no longer taking reservations. Fore more information, call 312.422.5580 or send us an email.
Join us for Feast, a theatrical journey about the food that nourishes us in body and spirit. This new production by the Albany Park Theater Project is based on the real-life stories of home cooks, restaurant owners, street vendors, grocers, butchers, fishermen, farmers, and migrant workers.
Following this special performance by Chicago’s award-winning youth theater ensemble, a facilitated conversation will explore the power and pleasure of food. Panelists include Dara Cooper, food-justice activist; Lucy Gomez-Feliciano, Chicago Partnership Director for “Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities;” Daniela Flores & Alexia Lyles, healthy lunch student activists from Senn and Little Village Lawndale High Schools; and Lisa Lee, Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and innovator behind the Museum’s weekly soup kitchen.
This special performance of Feast is not appropriate for children under 11 years of age.
This event is free and open to the public, but is now sold out. For more information, please call 312.422.5580.
More about our panel
Dara Cooper is an activist, organizer, and whole food lover who has been active in human rights struggles for about half of her life. She has worked for the past decade on economic justice, HIV/AIDS medicine and resource access in South Africa and Ethiopia, the exoneration and recognition of U.S. political prisoners and exiles, and mentoring young people working on healthy food access at the Congressional Hunger Center. She has been fortunate to travel the world meeting with incredible organizations working on innovative projects to alleviate hunger, destructive foods, or struggling to create a more just food system and world. Dara is a member of Rising in Solidarity with Ayiti (focusing on Haiti solidarity), and a new advisory board member for the Sustainable Agriculture Tract for Black Oaks Center for Sustainable and Renewable Living. This organization supports Black farmers in Pembroke, IL and brings fresh, affordable, and soon local foods into communities through “Healthy Food Hubs.” She is currently engaged in her own research on the links between decolonization and food and health on African descendants in the U.S.
Lucy Gomez-Feliciano works and lives in Chicago’s Logan Square Community and is the lead health organizer at the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA). In 2009 her work expanded to include serving as the director of the Chicago’s “Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities” Partnership, targeting policy changes that improve access to parks and increase healthy food options at parks. Lucy serves as co-chair to the “Open Streets” Stakeholders, hosting streets closures that engage residents in human powered activities. For 5 years Lucy served as the coordinator of the Active Living by Design and Health Eating by Design Partnership in Logan Square. Prior work of over 20 years included building the minds, bodies and spirits of youth and families. Lucy earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently a board member of the Active Transportation Alliance, co-chair of the Alliance for Research in Chicagoland Communities (ARCC).
Lisa Yun Lee is the Co-Founder and former Director of The Public Square. Currently, she is the Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and is a faculty member of the Art History Department at the University of Illinois Chicago. She also teaches a class on art and politics and the relationship between theory and practice as a visiting professor at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. She received her B.A. in Religion at Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. in German Studies from Duke University. Her last book was Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno (Routledge, 2005), and she is working on a new project about the radical potential and practice of oppositional body language and gesture. She serves on the Board of Trustees of Bryn Mawr College, the Ms. Magazine Advisory Board, and on the boards of Young Chicago Authors, the Public Housing Museum, Chicago Humanities Festival, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, the International Contemporary Music Ensemble, and the Chicago Children’s Theatre .
This event is co-sponsored by The Public Square and the Albany Park Theater Project.
This program is partially made possible by support from The Cricket Island Foundation.
If you need a sign interpreter or require other arrangements to fully participate, please call 312.422.5580. For parking locations near the facility, please visit ChicagoParkingMap.com.