Geoffrey Dunbar
About me
My undergraduate degree is in economics. I went to the city to get my MFA from NYU. I never really left after graduating. I worked in show business as a lighting designer and stagehand for 45 years.
I schooled in New York, I worked in New York. I still need the cultural hit that only New York provides. For example: I toured professionally with American Ballet Theater, worked at Radio City Music Hall and The Metropolitan Opera House. I designed the lighting for more than 75 off-Broadway plays. I was a lighting director at ABC TV.
My first city apartment was on Fifth Avenue, in a maid’s room, for $50 a month. I moved to the Bronx in1973, into an Art Deco building on Jerome Avenue near old Yankee Stadium.
Those days were dangerous. I witnessed the birth of graffiti in NYC (including work by Keith Haring) while commuting every day to NYU. After a few knife point muggings, I moved to the UWS where I have lived in the same apartment near Central Park since the late ’70s.
Knowing and loving New York is really having lived through all its manifestations, witnessing its changes.
I travel to learn how people live, how they manage living with low incomes in expensive cities, how they grapple with hard times and failing economies and ageing or crumbling families, how they age, what their lives mean to them and how they adapt.
Why New York
I love New York because it has a broad cultural spectrum, manifested in all forms of the arts, food, technology, politics and transportation, with easy access to the beautiful countryside surrounding it, and the other magnificent cites that are near it.
Where else can you find me online?
Ensemble Studio Theatre
