Baker Artist Portfolios

JON SPELMAN / NARRATIVE MATTERS is the overall project name for all of Jon's work in developing, performing, and teaching narrative art/storytelling. Jon's two newest original performance pieces are THE PROSTATE DIALOGUES AND TALES OF THE TELLYWACKER and TALES OF THE LINCOLN. His previous performing and writing have been supported by individual grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Maryland Arts Council, the Arts Councils of Florida and The District of Columbia, and the National Storytelling Network & the Cummington Press in honor of Harry Duncan. He has been Artist in Residence at the Blue Mountain Center in upstate New York, and at the Bellagio Center of The Rockefeller Foundation, on Lake Como in northern Italy. Spelman has been called ?World-Class? (Los Angeles TIMES), and ?a stunning wordsmith and a riveting performer? (Washington POST). His work has been widely commissioned and performed in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, England, Mexico, Austria, Japan, Israel, and France, at major performance festivals throughout the US, and at over three thousand other locations in North America, including the Kennedy Center, which commissioned his TALL TALES, WHITE LIES, LOCAL COLOR, AND MONUMENTAL VIEWS: STORIES FROM THE NATION?S CAPITOL. Spelman was also commissioned by Round House Theatre to write and perform OFF THE MAP and FRANKENSTEIN; by Woolly Mammoth Theatre to write and perform ON THE BEDPOST OVERNIGHT; by the Smithsonian Institution to collect and perform stories by and about children in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL; by the Clarice Smith Center For The Performing Arts at the University of Maryland to write and perform DIGGING INTO SHAKESPEARE, and by the Washington Storytellers Theatre to collect and perform the stories in I STILL BELIEVE: THE LIVES OF CHILDREN IN THE HOLOCAUST AND OTHER EXTREMITIES. ATTACK ON THE PENTAGON 9/11/2001 was commissioned by the Arlington Virginia Division of Cultural Affairs. TALES OF THE LINCOLN was commissioned by Ford?s Theatre, Washington, DC.
Jon has developed more than thirty-two hours of performance material, most of which he continues to present to a wide variety of audiences in a wide variety of venues throughout the US and Europe. He performs at colleges, theatres, schools, libraries, festivals, museums, and arts centers. He was the first American to perform at the International Festival of Solo Performers in Tel Aviv, Israel, and represented American performers at The Colloquium on the Revival of Storytelling held in Paris, France ("Spelman's story was one of the big grand moments of this meeting") said Association Le Renoveau du Conte. He has six times been a Featured Teller at the American National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Spelman has received three EMMYS, presented by the Washington Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, for THREE STORIES TALL, which he hosted for six years on NBC4-TV in Washington, DC.
In addition to THE PROSTATE DIALOGUES, Jon is also currently developing four new projects ( AN ANNOTATED GENESIS; OUT OF THE ICE; TALES FROM
CANTERBURY: A REUNION; and STOOP SITTING ON HAPPY ALLEY, a piece about his neighborhood in Fells Point. He performs frequently in Baltimore schools and is a resident artist with Young Audiences of Maryland, as well as a guest teaching artist at the Baltimore School For The Arts and in the Johns Hopkins University Odyssey Program.