May 5, 2026, 3:00 p.m.

Strefa BE, 1 Jagiellońska Street

A debate organized in collaboration with Georgetown University, The Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics, the Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków, and Jagiellonian University.
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The Trump administration is removing content related to slavery, racism, and the genocide of Indigenous peoples from museums, national parks, and memorial sites across the U.S. The president is openly interfering with American culture and history, attempting to bend them to his own views. What do Trump’s actions mean specifically for American artists? How do American forms of protest differ from Polish ones? If culture is a sphere of social practices and history is the study of different points of view, then isn’t every cultural and historical policy inherently manipulative? What would define the limits of this manipulation?

Participants: Cynthia P. Schneider, Derek Goldman
Moderators: Marta Bryś, Marcin Kościelniak

The event will be interpreted consecutively.
Free admission

Cynthia P. Schneider – a diplomat and lecturer at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where she also co-directs the Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics with Derek Goldman.
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She publishes and lectures on the importance of culture in diplomacy and international relations, while putting these ideas into practice—both in war zones and in Hollywood. U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands from 1998 to 2001. Previously, she was a lecturer in the Department of Art History at Georgetown University and a curator of exhibitions on Dutch art (National Gallery of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Metropolitan Museum of Art). She is the author of articles for, among others, the “Los Angeles Times,” CNN.com, “TIME,” and “Foreign Policy,” as well as strategic studies and reports for the Brookings Institution.

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Derek Goldman – theater director, playwright, curator, theater scholar, and professor in the Department of Theater and Theater Studies and at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He serves as artistic and executive director of The Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics (The Lab), which he co-founded with Cynthia Schneider.
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As a director, playwright, and adapter, he has collaborated with, among others, Chicago’s Steppenwolf, Washington’s Shakespeare Theater Company, The Kennedy Center, Ford’s Theater, Lincoln Center, Theater for A New Audience, Berkeley Rep, Baltimore Center Stage, Folger, Everyman Theater, Mosaic, Theater J, and Synetic Theater. He has directed over 100 theater productions, including, as part of The Lab, “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.”

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Marta Bryś – Ph.D. in the Humanities, graduate of theater studies at Jagiellonian University. Editor of “Gazeta Teatralna. Didaskalia,” lecturer at the Acting Department of the Stanisław Wyspiański Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków, member of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People (ASSITEJ).
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In 2014–2015 and 2016–2017, she served on the jury for the Competition for the Staging of Polish Contemporary Plays organized by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. She collaborates with numerous institutions as a curator (including Krakow Theater Reminiscences, POP-UP Theater, Krakow Art Salon, and Marek Chlanda’s CARGO at Cricoteka). In 2020, she published the book “The Experience of Post-Memory in Theater,” and in 2025, “The Estera Rachel and Ida Kamiński Jewish Theater in Warsaw: A Biography of the Institution.”

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Marcin Kościelniak – cultural studies scholar, theater scholar, and professor at Jagiellonian University. Editor of *Didaskalia: The Theater Gazette*. His research focuses on postwar Polish culture, particularly issues of dispersed power, symbolic violence, political art, and the mechanisms by which knowledge about the past is constructed.
Author of the books: “Human Rights, My Rights. The Theater of Helmut Kajzar” (2012), “Egoists. The Third Way in Polish Culture of the 1980s” (2018), “Abortion and Democracy. A Counter-History of Poland 1956–1993” (2024). Co-editor of several volumes, most recently: “Self-Censorship and Censorship: New Perspectives” (2024). Currently, as part of an NCN grant, he is preparing the second volume of a monograph on the political and cultural history of abortion in Poland.

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The Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics was established in 2012 as a joint initiative of the School of Foreign Service and the Department of Theatre Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
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Its mission is to humanize politics through the use of performing arts tools. The Lab is a center for research and artistic initiatives as well as a global network of artists, policymakers, scholars, cultural organizations, and students, recognized for its innovation at the intersection of the performing arts, civic dialogue, education, and global politics.