ABOUT
Founded in 2000, White Box Theatre is a project-based interdisciplinary arts workspace that bridges the visual and performing arts through collaborative learning and making experiences, resulting in performance, installation, education programs and events. Because the work is project-based, collaborators are listed with projects.
WHITE BOX THEATRE
FOUNDER
Sebastienne Mundheim is a performance-maker, installation artist, and educator with more than 30 years of experience in interdisciplinary arts and arts education. Her work integrates visual installation, puppetry, storytelling, dance, and theater. In addition to making her own work, Mundheim is a thought-partner and consultant for numerous other artists and arts organizations.
Mundheim began her career as a painter and writer, earning her BA and BFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. Wanting to get away from a solitary studio practice, she began working in communities designing and implementing parades, installations, and arts-based learning experiences. In 2007, she focused her practice by founding and artistic-directing White Box Theatre (WBT), a project-based nonprofit which creates responsive and immersive interdisciplinary, arts-based learning experiences, performances, and public events, for people of all ages. Works are created in partnership with museums, universities, theatre companies, dance troupes, community groups, and schools.
Mundheim/WBT have been commissioned and/or presented by institutions nationally and internationally including: The Rosenbach Museum and Library, The University of Pennsylvania, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Penn Museum of Art and Archeaology, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, The Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, The Arden Theatre, Lantern Theatre Company, The Pennsylvania Ballet, ArtYard, The Kohler Foundation, Franklin and Marshall College, Stonington Opera House, Baltimore Theatre Project, Cultural Alliance of Baltimore, Keene State University, Vermont Performance Lab, Marlboro College, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts (MassMOCA), and The Irish Ministry of Arts and Culture.
Collaborators have included: Ballet X; Theatre Exile; Brian Sanders JUNK; Pig Iron School: Daedalus Quartet: New Paradise Laboratories; Kate Watson-Wallace, Anonymous Bodies; Thaddeus Phillips, Lucidity Suitcase; Hua-Hua Zhang; Kun Yang Lin Dance; Tania Isaac Dance; Archedream for Humankind. Her work has received support from the Dolfinger McMahon Foundation, Lenfest Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, The Pew Charitable Trust, Philadelphia Theatre Initiative and Dance Advance, Pennsylvania Performing Artists on Tour, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and numerous commissioning organizations.
In 2017, Mundheim received national recognition from the Kennedy Center for the Arts College Theatre Festival for Distinguished Achievement in Puppetry Design and Direction and Distinguished Achievement in Overall Production. In 2014, she won Barrymores (Philadelphia’s Excellence in Theatre Award) for Outstanding Design and for Best Ensemble for her adaptation of A Child’s Christmas in Wales. In 2013, she received an Independence Foundation Fellowship for Writing. In 2011 she was a finalist for the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Mundheim studied puppetry at the O’Neill Center, Sandglass Puppetry Institute. She also studied with the Hand Spring Puppet Company in South Africa in 2010 with support from the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative. She received her EdM from Harvard in 2000.
CORE COLLABORATORS
Harlee Trautman, Co-creator, Thought Partner, Studio Maker, Performer
Harlee is a Philadelphia-based dance artist, choreographer, and sculptor. Her performance-making honors embodied knowledge, deep research, and collaborative possibility. She sees art making as a means to remain infinitely curious about the natural world, the universes that we hold, and in turn hold us. For her, the body is the first and final teacher. Harlee is an artistic collaborator for White Box Theatre and dances professionally with The Naked Stark dance company, Artist House, and Archedream for Humankind. Notable work has been presented at the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC), Manship Theatre (Baton Rouge), the Republic (New Orleans), Mandell Theater (Philadelphia), Grounds for Sculpture (Hamilton, NJ), as well as on display at Philadelphia International Airport's D terminal. In 2023 she will debut new works in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and in Chicago. Harlee earned her BFA from Louisiana State University. She has been a guest artist at Drexel University, Bryn Mawr College, Louisiana State, and Tulane. After six years of studying with Molly Shanahan, she will be a certified teacher of Spiral Body Technique, August of 2023.
Stephen Shuster, Technical Director and Lead Carpenter
Stephen is a Philadelphia-based carpenter and woodworker. He studied carpentry at the North Bennett School in Boston and has been doing fine carpentry since the 1990s. He currently works for Phillip Johnson Construction.
Emily McRight, Web Design and Maintenance
Emily is a Colorado-based freelance graphic designer. She provides web and graphic services for corporate and non-profit organizations.
BOARD
Tom Miles, President
Tom is a Trustee at the University of the Arts and one of the founders and senior partners of Miles & Generalis, Inc. He has 36 years of experience in the Philadelphia business community and has served on various volunteer boards, including Avenue for the Arts, Philadelphia Game Lab, and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, the American Red Cross, and the Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial. Tom is perhaps best known for his work of public art, Big Ben at Franklin Town, which presides over Interstate 676. Tom is currently focused on being a sculptor.
Jennifer Snead, Secretary
Jennifer currently works in government communications and has an extensive background in higher education, arts, and nonprofit strategy, outreach, and fundraising. She has been a strategic project director for grants and fundraising in global healthcare, a professor of English at Texas Tech University, and director of The Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from Duke University and her BA from the University of Pennsylvania.