FORUM SERIES

The Rockford University Forum Series presents speakers in a variety of disciplines who have achieved success both nationally and locally, and performers of stature in the arts. The Forum Series’ central programming focus is geared toward students, while also seeking to connect campus to the local community. Lectures and performances are concerned with intellectual, social, and cultural matters of general interest to deepen and broaden students’ education at Rockford University and enhance the rich culture of Rockford.

Forum Series presenters and events cover a broad spectrum of scope and genre. Events have included the Tibetan lamas from Drepung Loseling Monastery and their creation of a mandala—a sacred sand painting; Holocaust survivor Zev Kedem, the compelling speaker who worked with Steven Spielberg on the movie Schindler’s List; Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on a Central American Peace Plan; quadriplegic Olympic bronze medal rugby player Mark Zupan; film documentarian Barbara Martinez Jitner, who produced “La Frontera;” Davar Ardalan, author of “My Name is Iran;” and traditional University events like the President’s Opening Convocation, Charter Day Convocation, and theater productions.

Admission is free for students* but tickets are required for Performing Arts and Sports events. Gallery shows, Performing Arts Senior Seminars, and Recitals do not require tickets. Please contact the Box Office at 815-226-4100 for additional information. To request and reserve tickets, please email BoxOffice@rockford.edu.

*Except mainstage theatre performances for the general public (tickets can be purchased by visiting rupa.ludus.com; Rockford University students receive one free ticket to each Performing Arts event upon request with valid ID by visiting the box office or emailing boxoffice@rockford.edu. 

The Forum Series presents both Home Grown and Marquee events on the Rockford University campus in multiple locations. Please refer to the campus map for help finding venues if needed. https://www.rockford.edu/about/campusmap/

For further information on some of the events below and additional athletic schedules, please use one of the links below:

-Gallery shows https://www.rockford.edu/artslectures/artgallery/ Current gallery hours: Wed 3-5pm, Fri 12-3pm or contact Ari Norris at anorris@rockford.edu

-Performing Arts Programs https://www.rockford.edu/artslectures/performingarts/

-Athletics Department, teams, and team schedule info https://rockfordregents.com/index.aspx

Fall 2025 Lineup

President’s Convocation
President Patricia Lynott
Friday, August 22, 2025, Noon
Maddox Theatre, Clark Arts Center

To start each academic year, the campus gathers to hear from the University President. This tradition, dating back to 1851, includes a formal academic procession by the faculty and others in full regalia for the occasion. Join us to hear about the upcoming year. All RU students, staff, and faculty in attendance will have a chance to win a generous prize.

Forum Marquee Event                                                                                Fotos y Recuerdos
Salvador Dominguez
On Display: September 2nd – October 17th
Reception: Friday, October 10th, 6:00-8:00PM
Artist Talk: Friday, October 10th, 7:00PM

Salvador Dominguez was born in 1985 in Zacatecas, Mexico, and grew up in Pomona, California. He now lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, where he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. Like many first-generation immigrants, language is an important part of Dominguez’s narrative. Not just in terms of communication but also in its relevance within a broader contemporary American culture. Employing pattern, vibrant shifting colors and abstracted pictographic imagery, Dominguez’s works occupy a unique space between painting, textile-making and functional design.

Dominguez’s 2024 solo presentation with De Boer Gallery at the New Art Dealers Association
(NADA) Contemporary Art Fair in Miami was recognized by ARTnews in their top 6 selections
from the fair, writing “In his works that take on art history from the Renaissance to Pop art,
Dominguez imbues his own sense of cultural history to provide a sharp commentary on growing
up in the United States as the child of immigrants.”

Recent solo and group exhibitions include De Boer Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago, IL), Western Exhibitions (Chicago, IL), DePaul Art Museum (Chicago, IL), Lubeznik Center for the Arts (Michigan City, IN), Ralph Arnold Gallery at Loyola University (Chicago, IL), Walker Art Gallery (Garnett, KS), National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago, IL), Carroll University (Waukesha, WI), One After 909 (Chicago, IL), Thomas Masters Gallery (Chicago, IL), and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago, IL).

