3 BY 3

3 by 3

Welcome to 3 by 3, a Sunnylands interview program where control is in the hands of the person being interviewed.

This program focuses on women in different professions. The subject of each interview is allowed to select the person who will interview her, and she will be able to frame the six questions she will be asked.

There’s only one caveat:

Three of those questions must be ones that the subject has been asked before and finds them to be irrelevant. The remaining three questions must be ones the subject is rarely or are never asked, but believes they really should be.

The third episode of our 3 by 3 interview series is with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and program director at The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. An expert in the study of communication, she discusses her own experiences with gender bias within the academic world. In this segment, Jamieson is interviewed by Center & Gardens Director and 3 by 3 host Michaeleen Gallagher.

In our second interview for 3 by 3, Kathleen Doherty, former U.S. Ambassador and current chief strategy and retreats officer at Sunnylands, elected to have her conversation with Katherine Maxwell, a graduate student studying public administration and international relations at Syracuse University. They discuss biases women in leadership roles experience in the diplomatic sector, and how women often adjust to accommodate those situations.

In this inaugural interview for 3 by 3, artist Ghada Amer has a conversation with her sister, Sahar Amer, regarding the questions posed about her work that are rooted in biases related to culture, religion, gender, and sexuality. Ghada challenges conventional views of women and sexuality, particularly within the art world, and shares her views of cultural dichotomies, confronting shallow definitions and categories.

For Desert X 2021, Ghada Amer created Women’s Qualities, a site-specific garden sculpture at Sunnylands. Through a polling process, the artist asked members of local Coachella Valley communities to identify seven qualities of women. She then used desert and arid-adapted plants in metal planters to illustrate these words. It was on display at Sunnylands from March 12 through June 6, 2021.

Sahar Amer is a former professor and chair of the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and the University of Sydney.