Cultural Strategy ……..

is a concept that threads through a wide array of projects I have led/curated/produced/imagined/facilitated.

Local community organizing with Solidarity Sundays: trans kid care packages event, a freeway banner drop, and raising money for voter registration

Circus/Borders was a multiyear exploration with Jeff Raz on telling stories of border-crossing through circus. Stories were offered by university students and voiced by actors. Youth performers from the SF Circus Center perform.


The “Equity Bench” installation at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, part of a year-long fellowship exploring the concept of equity. Participants interviewed each other about their relative privilege then devised possible reparations for each other.

My essay “Please Don’t Start a Theater Company” was featured in this anthology. When Grantmakers in the Arts shared a version of it, the article went viral and was read by more than 30,000 people. Currently it is included in many college curricula.

I developed and led The Triangle Lab, a collaboration between California Shakespeare Theater and Intersection for the Arts aimed at creating methods to integrate theater more deeply into community life.  Lab programs catalyzed a major shift in Cal Shakes' mission and programming, attracted more than $1 million in national funding, and positioned Cal Shakes as a national leader in civic and community engagement.

Promoted to an expanded role  as Cal Shakes' associate artistic director, I led the new artistic engagement program.  New initiatives included a community tour, the Artist-Investigator project which placed artists in year-long residencies with social service non-profits, and expanded partnerships related to main-stage productions.  

Touring The Tempest to Civicorps Youth Center

Cal Shakes collaboration with Arielle Brown on The Love Balm Project, a series of site-specific pieces commemorating the places where young men were murdered

From founding a small theater company to reimagining who could participate at the California Shakespeare Theater; from designing granting programs at Theatre Bay Area to dreaming up civic engagement projects; from helping arts organizations redesign their leadership structures to collecting stories about border-crossing and setting them against circus performance…I’ve always been practicing cultural strategy. That is, I’ve always been seeking ways for art to work for justice,

Audience engagement at California Shakespeare Theater

 

Participants in a workshop on creative practice at the Yale Innovation Summit, co-led with Meena Malik

 

I’m a proud collaborator at Creative Evolutions where we work to dismantle outmoded ways of operating across the arts & culture sector. This has included working with Theatre Communications Group to move to a shared leadership structure, designing more humane methods for executive search, and developing planning methods better suited to these volatile times. Below: our “strategic pathways” offering, a staff retreat at Studio East with colleague Calida Jones, and post-its galore at the end of a two-day retreat for the faculty and staff of the UCSD Theater & Dance department, facilitated with Dr. Kim Davis.

One of a set of projects called Storybank for the Resistance exploring how first-person stories can shift political narratives. This was a collaboration with Bonfire Makers Collective in support of a rent control proposition.

The American Theatre Leadership Change Project (with Evren Odcikin) tracked the demographics of incoming artistic leaders. Our work was covered extensively including in American Theatre Magazine and the New York Times.

Audience dance party on the stage at Cal Shakes after a performance of Spunk led by Traci Bartlow

Installation by David Slaza with many different community members performing Romeo and Juliet’s famous balcony scene