Barbara Neri is a writer, scholar, multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and educator. She is internationally recognized for The EBB Project, a synergy of creative and critical processes generating groundbreaking work. She is a published writer and scholar, a published and produced playwright and an award winning screenwriter. Neri is the author of a solo show The Consolation of Poetry, the play Unlocking Desire and its Marfa Film Festival winning screen adaptation, that is currently in pre-production. Her feature screenplay, Sonnets from the Portuguese, re-envisions Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett & Robert Browning's powerful love story for contemporary audiences. Her screenplay The Forgotten Front is an historic LGBTQ+, WWII love story, and was a 2021 Academy Nicholl quarterfinalist.

 

Neri’s life as an artist began as a child with the serious study of dance with Marie Buczkowski a pupil of the famed Russian teacher Olga Preobrajenska. Neri has studied dance professionally in Chicago, New York and England, theater with NY drama coach Mimi Turque, and performance art with L.A. performance artist Rachel Rosenthal. Barbara Neri holds a Bachelor’s in Art Education from Herron Art School and Butler University and an MFA in Dance from the University of Michigan. She is the founder and artistic director of Khoros, a producing arts organization that has created work in dance, video, performance art, theater, visual art, installation, and film. Neri's work with Khoros has been funded by the Michigan Arts and Culture Council and the NEA and she has been the recipient of two prestigious MACC Creative Artist grants. Details of Barbara Neri's career and artistic process follow, with links to relevant pages within this website.

 

Photo by Patricia Izzo

 

Neri began the 1980's choreographing and performing her solo concert 5 Dances. In 1982 she founded Khoros, Inc., a producing arts organization. Neri artistic directed and administered the organization and under its auspices, through the 1980s and early 1990s, she formed and artistic directed a company of dancers and artists, creating and performing multimedia works of choreography, video, sculpture and sound. Neri returned to solo work in 1993 and under the auspices of Khoros created, performed and exhibited works of performance art and installation, and visual art. Matter of Life & Death (Bolero) and INFINITE FIELD are two long process solo performance works from this period. Both works were produced as DVDs in 2007. Publications about and exhibitions of this work in 2006, 2008 and 2009 revisited Neri’s work in choreography and performance / installation, bringing it into new light. Find exhibition photos, DVD excerpts and PDFs of published writing about this award winning work in Work Archive

 

“The idea creates the form.”

 

In 1995, upon awakening from a mysterious dream, Ms. Neri began reading the poetry and researching the life and times of Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB). Working with a synergy of creative processes in research, writing, visual art and performance, Neri created a groundbreaking long-term study called The EBB Project. Neri's research ideas emerged from her artistic practice, revealing the creative process as a fruitful method of discovery, creating new ways to experience history, literature and art and leading to innovative teaching methods. Read The EBB Project Artist Statement. Neri has performed research in all the major archives of Barrett Browning materials: Wellesley College, The Berg Collection NYPL, The Morgan Library, The British Library and was awarded research fellowships by the Armstrong Browning Library in 1997 and 2012. With a focus on EBB’s enduringly popular, but critically misunderstood, forty-four love sonnets, Sonnets from the Portuguese, Neri became a published Barrett Browning scholar establishing the ground upon which her creative work is built. Neri was invited to work with an international team of scholars as an associate editor of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, an historic five volume edition of EBB's complete works, funded by the NEH and published in 2010 by London's renowned Pickering and Chatto. Neri contributed in general to the edition and specifically her groundbreaking research on EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Links to the edition and Neri’s published research are found at Writing

 

“Scholarship is groundwater; Art is the public tap. The fruitful synergy between them is the realm my work emerges from”

 

The first major work of performance to emerge from The EBB Project was The Consolation of Poetry, in which Neri began as herself and became the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a multimedia work that premiered March 2002 at the University of Michigan. The performance was sponsored by the UM Center for the Education of Women and part of a campus wide theme semester on gender power and representation. Neri’s script was published in the Fall 2003 issue of The Drama Review. Neri's 10 Dream Drawings projected as part of the performance, were published in the March 2004 'Correspondence' issue of Performance Research. Links to both publications are found at Writing. The Consolation of Poetry was produced again at Eastern Michigan University in October 2003, where Neri also taught a performance workshop for theater students, ‘Acting Up, Drawing it Down and Writing Out Loud,’ and presented a lecture, The Critical nature of Creativity, for the Visual Art Department. The Consolation of Poetry was juried into the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival and Neri performed in a definitive production of the work at The Mazer Theater in lower Manhattan. A DVD of this performance has been produced and an excerpt can be seen on The EBB Project Performance page where visitors can explore and see images of past performances.

