May 8, 2025

Lisa Channer is a professor of Theatre Arts & Dance in the College of Liberal Arts. She is also a director, writer, actor, and producer of theater and film, with work across the U.S., Ireland, Europe, and Russia. As a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, she spent Spring 2025 connecting with community and peers in search of a medium to apply to her current work in progress. This project spotlights the captivating story of her mother, Eileen Channer, a secret pregnancy and birth, and paves the way for a complex discussion on mid-century views of reproductive rights, women’s autonomy, and social norms in the United States. Channer is co-founder of Theater Novi Most and is the co-director of Sickle, on stage through May 10.

Here, Channer discusses her family’s story, its personal and political connections, and how she has used her Faculty Fellowship at the IAS to turn her discoveries into art.

In 2020, Lisa Channer discovered that her mother and father had given a child up for adoption before she was born. Now, she and her brother David, with whom she grew up, have found and met their third sibling, Wes, sixty years later.

Our story is unusual, because we’re full siblings. And because we ended up in the same town! Neither of us—his adoptive family or my family—have Minnesota connections, so it is very strange that we, the University of Minnesota, brought both of us here, at different times. My project is a story of learning there was this other sibling—full sibling—that we didn’t know about, learning that he lives in the same town as me, and then understanding what it tells me about the choices my mother had to make in 1959 and 1960.

The project highlights the joy surrounded with uncovering this hidden family connection, but also emphasizes Channer’s investigation into the societal pressures on women who had children or were pregnant out of wedlock during this time, including class and immigration status.

In the fifties, when my mother was making this decision, it was considered absolutely not something you talk about: a pregnancy conceived out of wedlock, even if you were going to get married. It's not a uniform experience to be a woman in America. Every class, every race has different pressures. When I think about my mother, I'm very moved because she didn't have status yet, she was still trying to figure out how to make it in this new land by herself, which is already kind of extraordinary. She was a very sharp, very bright woman, but had very little formal education. They didn't educate her or many girls past the age of sixteen at that time. Then she met my father, and he was from a much more established American family who had been here for a couple more generations, and they were solidly living as middle class in the Detroit area. I think about my mother having the opportunity to experience this American Dream lifestyle with a yard, a house, and all the benefits that come with it—that is something she wouldn't have had in England, she was from a much lower class. Class plays a big part on the pressures that exist and it's very possible that there were heavy pressures on her to not let anyone know that there had been a mistake.

Channer also stresses the importance of acknowledging how current attacks on feminism and reproductive freedom parallel the time period her project examines.

There is a whole concerted effort right now to bring us back to that time. There are powerful individuals who absolutely, openly and without apology, want us to go back to a time when women were more considered property, and what came out of their bodies was property. If you don't get to control what happens to your body and choose when and if to become a parent, all other rights are meaningless in some ways, because this is the most basic reproductive freedom.

Channer’s work-in-progress includes a mix of primary sources, ranging from old family photos to interviews with women who also gave up children for adoption.

I have some eight millimeter films my father's family had taken in the fifties and sixties that I have now digitized along with some letters between my parents in the first months of the pregnancy back and forth, because she was in England visiting her family. They don't ever mention the pregnancy, but you can read between the lines. I also have a few photos of my mother where we now know she was pregnant at the time. I have done a lot of personal writing, but I've also been conducting some interviews with women who gave up children for adoption, especially in the years before Roe v. Wade or before third wave—or even second wave— feminism kicked in. There's been some very beautiful testimonies about loss and the kinds of pressure that existed for women. But I don't know where all this is leading yet.

While it is not yet clear to Channer exactly what method she will be using to tell her story, she has used her semester at the IAS to experiment with different forms.

My project is still in a very early stage. It still feels very tender. So I can't say, I know it's a film, or it's a performance, or it's an article, or it's an installation. I'm mostly a theater director and a performance maker but I have made a few films now, too. For a while I thought it might be a film, and now I just am not sure what it is! But the cohort at the IAS is so wonderful, and I feel so blessed to have that kind of supportive group. The structure that the IAS does so well around interdisciplinary work, it really feels like a safe place to explore new ideas. I'm really grateful to get inspiration from people from sociology and German studies and all these other fields that, of course, are very different from mine. It's very stimulating to hear people talk.

Receiving the IAS fellowship has made this semester a truly remarkable one for Channer, as she continues to develop her project-in-progress, which she has tentatively titled Eileen in 60. She expresses her gratitude for her peers and community at the IAS.

Having the IAS fellowship has made it such a great semester for simmering this project, because every single person in this cohort has been interesting and useful and stimulating for me. They're just amazing, a national treasure. They've supported some of my projects in the past through research collaboratives, but I have never been a fellow. Then a colleague of mine—they did it once—said, you know this is a great thing, you should do it. So this is my first year as a fellow, and I just can't thank them enough.

Lana Burling (she/her) assists in developing content to support the outreach efforts of the IAS. She is a student at the U of M with a passion for writing and creating. In 2024, Lana was awarded Volunteer of the Year by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center for her interviewing and writing done for the city’s annual music festival.