June 2020

Ayham Majid Agha is a theater director and actor at Gorki Theater in Berlin. He was trained as an actor at the Academy of Performing Arts in Damascus and studied in Italy and the UK. After a successful career at home, he left Syria. He has been affiliated with the Gorki Theater since 2016. In the season 2017/18 his play “Skelett eines Elefanten in der Wüste” premiered at the Gorki which was invited to the “Radikal Jung” Festival where Ayham Majid Agha won the Young Critics Award. He is married to the novelist Olga Grjasnowa.

Mohamed Amjahid was born as the son of so-called guest workers in Frankfurt am Main. He studied political science in Berlin and Cairo and conducted research on various anthropological projects in North Africa. During his studies, he worked as a journalist for taz, Frankfurter Rundschau and Deutschlandfunk. He has worked as a political reporter for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and the Zeit Magazin. Anthropologically and journalistically, he focuses on human rights, equality and upheaval in the US, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Mohamed Amjahid is a 2020 Thomas Mann fellow.

Olga Grjasnowa was born in Baku, Azerbaijan. In 1996 her family emigrated and settled in Germany as “quota refugees”, where she learned German at the age of 11. After studying abroad in Leipzig, Poland, Russia, and Israel, Grjasnowa took up dance studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her critically acclaimed debut novel “All Russians Love Birch Trees” won the Klaus-Michael Kühne Prize and the Anna Seghers Prize in 2012. Her latest book “City of Jasemine" came out in 2017. Grjasnowa is married to theatre director and actor Ayham Majid Agha.

Josh Kun is a music scholar, author, and curator exploring the ways in which the arts and popular culture are conduits for cross-cultural exchange. He is Director of the USC Annenberg School of Communication, where he holds the Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication. His work has an emphasis on the impact of displacement, relocation, deportation, and immigration on contemporary global music practices. In 2016 he was named a MacArthur Fellow and in 2018, he was Bosch Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Prof. Dr. Jutta Allmendinger is Professor of Sociology at the Humboldt University in Berlin and President of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) (Social Science Research Center Berlin). She received her training in sociology and social psychology at the University of Mannheim (M.A. 1982), the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University (Ph.D. 1989), and the Free University of Berlin (Habilitation 1993). In 2019, she was a fellow in residence at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles.

Dr. Allmendinger worked as Researcher at the Center for Survey Research and Methodology (Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen, ZUMA) in Mannheim (1981-83), as Research Assistant at Harvard University and at the Center for Educational Sciences at the University of Wisconsin (1984-88). From 1988 to 1991, she was Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. From 1999-2002, she was Chairperson of the German Society for Sociology (DGS), from 1992 to 2007 she was Full Professor of Sociology at the University of Munich and, from 2003 to 2007, Director of the Institute for Employment Research (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung der Bundesagentur für Arbeit, IAB) in Nürnberg. In the academic year 1991-1992 she was Fellow at the Harvard Business School in Cambridge (Program for Organizational Behavior) and, in the academic year 1996-1997, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

Dr. Allmendinger holds memberships in the Scientific Commission of the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW), the expert commission “Research und Innovation” of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, and in the Foundation Council of the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). She is editor in chief of the Zeitschrift für Arbeitsmarkt Forschung (ZAF) (Journal for Labor Market Research) and was coeditor of the Journal of European Societies (1998-2001). Dr. Allmendinger has published 11 books and over 140 articles, mostly in peer-reviewed journals on social inequality, educational sociology, labor market research, demography, and social stratification.

William E. Strickland grew up in the Manchester neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Oliver High School. He then attended the University of Pittsburgh, where as an undergraduate he founded the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild as an after-school program to teach children pottery skill in his old neighborhood. He graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in American history and foreign relations in 1970. Following graduation he continued to build the Manchester Guild into an innovative nonprofit agency that uses the arts to inspire and mentor inner-city teenagers. In 1972 he took over the Bidwell Training Center that trains displaced adults for jobs.

He has served on the boards of the National Endowment for the Arts, Mellon Financial Corporation, and the University of Pittsburgh. For his work, Strickland has won various awards including a MacArthur Fellowship "genius" award in 1996. He has been honored by the White House, and received the Goi Peace Award in 2011.

In June 2018, Strickland announced that he would be stepping down from his role as president and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corp., but that he will remain on as executive chairman. He had served as the leader of the organization for 50 years.