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Violet Shindler

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Violet Shindler is an actor, performance artist and playwright. She has appeared as Ilya in Everone on this Train and Eurydyke in Antigonck for Ghostbird Theatre Company. Her personal practices in performance art and playwriting examine intersectional feminism, queer identity, and the experiences of trauma survivors, their transcendence, and their political empowerment.

In the latter regard, Shindler spent several years collecting stories from survivors of sexual violence across the nation. Their stories had previously been kept secret, told only in whispers to the most trusted of confidants or through tears to a police officer. They are graphic, raw, emotional and violent. They are about rape, molestation, victim blaming and surviving. And Megan assimilated them into an oral history and theatrical ethnography known as S(he) Will Fade. Part performance, part art and part social activism, S(he) Will Fade is typically performed by college-aged women dressed in black who retell the transcribed stories unedited.

The idea to draw attention to sexual assault came to Shindler when she was 15 years old. It percolated there for a couple of years. Then, one night before bed during her senior year of high school, she floated a proposal on Tumblr about empowering sexual violence survivors by collecting their stories and turning them into documentary theater pieces. When she woke to get ready for school the next day, she had hundreds of messages in her inbox.

“It was a story that was just too important, too urgent and too sensitive to let go of.”

As a playwright, artist and instructor, Shindler feels that it is her social responsibility to serve disadvantaged and disenfranchised communities with her art.

“I am here to deepen my philosophies, motivations, and techniques to raise the impact and power of my creations,” she points out.

Shindler has a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Political Science from Florida Gulf Coast University and her Master of Arts – Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

October 11, 2019.

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