Tom Lee, head of Harvard’s Learning from Performers program, is stepping down
Dan Hurlin doesn’t have the name recognition of Plácido Domingo, or Renée Fleming, or Lin-Manuel Miranda. But Hurlin, an American puppeteer and playwright, is among the long list of artists who have come to Harvard to share their work and expertise with students as part of the Office for the Arts’ Learning from Performers program. He came at the invitation of program director Tom Lee, who hoped to inspire Sara Berliner ’98, a student who was running a puppet company at Harvard. “Dan did several performances of one of his solo ‘toy theater’ puppet productions, an exquisitely detailed work based on a short story written by a friend who died from AIDS. It was quite a bold and moving statement not usually expressed via puppetry, and it galvanized the students who saw it,” Lee recalled, adding that Berliner followed up by taking a two-day workshop taught by Hurlin. When she left Harvard,...