Karen Monahan has joined Wieden+Kennedy, New York, as director of digital production. She previously served as head of interactive at BBH New York.
During her BBH tenure, Monahan was instrumental in establishing processes for the development of interactive work and was influential in the launch of key campaigns for Axe Unilever, such as “100 Girls” and the recently launched Axe “Rise” campaign.
Before joining BBH, she held the managing director role in the New York office of Perfect Fools, an international boutique design agency, and earlier held the roles of executive producer and director of production, respectively, at digital agencies R/GA and Big Spaceship.
At Wieden, Monahan rounds out an interactive creative management production team that includes interactive creative director Jerome Austria, and which is headed by executive creative directors Todd Waterbury and Kevin Proudfoot, and head of content production Gary Krieg.
Before she began her advertising career, Monahan was the assistant chair of the digital design department at Parsons School of Design, where she received a Master’s degree in design and technology and a Bachelor’s degree in fine art.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More