In conjunction with BAMPFA’s presentation of Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground, the Black Life series, and the Oakland Theater Project, watch a recording of a live conversation and Q&A about Collins’s work as a writer and filmmaker.

Nina Lorez Collins is a writer and entrepreneur and manages the literary estate of her late mother, Kathleen Collins. She is the founder of The Woolfer, a social platform and website for like-minded women over forty, and the author of What Would Virginia Woolf Do? And Other Questions I Ask Myself as I Attempt to Age Without Apology. Collins has a long professional background in book publishing, as a literary scout and as an agent. She serves as a trustee of the Brooklyn Public Library and board member of the publishing house Spiegel & Grau.

Eisa Davis is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist working on screen, on and off Broadway, and in hybrid performance spaces. She is codirector of the premiere of Kathleen Collins’s Begin the Beguine: A Quartet of One Acts for Performance Space New York in conjunction with Oakland Theater Project, Alliance for Downtown NY / En Garde Arts / The Tank, New Georges, and AFROFEMONONOMY // WORK THE ROOTS. She has originated roles in The Secret Life of Bees, Preludes, This, and Passing Strange. Her own works include two albums (Something Else and Tinctures), The Essentialisn’t (2020 Creative Capital Award), Bulrusher (Pulitzer finalist), and Angela’s Mixtape.

Geetha Ramanathan’s most recent book is Kathleen Collins: The Black Essai Film. She is the author of, among others, Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films, Locating Gender in Modernism: The Female Outsider, and The Female in German Modernisms: The Visual Turn. A professor of comparative literature at Westchester University, she is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Resurgent Modernisms.”

Dawn L. Troupe is an actor, director, and educator. She is codirector and star of the Oakland Theater Project’s Begin the Beguine: A Quartet of One Acts. Troupe’s most recent Off Broadway acting credits include Moby-Dick, Brothers ParaNormal, Anne of Green Gables, Year of the Monkey, and As Much As I Can. She has directed theater in the Bay Area for twenty years, including productions of Guys and Dolls, The Secret Garden, 13 the Musical, Jungle Book, Wonderland, Annie, Bye Bye Birdie, The Lottery, and Dial M for Murder.

Oakland Theater Project’s literary manager John Wilkins is the founder and former artistic director of Last Planet Theatre. He directed critically acclaimed productions of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Ursula, Fear of the Estuary, Sore Throats, Farmyard, Sweet Table at the Richelieu, and The Designated Mourner. He also was the theater critic for KQED Arts and covered the Bay Area performance scene at his own site, The Free Audience, and currently teaches in the Writing and Literature department at CCA.