 

“The EBB Project is about more than Elizabeth because her work (the work of art) is about more than her. Art is always about more than the artist is or can speak of.”

 

Researching and recreating the historically accurate reproductions of EBB's mid-Victorian clothing, that Neri wore in The Consolation of Poetry, was a complex process during which Neri discovered that what EBB chose to wear in photographic images was interlaced with her poetry and politics at the time they were taken. Some of this research was presented in a 1999 lecture before the Boston Browning Society and the New England chapter of the Costume Society of America at Prescott house in Boston, Massachusetts. After the premiere, in November 2002, the costumes were displayed as part of an installation of performance relics and visual art at the Ann Arbor Public Library, where Neri also presented a lecture “Unveiling EBB.” Neri exhibited the performance relics as an interactive installation, Dec. 2008 – Jan. 2009, called Imagine me imagining you…Dream of me dreaming of you at The Gallery Project in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During the month of February 2012, the costumes, relics and accessories were exhibited at the Armstrong Browning Library in Texas, where Neri also presented a lecture, and where the costumes will eventually become part of the library’s permanent collection. Explore the costumes, see EBB’s images and learn who Neri’s collaborators were at What She Wore

 

Two culminating projects of The EBB Project are a screenplay and a book: Neri has written a feature length historical drama, Sonnets from the Portuguese, that re-envisions Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning's powerful love story for contemporary audiences: The screenplay was a 2016 CineStory Foundation feature screenplay quarterfinalist and scored in the top fifteen percent of all screenplays entered in the prestigious 2022 Academy Nicholl screenwriting competition. Neri is currently finishing a book that brings together her critical and creative work on EBB’s forty-four love sonnets, telling the story of their creation, revealing the revolutionary nature of the sonnet sequence and its relevance for all readers. Find more Screenplay / Book page.

 

“I have always engaged in long processes. One might say that to be an artist is one long evolutionary process from which work emerges.”

 

Neri became intrigued by an allusion Tennessee Williams made to EBB and her love sonnets in Scene 3 of his masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire. Neri’s initial research was presented in a lecture at a March 2005 Victorian Institute conference held at UNC Greensboro. In August 2005, as Neri returned from NY Fringe performances of The Consolation of Poetry, Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans and for Neri the tragedy of Blanche DuBois melded with the fate of New Orleans and its residents. In 2008, Neri conducted research in the city of New Orleans: Taking part in a Vodou ceremony, gathering images and video of the city, watching Elia Kazan’s 1951 film of Streetcar with young artists, and exploring and studying Williams’ manuscripts in The Historic New Orleans Collection. This research led to Neri writing Unlocking Desire, a stage play about an institutionalized woman claiming to be Blanche DuBois. The play was produced by Khoros at The Marlene Boll Theater in Detroit, Michigan in 2011. Explore Unlocking Desire and its development, read Neri’s artist statement and see production photos. Read John Quinn's review of the Detroit production: Unlocking the Past; Unlocking the Future. Post-premiere, Neri was invited to present a lecture at the October 2011 “Tennessee Williams @100!” conference at the University of Michigan as part of the of the Williams in Production panel. 

