Thomas Mann House Events Archive
July 2025
An Evening of Contemporary Cello with Seth Parker Woods & Thomas Mann Fellow Steven Walter
Thomas Mann House (1550 N San Remo Drive, CA 90272)
Language: English ・ By invitation only
Info
Join the Thomas Mann House and Thomas Mann Fellow Steven Walter for a captivating evening with three-time GRAMMY-nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods.
The insightful conversation explores the diversity of America's classical music scene, discussing approaches to composing new music in today's world and the profound connection between music-making and societal issues. Woods, hailed by The Guardian as “a cellist of power and grace,” will perform a program of powerful solo cello works by American contemporary composers Alvin Singleton, Chinary Ung, Carlos Simon, and Giacinto Scelsi. In conversation with music curator Steven Walter, they will explore the diversity of America's classical music scene, discussing approaches to composing new music in today's world and the profound connection between music-making and societal issues on both sides of the Atlantic.
Participants
Three-time GRAMMY®-nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator across multiple genres. Woods’ projects delve deep into our cultural fabric, reimagining traditional works and commissioning new ones to propel classical music into the future. He is an honoree of the 2023 Seattle Symphony’s 25th Anniversary Silver Gala and recipient of the 2022 Chamber Music America Michael Jaffee Visionary Award. Woods has served on the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at The University of Southern California since 2022, and was appointed to the Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music in 2024.
Steven Walter is an award-winning music curator and cultural manager. He grew up near Stuttgart as part of an American family in Germany, with a few interludes in the USA. He studied cello in Oslo and Detmold and cultural management in Hamburg. In 2009, he founded PODIUM Esslingen and developed it into an award-winning platform for new concert formats. He has been the director of the Beethovenfest Bonn since 2021. Walter is a 2025 Thomas Mann Fellow.
Loss of Shared Worlds: Reckoning with Environmental Destruction
Thomas Mann House (1550 N San Remo Drive, CA 90272)
Language: English ・ By invitation only
Info
From Kyiv to Los Angeles, we have witnessed how environmental destruction has dramatically altered our understanding of home, place and belonging. To trace ways in which ecological grief is echoed and reckoned with across these different contexts, the Thomas Mann House- which recently reopened after the devastating Palisades Fire- presents a conversation between Darya Tsymbalyuk (University of Chicago) and Ursula K. Heise (UCLA). The conversation will open with Tsymbalyuk briefly introducing her recent book Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity, 2025) and sharing poignant accounts of witnessing ecocide in her homeland of Ukraine. Drawing connections between Ukrainian experiences, the scarred lands of the Pacific Palisades, and beyond, Tsymbalyuk and Heise will discuss the loss of cherished places and species to examine the role of storytelling and the cultural imaginations in ways of inhabiting the damaged Earth.
Darya Tsymbalyuk's residency is part of a collaboration with Kyiv to LA, a cross-cultural initiative that invites Ukrainian artists, researchers, and art historians to participate in a residency and public program in Los Angeles. Organized by Independent Curator Asha Bukojemsky, the project marks a collaborative framework with several Los Angeles organization, including the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House; 18th Street Arts Center; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles (ICA LA); GRI Scholars Program; California Institute of Technology (Caltech); The Center for European and Russian Studies, UCLA; Los Angeles Filmforum; and e-flux in New York, amongst others. Kyiv to LA is made possible by a generous grant from Nora Mcneely Hurley and Manitou Fund.
Participants
Ursula K. Heise holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is co-founder and current Director of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Her research and teaching focus on the environmental humanities; contemporary environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Vietnam; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. Her books include, among others, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor of the series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave.
Darya Tsymbalyuk writes, researchers and makes images, and her work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and critical-creative practice. She is the author of the book Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity, 2025). Darya serves as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), University of Chicago.