Skirball Tapes: Elizabeth Streb

Elizabeth Streb is the founder and Artistic Director of the acclaimed STREB Extreme Action Company (1979) and the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics—an international action factory for experimentation and exchange—in Brooklyn, NY (2003). She has received numerous honors including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, a Doris Duke Artist Award and a USA Fellowship Award. Streb was a featured mainstage speaker at TED2018: The Age of Amazement in Vancouver and the subject of two documentaries: Born to Fly, directed by Catherine Gund (Aubin Pictures), and OXD, directed by Craig Lowy. In 2010, Feminist Press published her book, STREB: How to Become an Extreme Action Hero. In her 40+ years of pursuing human flight and pushing the limits of the impossible, she has dived through glass, allowed a ton of dirt to fall on her head, walked down (the outside of) London’s City Hall, and set herself on fire, among other feats of extreme action.

Catharine Stimpson is a University Professsor at New York University. Currently the editor of a book series for the University of Chicago Press, she was the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her many other publications include a novel, Class Notes; a selection of essays, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces; and a book on Gertrude Stein, which is under contract to the University of Chicago Press. In addition, more than 150 of her monographs, essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in Transatlantic Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Critical Inquiry, boundary 2, and other publications. Dean Stimpson is the Chair of the National Advisory Committee of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and past president of the Association of Graduate Schools. She is former chair of the New York State Humanities Council, the Ms. Magazine Board of Scholars, and the National Council for Research on Women, as well as past president of the Modern Language Association. She serves on the boards of other educational and cultural organizations, and from 1994-2000, was on the board of PBS. She has been awarded both Fulbright and Rockefeller Humanities Fellowships, as well as grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.