Anthony Robert Grasso
Saturday, September 13, 2025, 9:30am-12:30pm & 1:30pm-4:30pm.
Maddox Theatre, Clark Arts Center

Anthony Robert Grasso is an award-winning actor, director, and educator, and the founder of ARG Studios, where his students work consistently in film, television, and theater. He served as Artistic Director of Breakthrough Studios for 16 years and teaches in-person, virtual, and international masterclasses for colleges, universities, and performing arts studios. Grasso trained at the British American Drama Academy at Oxford, The Actor’s Studio, and The Neighborhood Playhouse, studying under renowned teachers such as John Barton, Fiona Shaw, Arthur Penn, and Larry Moss. His television credits include recurring and guest roles on Jessica Jones, Gotham, The Sinner, FBI, Blue Bloods, Person of Interest, Sex & The City, and eight appearances in the Law & Order franchise. Deeply rooted in the indie film scene, he has acted in over three dozen films, with his work as an actor, producer, and director screening at festivals from Sundance to Cannes. Grasso is known for his versatility and passion for bold, character-driven stories.

Participation is free to the public. For further information please call 815-226-4108.

Constitution Day Celebration
“Who Controls Foreign Policy in the United States?”
Ryan Scoville, Professor of Law
Marquette University Law School
Thursday, September 18, 2025, 2pm                                    Fisher Chapel, Rockford University

On September 17, 1787, the Constitution of the United States was signed in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania state legislature—the same site that witnessed the signing of the American Declaration of Independence. This year is the 238^th anniversary of that historic occasion.

Rockford University will celebrate Constitution Day with a shared classroom visit from Marquette University Law School Professor Ryan Scoville who will be meeting electronically with Dr. Ron Lee’s Current Issues in American Foreign Policy class (POLS 387). Please sit in with us to listen to an informative aspect of the US Constitution that is often less-explored, but increasingly critical in the 21^st century.

Most Americans are aware of the central role that the president and the executive branch play in foreign policymaking.  But has this always been the case? Find out what the Constitution tell us about the distribution of foreign policy powers and the foreign policy responsibilities of the other branches, especially Congress. Explore how we get to the point where presidents and the executive branch seem to have almost exclusive authority over foreign policy. Learn the part the courts can and should play in interpreting the law and resolving disputes as they relate to foreign policy. Understand how the fact that the US. has a federal system of government that divides power between the national government and state governments effects American foreign policy. With respect to current foreign policy matters, know the constitutional debates surrounding the Trump administration’s immigration and international trade policies and its use of military force. Come and learn more about our most basic governing document while celebrating its creation.

Regent Cabaret                                                                  Broadway Through the Decades
Saturday, September 20, 2025, at 7:30 pm.
Cheek Theatre, Clark Arts Center
Director, Aiden Foreman                                                    Assistant Director, Aubry Musfelt                          Choreographer, Nora Eliff                                                                                                                                                                    Come and experience a night of dazzling music, storytelling, and theatre magic with Regent Players’ “Broadway Through the Decades”, a cabaret of traditional Broadway show songs. From the sweeping romance of Oklahoma!, the eerie complexity of Hadestown and the fairy tale fantasies of Into the Woods. The students of Rockford University and the wider community come together in this cabaret celebrating the songs that have captured the hearts of generations. Come see our performers and enjoy the drama, joy, and magic of Broadway right on campus!

Forum Marquee Event
A Workshop for International Day of Peace
“Prototyping Plural Pathways Towards Peace:
Situating, Storying, & Slipping”                                          Danielle Lake, Ph. D., Associate Professor
Director of Design Thinking                                                      Elon University
Monday, September 22, 2025, 9am                                        Fisher Chapel

Held in conjunction with ”In the Spirit of Jane Addams: Global Dialogue, Social Change, and Community Engagement in the 21^st Century” an International  Conference at the University of Warsaw in Warsaw Poland, September 25-26, 2025, this interactive workshop is an invitation to reimagine plural pathways towards peace. Dr. Lake will share research on effective social systems changemaking, highlighting powerful stories and promising strategies from visionary changemakers like Jane Addams, Grace Lee Boggs, and Arturo Escobar.

