Chapel Hill

Playmakers Theatre, also known as Smith Hall, is a Greek Revival temple built in 1850, that was originally designed by New York architect Alexander... Jackson Davis as Smith Hall, a combined library and ballroom. After also being used as a laboratory, bath house, and law school, it became a theater in 1923. The Theatre is the perpetual home of the Carolina Playmakers, although as their successor, the Playmakers Repertory Company uses Paul Green Theatre as their primary venue. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. It was further declared a National Historic Landmark in 1973.
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Kenan Memorial Stadium is located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and is the home field of the North Carolina Tar Heels. It is primarily used for... football. Kenan Memorial Stadium opened in 1927 and holds 62,980 people. It is located in a cluster of pine trees near the center of campus at the University of North Carolina, next door to the Bell Tower. Since the stadium was opened, it has been an unwritten rule that the stadium can never be taller than the surrounding pine trees. Mel Kiper, Jr. ranks Kenan Stadium as the third most scenic venue in the country for college football. The previous home of the Tar Heels had been Emerson Field, which had opened in 1916 on the current site of Davis Library. By 1925, it was obvious that that 2,400-seat facility was not adequate for the increasing crowds. Expansion was quickly ruled out since the baseball team also used it, and any new football seats would have been too far away for baseball. Funding for the stadium was originally supposed to come from alumni donations. William R. Kenan, Jr.
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The Dean E. Smith Student Activities Center, usually called simply the Smith Center and popularly referred to as the Dean Dome is a multi-purpose... arena in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The arena is home to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Tar Heels men's basketball team, and temporary home to the women's team during renovations to Carmichael Auditorium. The arena opened in 1986. The arena is named after former North Carolina coach Dean Smith, who coached the team from 1961 to 1997. According to David Halberstam's biography of Michael Jordan, Smith did not want the arena named after him, but was persuaded by the UNC administration and the arena's backers that fundraising efforts for the facility could fail if they did not use his name. Smith coached the last 11 years of his career in the arena, making him one of the few college coaches in any sport to coach in an arena or stadium that is named for him. The arena originally seated 21,444. Seating adjustments brought capacity to 21,572 in 1992 and 21,750 in 2000. The largest crowd to see a game in the Dean Dome was on March 6, 2005, when 22,125 fans saw the Tar Heels win 75-73 against Duke.
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Bynum Gymnasium was the first home of North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball. It was built in 1904 as a general gymnasium and swimming pool, and... hosted the basketball team for the first fourteen years of its existence . The most distinctive feature of the gymnasium was its second level running track suspended above the court. No longer needed for its original purpose after Woollen Gymnasium was built, the building was remodeled internally as offices and renamed Bynum Hall. As of 2008, it is the Graduate Admissions Office.
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Johnny Reid "John" Edwards is an American politician, who served as a U.S. Senator from North Carolina. He was the Democratic nominee for Vice... President in 2004, and was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and 2008. He defeated incumbent Republican Lauch Faircloth in North Carolina's 1998 Senate election. Towards the end of his single six-year term, he sought the Democratic Party's nomination in the 2004 presidential election. He eventually became the 2004 Democratic candidate for vice-president, the running mate of presidential nominee Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Following Kerry's loss to incumbent President George W. Bush, Edwards began working full-time at the One America Committee, a political action committee he established in 2001, and was appointed director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. He was also a consultant for Fortress Investment Group LLC. Edwards launched a second bid for the Democratic nomination during the 2008 presidential campaign.
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Lewis Niles Black is an American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor. He is known for his comedy style, which often... includes simulating a mental breakdown, or an increasingly angry rant, ridiculing history, politics, religion, trends and cultural phenomena. He hosted the Comedy Central series Lewis Black's Root of All Evil, and makes regular appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart delivering his “Back in Black” commentary segment. When not on the road performing, he resides in Manhattan. He also maintains a residence in Chapel Hill, N.C. He is currently the spokesman for Aruba Tourism, appearing in television ads that aired in late 2009 and 2010. He was voted 51st of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time by Comedy Central in 2004; and was voted 5th in Comedy Central's Stand`Up Showdown in 2008 and 11th in 2010. Black is the son of Jeannette, a teacher, and Sam Black, an artist and mechanical engineer. He was born and raised in a middle-class Jewish family in Silver Spring, Maryland, graduating from Springbrook High School in 1966, summa cum laude.
