Willa Shalit (born 1955) is an American social entrepreneur, and strategic advisor. She is widely recognized for her work as an artist, theatrical and television producer, photographer and author/editor.
Table of Contents
- 1 Early life
- 2 Career
- 2.1 Artist
- 2.2 Producer
- 2.3 Photographer
- 2.4 Author and editor
- 2.5 Social entrepreneur
- 2.6 Philanthropist and activist
- 2.7 Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female
- 2.8 Life Cast: Behind the Mask
- 2.9 Please Touch! Lifecasts By Willa Shalit and Dean Ericson
- 2.10 The Vagina Monologues
- 2.11 Kadin Olmak : Buyuyup Kendin Olmak Uzerine
- 2.12 Amscan 8400031 Zombie Slayer Costume - Medium (8-10)
- 2.13 Descaler (2 Pack, 2 Uses Per Bottle) - Made in the USA - Universal Descaling Solution for Keurig, Nespresso, Delonghi and All Single Use Coffee and Espresso Machines
- 2.14 Volverme yo misma/ Convert Myself: Reflexions Para Madurar Como Mujer (Spanish Edition)
- 2.15 COSORI Air Fryer Max XL(100 Recipes) Digital Hot Oven Cooker, One Touch Screen with 13 Cooking Functions, Preheat and Shake Reminder, 5.8 QT, Black
- 2.16 Southwest Art, April 1989 (Volume 18, Number 11)
Early life
Shalit was born in 1955 in New York City to film and LP critic Gene Shalit and Nancy Shalit (née Lewis). Her parents were of Russian Jewish descent. Her proclaim comes from the American author Willa Cather. She was born the second of six children. Shalit was raised in Leonia, New Jersey. Her father shielded the relatives from the public eye. Her brother, Dr. Peter Shalit is an internal medicine physician and the author of Living Well: The Gay Man’s Essential Health Guide. Her uncle was Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Anthony Lewis; her aunt, and Lewis’ widow, is retired Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall, who wrote the decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health resulting in the world’s first ruling in a court of unlimited appeal legalizing same sex marriage.
When Shalit was 15, she was raped at knifepoint. She said of the experience, “I literary that dynamism can alter in the blink of an eye and that security is definitely illusory. I moreover realized there are some experiences that require a lifetime to recover from.” She explained that this contract would prove to be severely constructive, if cruel, training for finding common ground later than the women of Rwanda.
She graduated from Saint Ann’s School (Brooklyn) in 1974. In 1978, she graduated from Oberlin College past a degree in Classics. After graduating, she moved to Martha’s Vineyard and joined with performer Richard Lee to create masks.
Career
Artist
Throughout the 1980s, Shalit created “lifecast” sculptures made from molds formed directly upon human faces and bodies. Her casts of five former United States presidents are in the collections of their respective presidential libraries. Other examples of her accomplish are upon display at the United States Olympic Committee’s training middle in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the Fogelson Library at the College of Santa Fe (now Santa Fe University of Art and Design), and the Jewish Guild for the Blind in New York City. She also created activity casts for Muhammad Ali, Bill Gates, Clint Eastwood, Sting, civil rights leader Rosa Parks, choreographer Alvin Ailey, Isaac Stern, sculptor Louise Nevelson, prima ballerina Natalia Makarova and the 14th Dalai Lama.
In 1986, Shalit collaborated subsequently Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and Gilbert Moses to design masks and costumes for Morrison’s deed Dreaming Emmett, directed by Mr. Moses.
In 1994, Shalit and her lifecasting art were featured in the Emmy Award-winning television documentary, Willa: Behind The Mask.
She was artist-in-residence at the College of Santa Fe from 1989 to 1994.
In 1998, Shalit’s exhibit “Incarcerated Women: A View From the Inside Out” was featured at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. The installation displayed life-cast facial portraits of inmates from the Bexar County Adult Detention Center in San Antonio, Texas.
Producer
In 1985, Shalit produced James Lecesne’s play One Man Band off-Broadway.
Shalit was the producer of the first anti-violence benefit work of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues with Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Winona Ryder, Calista Flockhart, Lily Tomlin and others. She then produced a 1997 reading of Eve Ensler’s Necessary Targets at the Helen Hayes Theater Broadway starring Meryl Streep, Anjelica Huston, and Cherry Jones and the landmark V-Day 2001 do its stuff in Madison Square Garden featuring Oprah Winfrey, Queen Latifah, Glenn Close, Claire Danes and many others. Shalit continued to manufacture the ham it up February 1998 in New York City,
and during a second reading of the play a part at Kennedy Center for next First Lady Hillary Clinton starring Natalie Portman and Jena Malone. From 1999 to 2003 Shalit produced the pretense during the off-Broadway direct at New York City’s Westside Theater and vanguard served as giving out producer of the 2002 HBO film of the show. She was an management producer of Until the Violence Stops, a documentary film nearly V-Day’s 2002 activities.
