Theater as a Site of Public History: Dillon Chitto in conversation with Laurie Arnold

BIOS

Dillon Chitto is Native American from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and the Pueblos of Laguna and Isleta. Very much a product of his environment he grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he learned the importance of art, culture, and traditions from his family and members of his community. In his playwriting, he connects these ideas using storytelling techniques learned throughout his life. Dillon is presently in Chicago, Illinois and is currently a company member of BoHo Theatre where he is the Literary Manager. His first play Bingo Hall, developed by Native Voices at The Autry and presented during their 2017 Festival of New Plays, was given a world premiere at Native Voices in March 2018 in Los Angeles. He was selected as Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program’s 2017 winning playwright. Bingo Hall had a reading presented by the Global Voices theatre project as part of 2019 Origins Festival of First Nations at the British Library in London. He was also featured in the 2019 Adaptation Festival at Theater Above the Law in Chicago, Illinois. Dillon was also awarded Sundance Institute’s Uprise Grant in 2022, and Theatre Bay Area’s Rella Lossy award for best new script. 

Laurie Arnold is an enrolled citizen of the Sinixt Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes. She is Associate Professor of History, Director of Native American Studies, and the Robert K. and Ann J. Powers Chair of the Humanities at Gonzaga University. In 2019-20 she held the Frederick W. Beinecke Senior Research Fellowship at Yale University and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. Her first book, Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: The Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination, was published by the University of Washington Press. Her scholarship includes Colville author Mourning Dove, the Indigenous Columbia Plateau, Indian gaming, and her current research considers how contemporary Native American playwrights are using theatre to tell Native narratives of the past and present.

Her publications have appeared in Time Magazine and in scholarly journals including Montana: The Magazine of Western History, the Western Historical Quarterly, and The Public Historian. She is a publicly engaged scholar and has collaborated on projects with the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, the High Desert Museum, the History Colorado Center, and the National Council on Public History. She holds a PhD in History from Arizona State University and a Bachelor’s degree in History from Oregon State University.