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Charles Kuralt was an American journalist. He was most widely known for his long career with CBS, first for his "On the Road" segments on The CBS... Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and later as the first anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning, a position he held for fifteen years. Kuralt's "On the Road" segments were recognized twice with personal Peabody Awards. The first, awarded in 1968, cited those segments as heartwarming and "nostalgic vignettes"; in 1975, the award was for his work as a U.S. "bicentennial historian"; his work "capture[d] the individuality of the people, the dynamic growth inherent in the area, and the rich heritage of this great nation." He shared in a third Peabody awarded to CBS News Sunday Morning. Kuralt was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. As a boy he won a children's sports writing contest for a local newspaper by writing about a dog that got loose on the field during a baseball game. Charles’ father, Wallace H. Kuralt. Sr., moved his family to Charlotte in 1945, when he became Director of Public Welfare in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.
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Floyd Council was an American blues guitarist and singer. He became a well-known practitioner of the Piedmont blues sound from that area, popular... throughout the southeastern region of the US in the 1930s. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States, to Harrie and Lizzie Council, Floyd began his musical career on the streets of Chapel Hill in the 1920s, performing with two brothers, Leo and Thomas Strowd as "The Chapel Hillbillies". He recorded twice for ARC at sessions with Blind Boy Fuller in the mid-thirties, all examples of the Piedmont style. Council suffered a stroke in the late 1960s which partially paralyzed his throat muscles and slowed his motor skills, but did not significantly damage his cognitive abilities. Folklorist Peter B. Lowry attempted to record him one afternoon in 1970, but he never regained his singing or playing abilities. Accounts say that he remained "quite sharp in mind". Council died in 1976 of a heart attack, after moving to Sanford, North Carolina. He was buried at White Oak AME Zion Cemetery in Sanford.
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Robert Frederic Schenkkan, Jr. is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor, perhaps most recognizable as the character of Lieutenant... Commander Dexter Remmick in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1992 for his work The Kentucky Cycle. Schenkkan was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to Jean McKenzie and Robert Frederic Schenkkan, a public television executive. He grew up in Austin, Texas. As a Plan II Honors student he received a B.A.in Drama, magna cum laude from the University of Texas, Austin , and an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts from Cornell University. For many years, he lived in New York City and then Los Angeles, California, working both as a writer and an actor in film, television, and theatre. Since 1990 he has focused exclusively on his writing. Schenkkan is the author of ten full-length plays. By the Waters of Babylon premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in February, 2005. The play is unrelated to the Stephen Vincent Benét short story By the Waters of Babylon or its subsequent adaptation.
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Chris Stamey is an American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. After a stint playing with Alex Chilton, and a brief partnering with... Mitch Easter under the name Sneakers, he formed The dB's, whose stewardship he would share with Peter Holsapple. In 1977 in New York, Chris founded the independent record label, Car Records, which released Chris Bell's single "I am the Cosmos" / "You and Your Sister" . Stamey recorded and released two critically acclaimed albums with The dB's, Stands for deciBels and Repercussion , before quitting the band to begin a solo career. In 1991, he and Holsapple reunited to record an album entitled Mavericks. Chris relocated from New York back to Chapel Hill, NC in 1996, and founded a recording studio, Modern Recording with former dB's producer Scott Litt. He has worked as a producer and mixer for various artists and albums. One of his first projects at Modern Recording was recording and mixing Whiskeytown. Chris recorded "Fireworks" in 1988 for A&M Records.But it was released in 1991 through a Rhino subsidiary RNA Records.
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Robert Frederic Schenkkan, Jr. is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor, perhaps most recognizable as the character of Lieutenant... Commander Dexter Remmick in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1992 for his work The Kentucky Cycle. Schenkkan was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to Jean McKenzie and Robert Frederic Schenkkan, a public television executive. He grew up in Austin, Texas. As a Plan II Honors student he received a B.A.in Drama, magna cum laude from the University of Texas, Austin , and an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts from Cornell University. For many years, he lived in New York City and then Los Angeles, California, working both as a writer and an actor in film, television, and theatre. Since 1990 he has focused exclusively on his writing. Schenkkan is the author of ten full-length plays. By the Waters of Babylon premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in February, 2005. The play is unrelated to the Stephen Vincent Benét short story By the Waters of Babylon or its subsequent adaptation.