She co-produced the 2002 off-Broadway govern of Ensler’s Necessary Targets, produced Carol Kaplan’s play Jocasta Rising at the Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town, South Africa in 2004, and was an link producer of the 2004 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom starring Whoopi Goldberg.
Photographer
Shalit’s photos of Afghanistan, Rwanda and Israel have been published in the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Parade magazine, Marie Claire magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, and distributed by the Associated Press wire service.
Author and editor
Her 1992 book Lifecast: Behind the Mask (
ISBN 0941831787) details her methods and experiences casting sculptures of the Dalai Lama and other notable persons. Proceeds from the wedding album benefitted the Touch Foundation, which sponsors “Please Touch” exhibits of do its stuff for the blind and visually impaired.
In 2005, along once Yoko Ono, Shalit shortened the HarperCollins book Memories of John Lennon; it features intimate glimpses from those who knew John, including Pete Townshend, Sir Elton John, and David Geffen, and artists who followed him such as Bono, Alicia Keys and Carlos Santana. The tape also contains photographs from Annie Leibovitz.
Shalit edited Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female, a deposit of essays and reminiscences by notable women including Meryl Streep, Maya Angelou, and America Ferrera, that was published by Hyperion in April 2006.
Social entrepreneur
To bring economic advancement to women in post-trauma zones, Shalit has worked to create markets in the United States for products manufactured jointly by Palestinian and Israeli women, and by women survivors of the Rwandan genocide.
Shalit’s company, Fair Winds Trading, became an importer of handmade goods from Rwanda; it partnered like Macy’s for the Rwanda Path to Peace project to announce handwoven Rwandan baskets in the United States, and produced hand-beaded gemstone and glass bracelets in partnership with O, The Oprah Magazine. In 2015, Macy’s and Rwanda Path to Peace much-admired a 10-year partnership.
In 2010, Fair Winds Trading launched the Heart of Haiti line working with Macy’s and the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. The heritage included handcrafted products made by Haitian artists and was ration of an effort to support rebuild from the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Shalit organized a trip to Haiti where Macy’s leaders, joined by Martha Stewart and Rachel Roy, met in imitation of local artisans. In 2010, Macy’s was the biggest U.S. retailer selling handmade Haitian goods, followed by the West Elm and Anthropologie chains.
In 2011, Shalit co-founded the communications solution Road to Market, ltd where she develops global branding strategies and continues to behave with social justice missions and worldwide movements.
Shalit after that co-founded an online platform for women designers called Maiden Nation. The site features put on an act designed by Rachel Roy, Lauren Bush, Yoko Ono, Gloria Steinem and Chan Luu.
When Shalit’s friend Anne Glauber was diagnosed in the impression of pancreatic cancer in 2014, together they held an information-gathering meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, where they met in the same way as Dr. Allyson Ocean of New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine, Kerri Kaplan of the Lustgarten Foundation and others. The team developed Let’s Win – an online community for sharing extra science-driven treatments to put taking place to patients and families fight pancreatic cancer. Shalit is the co-founder and digital director of Let’s Win.
Shalit serves as President of the Board for Indigenous Ways, an advocacy processing based in New Mexico. She in addition to is a team devotee at 18by.vote, a non-partisan youth-led executive developed to retain teenage voter registration and voting.
Philanthropist and activist
Shalit’s Touch Foundation created an exhibit of touchable lifecasts of the faces of celebrities and new notable individuals, for the try of making those faces accessible to the blind and visually impaired, which toured American museums from 1990 to 2000, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, Tennessee.
Shalit was a member of the Board of Trustees at the College of Santa Fe from 1990 to 1995.
She co-founded V-Day when Ensler and served as its first doling out director. V-day is a non-profit doling out that distributes funds to grassroots, national, and international organizations and programs that affect to End violence against women and girls. During her period as supervision director, Shalit traveled like Ensler on a “harrowing undercover journey” to chronicle the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan’s fight against the Taliban in 2002. More than 2,000 members of this clandestine network pay for shelter, education and medical services to Afghan women and girls—all in defiance of the Taliban.
Shalit served as a special advisor to the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and The United Nations Ethical Fashion Initiative. In 2007, Shalit allied the Board of Directors of the Hadassah Foundation. She currently serves upon the Board of the Israeli Palestinian Peace organization, American Friends of the Parents Circle, (Parents Circle Family Forum) and upon the Advisory Board of Feminist.com.
in 2014, Shalit was one of the first sponsors of Women and Men as Allies, an initiative founded by Feminist.com in partnership subsequently The Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University.
Last update 2021-08-06