Prof. Kathleen Mulligan is a Professor of voice and speech in the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Ithaca College. She is a member of Actors Equity Association, the union of professional actors. She earned her BFA in acting from Boston University and her MFA in Performance from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. In 2010, Prof. Mulligan was a Fulbright grantee to Kerala, India with her project Finding Women’s Voices, focused on the empowerment of women through voice. This led to a Fulbright Specialist grant to Pakistan, where she first considered the idea of creating an original theatre piece about Partition. In 2015, a U.S. Embassy grant allowed Prof. Mulligan and her husband, Actor and Director David Studwell, to collaborate with Islamabad’s Theatre Wallay on the project Voices of Partition, drawing on interviews with Partition survivors to devise the original play Dagh Dagh Ujala (This Stained Dawn.) Dagh Dagh Ujala opened in Islamabad and toured to the .U.S with stops in Boston, Ithaca, and the US Department of State in Washington DC before returning home for closing performances in Lahore. In 2017, Mulligan and Studwell again joined with Theatre Wallay along with U.S. playwright Linda Alper for a new project titled On Common Ground. This original piece, exploring the effect of violence on public space, toured to the western US with stops at Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, OR and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. It then returned home to perform in several cities across Pakistan. Prof. Mulligan’s acting career has brought her to every state in the US, performing such roles as Prospero in The Tempest, Jocasta in Oedipus, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Lucy in Sweeney Todd. Most recently, she traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to perform her one-woman show The Belle of Amherst (written by William Luce and based on the life of New England poet Emily Dickinson) as a guest of the American University in Beirut. She is eager to continue offering this performance to audiences in India and around the globe.
The partition of India and Pakistan resulted in the death of over one million and caused the largest forced migration the world has ever seen. History books tell the stories of leaders and governments that brought about Partition—but little of the people whose lives were lost or changed forever. Drawing on interviews with survivors and their families, Prof. Mulligan intends to work with young people through her Fulbright-Nehru project to create an original theatre piece that preserves the human stories of Partition. By experiencing live theatre, whether as creators or audience members, young people in India will connect with the stories of those who came before them to better understand themselves and the world they live in.