A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Selfie of a white woman with a tree in the background

On This Page

Jenny Magnus

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Jenny Magnus (she/her) is a writer, performer, musician, director, and teacher who is a founding co-artistic director of the Curious Theater Branch, an all-original theater company, now entering it’s 36th year, author/creator of plays that have been produced at Steppenwolf Theater, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, at Chicago Dramatists, at the former Lunar Cabaret, the Prop Thtr and on tour throughout America and Europe. She was a long-time member of the band Maestro Subgum and the Whole and made multiple records with them, as well as three solo recorded CDs, has a current band called The Crooked Mouth, and is represented and distributed by UvuLittle Recordings. In addition to running the Curious Theater Branch and making her own work, she has been teaching in the Writing Program at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago for over 20 years. Jenny Magnus was a long-time adjunct faculty member with Columbia College Chicago, in both the graduate Interdisciplinary Arts Department and the undergraduate Interactive Arts and Media Department. She has taught at The University of Chicago, the Chicago Public Schools, the Metropolitan Correctional Center of Chicago, The University of Illinois, been a Free Street Theater teaching artist, and is sole proprietor of Creative Consulting, a private practice of creativity facilitation. She got her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Awards: 2024 Artists Support Grant from Dramatists Guild; 2024 Faculty Enrichment Grant from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Individual Artist Support, 2022, Media Arts Illinois Arts Council; 2021 Cultural Workers Program Grant, Allies for Community Business; 2018–19 Project Support Grant from Illinois Arts Council; wrote and managed all grants for The Curious Theatre Branch 1988–2006; 1998 Illinois Arts Fellowship Grant in Interdisciplinary Arts; inducted into Hall of Fame at Kettle Moraine High School 2006; included on “Best of Chicago Theater” lists New City Chicago 1997–2011; included among “Artists of the Year” by Chicago Tribune with collaborator Beau O’Reilly 1998. Publications: Curious Plays (inclusion Salvagers), JackLeg Press, 2022; They Don’t Allow Candy in Their Home (story), Jet Fuel Review, 2021; How Not To Be A Wendy (story), Oyez Review, 2019; Observations of an Orchestrated Catastrophe: Plays and Performances, JackLeg Press, 2014/2021 reprint; Robert (video excerpt), Requited online journal, 2013; excerpts from How to Carry Love, Eleven Eleven, California College of the Arts, 2013.

Personal Statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist who brings composition, intention, rhythm, dynamics, and inventiveness to every form of making she encounters. I have created hybrid forms of performance, music, images, and philosophy in my explorations and meditations about awareness, attention, and the performative moment, riding a shifting line between singing and speaking, talking about thinking and thinking about talking, and live and mediated images. My intrepid curiosity about being present in front of people has also lead to an active teaching career, in which I bring a conscious intention to challenge students of whatever age or situation to see themselves as the authors of their own education, striving for excellence in their attention and intention. I am primarily interested in provoking myself and others to look more closely, listen more thoughtfully, and participate in explosive inquiry whenever possible.

I am a practitioner, not a scholar. However, I have been practicing being a teacher for a good long while. My teaching philosophy is based around John Dewey’s ideas of experiential learning, the Socratic method of asking questions, bell hooks’ ideas that the classroom can be a place of liberation, and Paolo Freire’s ideas of an ethical relationship between instructor and student, where powerful hierarchies and systems are made explicit, and the focus is on teaching the student, and not the subject. I utilize a seminar construct, in which all participants are teachers/learners, including myself. I strongly believe in being a “difficultator”, Freire’s word for someone who takes responsibility for tolerating discomfort and awkwardness, because most of the exciting things of the world come out of friction, difficulties, and turbulence.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing as an art form in itself and as a vital element of interdisciplinary projects. We explore the possibilities of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices as writing for the page, as well as for performance, sound, installation, and image-based pieces. Students are assigned reading and writing exercises, and discuss each other's writing in workshop or small critique sessions.

Class Number

1833

Credits

3

Description

This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing as an art form in itself and as a vital element of interdisciplinary projects. We explore the possibilities of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices as writing for the page, as well as for performance, sound, installation, and image-based pieces. Students are assigned reading and writing exercises, and discuss each other's writing in workshop or small critique sessions.

Class Number

2112

Credits

3

Description

This blended academic/studio course offers Scholars Program students an opportunity to explore and analyze art forms that incorporate text within interdisciplinary projects. Our academic investigations will serve as a base of information and inspiration to facilitate students¿ processes of writing and making in creating text-inclusive interdisciplinary work. We¿ll engage in viewing, listening, reading, writing responses, and discussing pieces created by artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Robert Ashley, Patti Smith, Kurt Schwitters, Idris Goodwin, Claudia Rankine, and Emil Ferris. We¿ll then consider what we¿ve seen, learned, and discussed as we work in the studio, moving across generative exercises, writing workshop sessions, and individual making time focused on developing and fine-tuning both words and structures for new projects. Students will experiment with their writing in combinations involving 2d and 3d image, sound, and performance ideas, with critiques as follow-up feedback. Students should expect to work loosely, but passionately, to create distinct trial projects reflecting assigned investigations, as well as meet related reading and written response deadlines along the timeline of the semester. Final projects will present further steps of revision toward a chosen finished piece.

Class Number

1658

Credits

3

Description

This blended academic/studio course offers Scholars Program students an opportunity to explore and analyze art forms that incorporate text within interdisciplinary projects. Our academic investigations will serve as a base of information and inspiration to facilitate students¿ processes of writing and making in creating text-inclusive interdisciplinary work. We¿ll engage in viewing, listening, reading, writing responses, and discussing pieces created by artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Robert Ashley, Patti Smith, Kurt Schwitters, Idris Goodwin, Claudia Rankine, and Emil Ferris. We¿ll then consider what we¿ve seen, learned, and discussed as we work in the studio, moving across generative exercises, writing workshop sessions, and individual making time focused on developing and fine-tuning both words and structures for new projects. Students will experiment with their writing in combinations involving 2d and 3d image, sound, and performance ideas, with critiques as follow-up feedback. Students should expect to work loosely, but passionately, to create distinct trial projects reflecting assigned investigations, as well as meet related reading and written response deadlines along the timeline of the semester. Final projects will present further steps of revision toward a chosen finished piece.

Class Number

1661

Credits

3

Description

This class will have as its focus the development of support materials and methods for professional practice relating to the work of writers and
artists who engage in interdisciplinary projects with writing as a central element. This section is open to both BFAW Program students as well as non-BFAW students who are interested in developing professional practices strategies from that perspective.

Across the semester, you will work to generate and fine-tune professional practice support materials such as artist statements and artist resumes, tap into SAIC?s CAPX and research other current online resources for funding, publication and exhibition opportunities, and align and present your body of work in order to further define and articulate central lines of concept and inquiry. Additionally, we?ll discuss assigned relevant readings and meet and speak with a local writer/artist concerning their own body of work and professional practice

Course work results in creating professional practice materials supporting a digital portfolio of your work and collaboratively participating in an exhibition and literary reading event.

Class Number

1582

Credits

3