Arts & Culture

Three-time Grammy winner Isabel Leonard will join celebrated accompanist John Arida for an evening of works by Spanish composers and classic mid-century American songs March 29 as part of WashU’s Great Artists Series.

Christopher J. Salango and Lorraine “Rain” Stippec, second-year candidates in the Master of Fine Arts in Dance program, will present new and original works in Edison Theatre March 20 and 21.

The African Film Festival will celebrate its 20th anniversary with award-winning films from South Africa, Morocco, Cape Verde, Sudan and other nations from March 27-29 in WashU’s Brown Hall. Admission is free.

In their acclaimed chamber opera “The Tongue and The Lash,” composer Damien Sneed and librettist Karen Chilton imagine a conversation between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. following their iconic 1965 debate. WashU will present a performance at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 19, in Graham Chapel.

Pianist and composer Conrad Tao, an artist of “probing intellect and open-hearted vision” (The New York Times), will perform Sunday, March 1, as part of the WashU Department of Music’s Great Artists Series.

The Performing Arts Department will present Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Our Town” in Edison Theatre beginning Feb. 20. Though familiar to generations of audiences, the play’s pastoral setting can disguise its formal inventiveness, says director Andrea Urice.

Shot on WashU’s campus, the 110-year old film “The Maid of McMillan” is one of 25 films the Library of Congress added to the National Film Registry. 

Ballaké Sissoko, one of the world’s great virtuosos of the 21-stringed West African kora, will be joined Feb. 1 by classically trained Cape Town guitarist Derek Gripper for an intimate recital as part of WashU’s Great Artists Series.

Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is “a perfect musician” (Le Monde), at once “vocally brilliant and dramatically fearless” (New York Times). On Jan. 25, Costanzo will launch WashU’s 2026 Great Artists Series.

Ron Himes, the Henry E. Hampton Jr. Artist-in-Residence in Arts & Sciences and founder of the St. Louis Black Repertory Company, has won a Lifetime Achievement Award from New York theater group AUDELCO.