Arts & Culture

Hiro is young and successful in New York, a world away from her old Kentucky home. But when her little sister decides to marry — at age 22, to a born-again Christian she just met — Hiro responds, determined to stop the wedding. Washington University’s Ron Himes will direct “Kentucky” Nov. 15-18 in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.

WashU nurtures women entrepreneurs through training, mentoring, funding and real-world experience. This is their story.

In the age of reality TV, what does it mean to be “authentic”? So asks senior Grace Haselhorst in “The Realness.” Thyrsus, Washington University’s student-run experimental theater group, will debut the play Nov. 9-11.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will launch its 2018 Informal Cities Workshop at 12:15 p.m. Friday, Nov. 2, with a free talk by Jorge Mario Jáuregui, a Brazilian architect taking on the challenge of population growth in informal settings.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will launch a new master of fine arts degree in illustration and visual culture in fall 2019. The program — the first of its kind in the Midwest — will combine intensive studio practice with an emphasis on scholarly and theoretical analysis.

The Brooksfields are determined to take a trip. Nothing will stop them — not the blizzard, not the mistress, not even the drug dealers. In “Florida,” Lucas Marschke recounts a dysfunctional family vacation for the ages. This weekend, “Florida” will receive its world-premiere staged reading at Washington University in St. Louis as part of the annual A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival.

The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis welcome Dave Hullfish Bailey as their 2018-19 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow. Designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles, the fellowship consists of two month-long residencies, during which Bailey will lead studios in the Sam Fox School while preparing an exhibition for the museum’s Currents series.

In “The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs,” the Sam Fox School’s Cheryl Wassenaar and Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer explore the ways our distinct inner voices combine to create a “bureaucracy of the mind.”

Paul Tran, a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, is one of five young poets awarded a $25,800 prize from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine.

Kinga Pabjan, project manager for Team WashU at the 2018 Solar Decathlon China, discusses Lotus House, 3D printing and the future of sustainable design.