Playwrights 21st century
Jovan Mihailović is a Serbian and American musician, artist and writer.
Jovan Mihailović was born and raised in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, where he and his family survived the Nazi occupation and the transition to communism. From a young age, he demonstrated artistic ability and began to draw, paint and play the violin. He studied at the Belgrade Theater Academy, worked as a playwright in Yugoslavia and traveled throughout Western Europe as a folk musician before immigrating to Sweden, Canada and finally Chicago in 1971.
Jovan was an active member of Chicago's creative community for four decades, writing dozens of novels, plays, and short stories, as well as performing music in restaurants and cafes. He also created many hundreds of drawings and paintings that are full of emotionally intense images from the artist's mystical universe of beauty.
Raimonds Staprans is a Latvian-born American artist and playwright living in San Francisco, California.
He emigrated from Latvia to the United States in the mid-1940s, and studied art at the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley.
Staprans is best known for his depictions of ordinary everyday objects, such as paint cans, chairs and cabinets, which are painted in bright colors and set against a monochromatic background. His work balances on the edge between realism and abstraction. Staprans has also gained recognition as a playwright, having written several plays on the theme of "the Soviet occupation of Latvia.
Robert Wilson is an American experimental theater stage director and playwright who has been described by The New York Times as «America's – or even the world's – foremost vanguard theater artist.» He has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer.