Dear Lara: Community Education Event on Sexual Assault in Higher Education and Documentary Screening

Presented in partnership with FilmScene, Sexual Assault Survivors at Iowa (SASI), The Bijou Film Board, and Honors Students for Unity and Progress:

Join us for a screening of Dear Lara, a deeply personal documentary that exposes decades of sexual abuse and institutional complicity in the classical music world.

9/10/26 – 6:30pm @ FilmScene (Chauncey location)

Purchase tickets ahead of time here. 

Catered reception preceding the screening starting at 6pm

There will be a post-screening panel discussion led by Julia Conrad with representatives from DVIP/RVAP as well as Amber Joy Powell and Katharine Baker.

Amber Joy Powell received her PhD in Sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2022. Amber’s research examines the intersections of gendered racialized violence, law, and the carceral state. Her most recent work explores how juvenile detention centers enable and respond to the sexual victimization of incarcerated youth. She is conducting ongoing research on prison rape reform and the fight for sexual safety among legal practitioners and anti-prison rape activists.

Katharine Baker is the Aliber Family Chair in Law at the University of Iowa College of Law. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of women’s intimate lives and the law. Baker has written extensively on sexual violence and misconduct, especially among young adults on college campuses. Her work has been published in leading law journals such as the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and the University of Chicago Law Review. She co-authored Family Law: The Essentials and numerous book chapters.

About the documentary: 

The story begins in 2019, when renowned violinist Lara St. John speaks out about the sexual assault she endured as a 14-year-old student at the elite Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. After her story is published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, she is flooded with letters and outreach from fellow survivors. Determined to make these voices heard, Lara travels across North America and Europe to meet others who, like her, were failed by the very organizations meant to protect them. As these personal accounts accumulate, a pattern emerges of institutions shielding predators at the expense of the vulnerable. Blending unflinching testimony, investigative rigor, and a haunting original score, the film exposes ingrained practices of harm and cover-ups, rooted in power, silence, and the worship of reputation over justice.

Joined by fellow musicians, journalists, students and activists pressing for accountability, Lara’s pursuit to illuminate this insidious pattern in the classical music world serves as both a reckoning from within and a rallying cry for cultural change, created by someone who lived an all-too-common ordeal and refused to look away.

“St. John […] does not follow the creed that a journalist’s job is to look but not touch […]. She openly approaches the institutions that are causing harm. Her dialogue with these institutions—or lack thereof—is central to her argument that claims of abuse are being swept under the rug.”—Hal Kowalewski, My Scena