The TAPS Graduate Students host Daniel Pollack-Pelzner for the October First Friday in Roble Gym 137. Open To the TAPS Community.

ABOUT THE LECTURE | Fans of Lin-Manuel Miranda before he became a Hamilton sensation and Disney composer might know his collegiate origin story: that it was during his undergraduate years as a theater major at Wesleyan University that he wrote his first musical, In the Heights, and met the collaborators who would help him shape his chart-topping box-office hits. But his Wesleyan experience wasn't only a launching pad for future successes; it was also a period of dislocation, disorientation, and disarming failure. What lessons could Miranda's own college education hold for an education in the arts today?

ABOUT DANIEL POLLACK-PELZNER | Daniel Pollack-Pelzner is the author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2025). A performing arts scholar at Portland State University and the scholar-in-residence at the Portland Shakespeare Project, he has written about theater and cultural history for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. His profile of Cherokee playwright and lawyer Mary Kathryn Nagle is being adapted into a feature documentary, and his pandemic spoof, "What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague," was turned into a short film for PBS. Born and raised in Portland, he received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He met his wife in their elementary-school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream; they now live in Portland with their two children.