From STEM to STEAM: How an Engineer Wrote a Play

How can software engineering inspire work in theater and film?

After spending more than a decade at Hewlett Packard, learn how Susan Marie Frontczak’s background in engineering, math, and performing arts helped her create an acclaimed living history portrayal of world-renowned scientist Marie Sk³odowska Curie.

Join us for the Bay Area debut screening of the award-winning narrative science film Humanity Needs Dreamers: A Visit With Marie Curie (40 mins), based on Frontczak’s performance. The film will be followed by a keynote presentation and panel discussion exploring the intersection of STEM and the performing arts—and why STEAM is vital in shaping global opportunities in the 21st century.

As one of the world’s most renowned scientists, two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Sk³odowska Curie is best known for pioneering the field of radioactivity—including early experiments to treat cancer with radium therapy—but few understand the obstacles she faced just to enter the laboratory. What if she could tell her story?

Humanity Needs Dreamers: A Visit With Marie Curie invites audiences to meet Marie Curie as she recollects her quest to isolate two elements—polonium and radium. From her childhood in Poland to groundbreaking research in France, Dr. Curie shares the struggles, failures, and triumphs behind her scientific discoveries and remarkable collaboration with companion scientist and husband Pierre Curie.

Produced and directed by Jen Myronuk, Humanity Needs Dreamers is an immersive living history film designed to be screened with a live audience, breaking the digital fourth wall between theater and cinema. Produced by STEM on Stage, a STEAM initiative to promote narrative science through living history film and immersive media. STEM on Stage is part of an NSF-funded collaborative outreach study with Princeton Center for Complex Materials.