MOUNT VERNON — Kathleen Juhl’s upcoming performance at a Cornell College Music Mondays concert is hardly the first venture to Iowa for this Texas resident.
An acclaimed theater professor at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Juhl will read the works of top American and European novelists and poets during a multimedia performance featuring pianist Kevin Kenner, in a production called Hydra at Cornell’s King Chapel on Sept. 29.
Juhl was active in drama in junior high and high school in Tama/Toledo. She earned degrees in theater, speech and English from Iowa State University. During college she took a year off to perform with the Old Creamery Theater in Garrison, including a Midwest touring production of “A Dandy Yankee Doodley Doo” for the bicentennial in 1976.
Juhl arrived at Southwestern as a visiting artist in 1987. Two years ago her colleagues recognized her outstanding work in the classroom by naming her the Brown Distinguished Teaching Professor.
Juhl’s Iowa ties run deep. Her parents, Jackie and Phil Juhl, live in Waverly; her brother, Tim, is the longtime high school band director in Greene; Tim’s wife, Michelle, is the daughter of Norma “Duffy” Lyon of Toledo, the butter sculptress for the Iowa State Fair. Juhl has a niece attending the University of Iowa and a nephew attending Iowa State.
“I love Iowa, visit my folks and brother often, and am so excited to perform there after all these years,” Juhl says.
Over the summer Juhl performed at the Danish Immigrant Museum in Elk Horn in western Iowa as part of their Minnesota Days exhibit. She did a biographical performance piece, written by a relative, of her great-aunt, the wife of a Danish Lutheran minister who served churches in Elk Horn and Fredsville, Iowa.
“The stage manager for the show, the director and people who helped with many other aspects of the show were members of my family. It was a great event mostly because a whole busload of folks who were my great-aunt’s and great-uncle’s parishioners at the church in Fredsville came and saw the show,” she says.