Join student participants across the RU campus and the globe as they together frame, explore, generate, prototype, and cultivate situated strategies that transform practices and policies, shift resource flows, reshape unjust structures, build relationships, and generate tipping points.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
October 2-5, 2025 (Thursday-Saturday 7:30 pm; Sunday 2 pm)
Maddox Theatre, Clark Arts Center
Director, Prof. Timm Adams

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is the colorful and comical re-telling of the Old Testament’s Joseph and his eleven jealous brothers who sell him into slavery. Joseph’s ability to interpret dreams sparks a meteoric rise from captivity to a seat at the Pharoah’s right hand. It’s a story of hope, resilience, and forgiveness told entirely through song: a toe-tapping array of 70s rock, country-western, French ballad, Calypso and more. This family-friendly musical will have you on your feet dancing along with the cast by the show’s mega-mix ending! JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of The Really Useful Group. www.concordtheatricals.com

Forum Marquee Event
ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence Nationwide Reading
Monday, October 6, 2025, 7pm
Cheek Theatre

ENOUGH! invites YOU to attend staged readings of this year’s plays in your community.

On October 6, 2025, six of the plays submitted through our nationwide call in Spring 2025 will be presented in an evening of readings staged simultaneously by theaters, schools, and community groups across the country. Nearly 3,000 artists in more than 150 communities have participated across three previous Nationwide Readings. Many have used ENOUGH! to forge meaningful community partnerships and create space for the youth of their area to be seen and heard.

Our teens are looking for answers on how to avoid becoming another statistic and saying, “Enough is enough.”

Will you join them? For more information Nationwide Reading | ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence

Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar—Forum Marquee Event
“Democracy and the Arts”
Dr. Shannon Jackson
Cyrus & Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities
University of California at Berkeley                                    Tuesday, October 7, 2025, 4:00pm                                      Fisher Chapel

What is the role of the arts in activating and sustaining democratic life? How have artists sustained the rights of free expression? Why are some forms of artistic expression censored? How have the arts contributed to social movements? Should the arts have a politically useful role? Or stay strategically “un-useful”? In different eras and regions of the world, artists have responded to these questions quite differently. This lecture explores a range of socially engaged art practices, considering how some seek to make community, how some seek to expose inequity, and how some open new ideas of what democracy might mean.

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley and the Chair of the History of Art department. Her research, teaching, and convening focus on the role of visual, literary, performance, and media art forms in social movements and in public life, with a recent focus on ecological aesthetics. For more information use this link to the PBK website; https://www.pbk.org/visitingscholars/2025-2026/shannon-jackson

Women’s Soccer Senior Day
Date TBD vs. TBA
Game TBA, ceremony TBA
Sam Greeley Field, Rockford University                                                          Help recognize those senior students playing their last home season by coming out to cheer them on!

Men’s Soccer Senior Day
Date TBD vs. TBA
Game TBA, ceremony TBA
Sam Greeley Field, Rockford University                          Help recognize those senior students playing their last home season by coming out to cheer them on!

Forum Marquee Event                                                          Post-Digital Landscapes
Curtis Anthony Bozif, Ruth Lantz, & Jonathan Worcester  On Display: October 27th – December 12th
Reception: Friday, November 21st, 6:00-8:00PM
Artist Talk: Friday, November 21st, 7:00PM

Curtis Anthony Bozif Curtis Anthony Bozif is a Chicago-based visual artist and art writer. He was born in 1982 in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned his BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2006. That same year, he moved to Chicago where, in 2008, he earned his MFA from the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University. His art has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in numerous private collections throughout the country. To date, his art criticism has been featured in Newcity, Bridge,and the Reader. Since 2008, Bozif has worked as a Digitization Specialist in the Digital Products & Data Curation workgroup at the Northwestern University Libraries where he specializes in cultural heritage imaging and digital assets and project management with an emphasis on color management, image quality standards, analytics, and quality control. Aside from making his own art, Bozif enjoys thinking and writing about other peoples’ art; reading about art, history, ecology, and nature; hiking, backpacking, and camping; and listening to jazz and classical music. He keeps his studio and lives with his wife, Zoë, and their growing family of houseplants, in the lakeside neighborhood of Rogers Park on Chicago’s far northside.

