NEW HAVEN, CONN.: The Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP) has named Madeline Sayet their new executive director, effective immediately.
YIPAP was created in 2015 to promote Native voices at Yale, and has brought together Native students, actors, directors, and designers to share Native stories onstage. Nagle and Sayet first came to Yale in the spring of 2015 when they presented Nagle’s play Sliver of a Full Moon, about the Violence Against Women Act, at the Yale Law School.
“I am confident that under Madeline’s leadership, YIPAP will continue to serve Indian country and combat our erasure in the American theatre at large,” said former executive director Mary Kathryn Nagle in a statement. “I look forward to witnessing the profound impact her leadership will have not only for our students at Yale, but on the American theatre as a whole.”
Sayet, a member of the Mohegan nation, is a director who has been honored as an O’Neill Theater Center National Directing Fellow, a Drama League Director in Residence, and a MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, among others. She performed her solo piece Where We Belong at Shakespeare’s Globe and RichMix in London this summer, and she has directed for South Dakota Shakespeare Festival, Connecticut Repertory Theatre, and HERE Arts Center, among others. Sayet holds a BFA in drama from New York University Tisch School of Arts, a M.A. in Arts Politics and Post-Colonial Study from NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and a M.A. in Shakespeare and Creativity from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Sayet wrote the cover story for this magazine’s first issue dedicated to Native American theatre.
“YIPAP offers an incredible resource to both students and the American theatre at large by offering space for Native theatre to be developed and grow at Yale,” Sayet said in a statement. “I am incredibly humbled to carry forward the good traditions YIPAP has already established, and imagine how we can continue to deepen and grow our support for the development of Native theatre going forward to ensure Native voices are heard on all stages.”