 

In 2016, Neri adapted Unlocking Desire for the screen and the screenplay won the 2017 Marfa Film Festival screenwriting competition. The screenplay was also a quarterfinalist in the 2017 CineStory Foundation feature screenplay competition. Unlocking Desire is currently in early pre production with a May 2023 start date. The research that led to Unlocking Desire was published in the 2018 issue of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review  When accepting Neri’s article for publication, Review board members stated they were "particularly excited about the fact that it enables a fresh reading of Blanche, which is something hard to come by in the twenty-first century." The Review also published one of Neri’s visual art works: "Double Vision," a stereograph construct seen here. While at The Historic New Orleans Collection in 2008, Neri discovered an unpublished poem written by Tennessee Williams in 1976 that he entitled “Kicks.” The poem is considered extraordinary because in it Williams re-visits his iconic Blanche DuBois. “Kicks” and Neri’s editorial statement were published in the 2021 Tennessee Williams Annual Review. Find the link at Writing

 

“As a writer I am interested in how we tell our love stories.”

 

While exploring Tennessee Williams’ life, Neri learned that the first play he ever saw was a 1934 production of Rudolf Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street in Saint Louis, Missouri. The production was part of Katharine Cornell’s historic 1933-34 repertory tour of the US, opening theaters that had been long shuttered by the Depression. Curious about Cornell and her signature role of Elizabeth Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Neri began researching Cornell’s life and in 2017 conducted research in the NYPL Cornell Collection. Neri discovered that Cornell had also toured Italy during WW II with a troupe of actors performing The Barretts of Wimpole Street for G.I.s fighting there. Inspired by these brave men and women, Neri wrote a feature screenplay The Forgotten Front , an historic LGBTQ+, WW II love story about Cornell’s U.S.O tour of Italy. Neri’s screenplay was named a 2021 quarterfinalist in the prestigious Academy Nicholl feature screenplay competition. October of 2019, Neri presented a lecture “Creating Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Image on Stage and Screen: From The Barretts of Wimpole Street to The Forgotten Front” at the North American Victorian Studies Association, where director Mike Leigh was keynote speaker. Neri presented her research regarding the fallout from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's misogynist elimination from the literary cannon after her death in 1861, the advent of Rudolf Besier's popular 1930 play "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" and its 1934 and 1957 MGM film versions. Neri discussed her own work re-envisioning Barrett Browning: On stage in The Consolation of Poetry and in her screenplays Sonnets from the Portuguese and The Forgotten Front.

 

“My goal, among others, is to establish a discourse with and within the audience. I wish by example to empower them to become scholars of their own dreams.”

 

 

FURTHER LECTURES

 

Neri is an engaging, experienced speaker. In addition to the guest lectures mentioned above, she has created and presented the following:

 

Sonnets in the Night (and from the Portuguese): Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Lost and Found Notebook. During her February 2012 fellowship at the Armstrong Browning Library. Neri examined a newly recovered manuscript notebook belonging to Elizabeth Barrett Browning dated 1839-1842, and concluded her fellowship with a lecture.

 

She Blinded me with Science: Goethe’s Theory of Color and the embodiment of sight in EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Presented at the 2010 NAVSA Conference (North American Victorian Studies Association) held Nov 11-13, in Montreal, CA.

 

New Research: Letters and love sonnets revisited post WEBB: Presented at the London launch of "The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning" (WEBB). Presentation sponsored by The London Browning Society, May 14, 2010, London, England.  

 

The Critical Nature of Creativity: Guest lecture, AAWA (Ann Arbor Women Artists) 2009-10 lecture series, Ann Arbor, MI., Nov. 16, 2009.

 

The EBB Project: New (Old) Work: Guest lecture, EBB Bicentenary Conference, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Texas, March 6, 2006

 

THE EBB PROJECT: Ninety-minute lecture, performance, demonstration presented at Interdisciplinary Landscapes: Postfeminist Practices in the Arts. University College Northampton, England September 18, 2004

 

 

“I see nothing but opportunity for artists. We are needed more than ever.”

 

 

TEACHING

 

Neri is certified and endorsed by the Michigan Department of Education in Visual Art and Dance. She has developed curriculum and taught at the High School and University levels, and for many organizations, planning and presenting numerous lecture demonstrations as well as teaching classes open to the public in her private studios. Details are provided upon request. Neri’s current workshop is WALKING BETWEEN WORLDS, a multidisciplinary workshop for writers, visual artists and performers during which a grand project is dreamed / conceived, mapped and begun by participants.

 

Parties interested in a guest lecture or workshop: Contact for more information.

 

More current News about Barbara Neri.