Leading the Way
Razia’s Ray of Hope flourishes under the guidance of an active board of directors:
Lars Jan
Lars Jan is a director, designer, writer, and media artist currently living in Los Angeles. He is Razia Jan’s only child. For his entire life, he has watched her move mountains with her generosity, selflessness, and compassion. Knowing just what it means to be the focus of Razia’s nurturing energy, Lars hopes to do whatever is in his power to support her efforts with other young people.
Lars is the founding artistic director of Early Morning Opera, a multi-disciplinary art lab based in Los Angeles that specializes in live performance. He has trained and collaborated with members of Pig Iron Theatre Company, Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, New Paradise Laboratories, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Wooster Group, DumbType (Kyoto), and Gardzienice (Poland). He focuses on the creation of original works, though he also directs seldomly staged texts by master authors, including Ionesco (Jack, or the Submission), Witkiewicz (The Beelzebub Sonata), and Shaw (As Far as Thought Can Reach). In 2003 and 2004, Lars lived and worked in Kyoto, where he trained and performed as a head puppeteer under Abe Hidehiko, seventh-generation chief of the Tondo Ningyo Joruri Theatre — designated as an “Intangible Cultural Treasure” by the Japanese government. In 2005, Lars taught courses on emerging media in performance at Mount Holyoke College and Princeton University, where he developed a new work as a fellow of the Atelier Program at the invitation of author Toni Morrison. During the summer of 2005, he taught as an artist-in-residence at Kabul University and developed a number of public art projects in Afghanistan with the support of a grant from the US State Department. That fall, he inaugurated the Whitney Live series at the Whitney Museum of American Art with an original commissioned work set in the context of the Robert Smithson retrospective.
During the summers of 2005 and 2006, Lars traveled on two expeditions through rural Ukraine led by virtuoso vocalist Marjana Sadowska, culminating in an image-opera at Symphony Space (NYC). In the fall of 2006, he contributed a short film on Los Angeles to the “Cities: Architecture & Society” exhibit at the Venice Architectural Biennale. In 2007, he premiered new works at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and REDCAT (Los Angeles), as well as shot his first feature-length film.
Lars holds a BA in literature and theatre studies from Swarthmore College and an MFA in directing and integrated media from the California Institute of the Arts — the latter degree fully supported by a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar Fellowship. Lars is the recipient of the 2008 Sherwood Award, granted by Center Theatre Group to an innovative theatre artist in Los Angeles.