Ruth Lantz, an Urbana, IL based artist, received her Masters in Visual Studies from the Pacific
Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in Portland, OR in 2010. Her work has been featured nationally at numerous galleries and institutions, including the Rockford Art Museum (Rockford, IL), Russo Lee Gallery (Portland, OR) Disjecta (Portland, OR), Washington State University Vancouver (Vancouver, WA), Governors State University (University Park, IL), St. Louis Artist’s Guild (St. Louis, MO), Northern Illinois University (Dekalb, IL) and Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis, IN). Her work was featured at the Portland International Airport and she was a presenter in the “Making a Better Painting” Symposium at the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR. Lantz is the founder of Crit Connection, a project providing networking opportunities and resources to emerging and mid-career artists.

Jonathan Worcester lives and works in Chicago, IL. He received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024, and his BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2015. He is the Departmental Specialist in the Applied Arts of Europe Department at the Art Institute of Chicago and currently a Teaching Fellow in Painting and Drawing at SAIC.

Football Senior Day
Saturday, November 8 vs. Wisconsin Lutheran College
Game at noon, ceremony TBA
Seaver Center, Rockford University
Help recognize those senior students playing their last home season by coming out to cheer them on!

Women’s Volleyball Senior Day
Date TBD vs. TBA
Game TBA, ceremony TBA
Rockford University Seaver Center
Help recognize those senior students playing their last home season by coming out to cheer them on!

Forum Marquee Event
“Voices: Men and Women of Africa and America”
The Rockford Reader’s Theatre
Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 7pm
Maddox Theatre

African and American playwrights in the 20th and 21st century have shared stories of the black experience on two continents and found the binding connection to all of humanity seeking strength, dignity, and purpose. Under the direction of Dorothy Paige-Turner, the Rockford Reader’s Theatre will present selections from the works of August Wilson, Athol Fugard, Lynn Nottage, Efua Sutherland, and many others. Giving voice to these writers will be George Davis Richard Meeks Jacquelyn Rogers Wendell Thompson Carl L. Towns Coleen Martin Williams Janet Wright, in addition to Dorothy Paige-Turner.

Describe the Night
November 20-23, 2025 (Thursday-Saturday, 7:30 pm; Sunday 2 pm)
Maddox Theatre, Clark Arts Center
Director, Prof. Deborah Mogford

In 2010 a Polish Air Force Flight plane crashed near the Russian City of Smolensky killing the president of Poland, along with 18 members of the Polish Parliament. There is evidence suggesting this air disaster may have been an act of terrorism. Or is this just a conspiracy theory? The truth behind the incident sparked the mind of Rajiv Joseph to write an intense espionage thriller, Describe the Night. Joseph explores the historical friendship between the writer Isaac Babel and Nikolai Yezhov, the military man who helped create the KGB. How do their lives intertwine with a mysterious Stasi agent?   This epic play traces the lives of seven people connected by history and myth over 90 years while asking the question how often does time, hate, and ruthlessness turn truth into lies and lies into truth. DESCRIBE THE NIGHT is presented by special arrangement with Broadway Licensing, LLC, servicing the Dramatists Play Service collection. (www.dramatists.com)

Holiday Magic: A Night at the Movies, Part 2
December 5, 2025 (Friday, 7:30 pm)
Maddox Theatre, Clark Arts Center
Director, Prof. Timm Adams

Escape to a magical evening of unforgettable songs from Hollywood’s most memorable holiday movies. Rockford University choirs and soloists will take you on a nostalgic journey through the years with music from White Christmas, Meet Me in St. Louis, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Love Actually, Nightmare Before Christmas, and more. And no holiday movie music celebration would be complete without paying tribute to Rudolph, Frosty, and the Grinch!

Alice in Winter Wonderland
December 6-7, 2025 (Time, TBA)
Maddox Theatre, Clark Arts Center
Director, Sara Goodger

Alice is having a horrible holiday. Her parents are busy, her neighbors are mean, and her brother is totally annoying. On top of all that, she has homework — on Christmas Eve! — which involves writing a book report on Alice in Wonderland. While reading, Alice becomes drowsy, sees a White Rabbit, and follows it down a rabbit hole, plummeting her into Wonderland in the middle of winter. Now it’s up to Alice, and many of Lewis Carroll’s iconic characters, to restore Wonder to Wonderland. A contemporary, heartfelt reimagining of the classic story that is sure to bring joy and warmth to the holiday season. Join us for this enchanting and timeless tale for the whole family as we kick-off the month of December.