Hanay Geiogamah

Hanay Geiogamah (he/him/his) has been active in American Indian theater for nearly 40 years. With Ellen Stewart, he co-founded the first professional tribal theater, the American Indian Theater Ensemble at La Mama in New York in the 1970s. Hanay has been a professor of theater in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television since the early 1990s and headed the UCLA American Indian Studies Center for eight years. Professor Geiogamah is currently guiding the American Indian Dance Theater out of hiatus and its return to performances and touring. The company's new full-length dance drama, Ceremony For Mother Earth: A Healing, will be staged in a development workshop in late summer/early fall of this year. Mr. Geiogamah's publications include Ceremony, Spirituality and Ritual in Native American Performance; New Native American Drama: Three Plays; and Stories of Our Way, an anthology. He is a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and he has worked extensively in the theater and also film and television. He is completing work on a new play, The Grandmothers, which tells the story of his paternal grandfather's conversion to Christianity in the early 20th Century.