Nancy Kawalek

Nancy Kawalek is a Broadway performer, educator, and the founder of STAGE, a laboratory dedicated to producing theater and other art forms at the intersection of science and technology. She grew up in New York City and earned a bachelor's degree in theater and oral interpretation from Northwestern University before pursuing a professional acting career based primarily in New York. Her work as a performer extended beyond the stage to include film, television, and commercials.

Kawalek's Broadway career includes an appearance in 1979 in Strider. Following her performing career, she transitioned into academia, joining the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she eventually became a studio professor in the film and media studies department and the media arts and technology program. It was there that she founded STAGE, an acronym for Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration, initially conceived as an international script competition seeking the best new play about science and technology. The competition's early judges included recipients of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and Tony Award, which brought the program significant attention.

Since 2013, Kawalek has served as a professor and distinguished fellow in the arts, science, and technology at the University of Chicago, where STAGE is now housed within the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. The program has evolved from a script competition into a full laboratory that develops original theatrical productions through a collaborative process involving both artists and scientists, with casts drawn from student and professional performers. Productions are not built from pre-existing scripts but emerge through improvisation used as a form of research, with the goal of telling human stories rooted in scientific fields from their origins through real-world application.

Kawalek's approach to the work prioritizes emotional engagement and content over spectacle, incorporating technology into staging as a storytelling tool rather than as a focal point. Her interest in bridging art and science was shaped in part by her relationships with scientists and her observation that failure, embraced in scientific practice, is typically discouraged in artistic contexts. She has described STAGE as a means of making science more accessible and trustworthy to general audiences.