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Loudon Snowden Wainwright III is a Grammy Award-winning American songwriter, folk singer, humorist, and actor. He is the father of musicians Rufus... Wainwright, Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche, brother of Sloan Wainwright, and the former husband of the late folk singer Kate McGarrigle. To date, Wainwright has released 22 studio albums. Reflecting upon his career, in 1999, Wainwright stated "you could characterize the catalog as somewhat checkered, although I prefer to think of it as a tapestry." Wainwright was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the son of Martha Taylor, a yoga teacher, and Loudon Wainwright, Jr., a columnist and editor for Life magazine. His father was not a professional musician but he did play piano and wrote some songs, exposing his children to musicians such as Tom Lehrer and Stan Freberg who were later cited as influences. Wainwright grew up in Bedford, New York, in Westchester County. Among his sisters is Sloan Wainwright, also a singer. He graduated from St. Andrew's School in Delaware. He is a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Director-General of New Netherland .
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Chris Stamey is an American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. After a stint playing with Alex Chilton, and a brief partnering with... Mitch Easter under the name Sneakers, he formed The dB's, whose stewardship he would share with Peter Holsapple. In 1977 in New York, Chris founded the independent record label, Car Records, which released Chris Bell's single "I am the Cosmos" / "You and Your Sister" . Stamey recorded and released two critically acclaimed albums with The dB's, Stands for deciBels and Repercussion , before quitting the band to begin a solo career. In 1991, he and Holsapple reunited to record an album entitled Mavericks. Chris relocated from New York back to Chapel Hill, NC in 1996, and founded a recording studio, Modern Recording with former dB's producer Scott Litt. He has worked as a producer and mixer for various artists and albums. One of his first projects at Modern Recording was recording and mixing Whiskeytown. Chris recorded "Fireworks" in 1988 for A&M Records.But it was released in 1991 through a Rhino subsidiary RNA Records.
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Spencer Chamberlain is an American musician, best known as lead vocalist for the metalcore band Underoath. Before fronting Underoath, Chamberlain... was also the vocalist for the band This Runs Through in which his brother, Phil Chamberlain, was the drummer. Spencer Chamberlain was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his mother, and older brother, Phil . As a child, Chamberlain's family was well to do and had enough money to pay tuition at Greensboro Day School. Chamberlain's parents divorced when he was in elementary school at Greensboro Day School. Chamberlain also struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. He tells Alternative Press, "You know how some people have a good family or a girlfriend that's always there for them and never fails? That was [what] drugs [were] for me. That was my weakness." He particularly had problems with a serious addiction to cocaine. Chamberlain soon went on to Page High School. Shortly after graduating high school, he moved to Florida.
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Laurel Holloman is an American actress, best known for her roles as Randy Dean in the 1995 indie film The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in... Love, Justine Cooper on Angel, and Tina Kennard on the Showtime series The L Word. Laurel attended the University of North Carolina and appeared in numerous theater productions. After her freshman year, she moved to Chicago to work with the Piven Theatre Workshop. She studied with John Lynn in Los Angeles; was cast in David Orr's independent feature Blossom Time. She moved to New York City in early 1994 and appeared in stage productions such as Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie, Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at Theatre for the New City. Holloman also performed off-Broadway in Julia Jordan's Night Swim at Playwright's Horizons. In 1995, she began her film career with her breakout role as baby butch Randy Dean in The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love for which she received critical acclaim. She has worked steadily in a variety of mostly independent film roles, such as The Myth of Fingerprints, Boogie Nights and Tumbleweeds.
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John Newton is an American actor. He is perhaps best known for his regular roles on the television programs Superboy as Clark Kent in the show's... first season and as Ryan McBride on the original Melrose Place. He starred in the 2009 independent film Yesterday Was a Lie. On the DVD release of Superboy: The Complete First Season in 2006, Newton appears as himself on the documentary featurette "Superboy : Getting Off the Ground" and provided audio commentary with executive producer Ilya Salkind on two episodes. He played regular roles on the television programs Superboy, Melrose Place, and The Untouchables. He had a recurring role on Models, Inc. before being transferred onto Melrose Place after its cancellation. Both shows were part of the Beverly Hills, 90210 franchise. In 2011, Newton and his wife Jennifer lent their voices as Clark Kent/Superman and Lois Lane, respectively, in the animated fan film Superman Classic by veteran animator Robb Pratt. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Newton spent 3½ years training and performing theatrically in New York City, including a brief career as a model.
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