Lift The Curtain-End Unpaid Internships an organization whose goal is to end unpaid internships in the theater industry is hosting another USITT Conversation. Lift The Curtain has assembled a group of panelists, with backgrounds in advocacy, business, and law to have a discussion on empowering emerging theater professional, understand financial and labor practices in our industry, and how we can advocate for a more equitable theater community. This FREE webinar will take place on Thursday, June 10, 2021, at 4:00 p.m. EDT. Be sure to pre-register to be reminded when it goes live and join them for a conversation about theater’s dependency on unpaid internships.
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Meet the Panel
Shelley Attadgie is a New York-based lawyer and graduate of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. She currently works as a Law Clerk in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Prior to starting her clerkship, she was a Litigation Associate at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore LLP.
Before attending law school, Attadgie graduated from Ithaca College with a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance. After graduating, she spent two years in New York auditioning and performing as a non-union singer and dancer. Her experiences as a performer inspired her focus in law school, where, during her second year, she delved further into researching the labor practices in the theater industry, with a specific focus on non-union contracts, and the state and federal labor laws that regulate them, ultimately publishing an article titled Combating the Actor’s Sacrifice: How to Amend Federal Labor Law to Influence the Labor Practices of Theaters and Incentivize Actors to Fight for Their Rights.
Elsa Hiltner (she/her) is a costume designer, a writer, and organizer on pay and labor equity, and a consultant for theatre companies who are working to establish pay equity. In 2021 she was honored with the Merritt Award’s Arts Advocacy award. Her essays on labor and pay equity have inspired systemic change in the theatre industry, and the Theatrical Designer Pay Resource that she launched in 2018 has been used nation-wide by designers to promote pay transparency. She is a co-founder of On Our Team, which successfully organized for pay transparency on the job sites of Playbill, BroadwayWorld, and the League of Chicago Theatres. Hiltner also works as Collaboraction’s director of development, where she has seen firsthand how enacting pay equity benefits a company. Learn more about her work at www.elsahiltner.com.
Elizabeth Wislar (she/her) is a multi-award-winning costume professional, a large scale textile and integrated technology artist, a wage equity warrior, instructor, and registered member of the Northern Cherokee Nation.
Wislar spent close to 20 years as a freelance theatre artisan based in Chicago, IL. She has designed over 200 shows and built more than 150 productions in the Chicago area and nationally in collaboration with many of the prevailing theaters, opera companies, and local universities. In 2011, she founded Chicago Custom Costumes, a private build shop located in the historic Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. In 2015, Wislar sold her business and joined a college in the rolling mountains of rural Pennsylvania then Virginia. Her new mission in life is to participate in the development of new artistic collaborators and technicians, training them for the multitude of diverse opportunities.
Further information from Lift The Curtain: https://www.liftthecurtain.co/events
Further information from USITT: usitt.org/education-training/usitt-webinars
