Major Regional Theaters Form Joint Artistic Caucus in Support of Artistic Development

In an unprecedented collaboration, Baltimore Center Stage, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Long Wharf Theatre, and The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis have joined forces to hire a group of freelance artists to participate in a joint year-long Artistic Caucus as key parts of the artistic development teams within each theater. This initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

"The four of us have been working together formally in these positions for just a few years, but we've been informally collaborating our entire careers," shared Artistic Directors Hana Sharif (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis), Jacob Padron (Long Wharf Theatre), Maria Goyanes (Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company), and Stephanie Ybarra (Baltimore Center Stage). "Our field has long operated through the organic relationships formed amongst theater-makers, and this Artistic Caucus is our latest way of naming that trend and optimizing for it. By combining our intellectual and financial resources and increasing interconnection at every artistic level of our organizations, we are able to force multiply to throw our doors even further open - evolving how we bring artists into our communities towards more equality, more transparency, more accessibility, more trust, and more abundance."

The shared Artistic Caucus is made up of theater artists (intentionally not limited to traditional literary managers and dramaturgs) based all around the country, who will actively engage in reading new plays and proposals, scouting projects, and facilitating relationships with artists on behalf of all four theaters. In establishing this Caucus, the four theaters are actively opening up the frequently competitive and opaque artistic development process of our industry by engaging artists to help identify projects, paying them for their expertise, and positioning the different artistic priorities for each organization as a place of strength and cooperation.

Four Artistic Caucus members - Marie Cisco, Nailah Harper-Malveaux, Adil Mansoor, and Regina Victor - will support the artistic teams at each theatre, joined by Annalisa Dias (Director of Artistic Partnerships and Innovation, Baltimore Center Stage), Cheyenne Barboza (Artistic Associate, Long Wharf Theatre), Kate Moore Heaney (Artistic Associate, Long Wharf Theatre), Becks Redman (Producer of New Play Development, The Repertory Theater of St. Louis) and Sonia Fernandez (Director of New Work, Woolly Mammoth Theater Company).

"I am especially excited that the caucus brings together an ensemble of folks interested in curatorial disruption," says Artistic Caucus member Adil Mansoor. "I appreciate that the strategies and deliverables of our work together weren't predefined and are coming out of our time together. It's thrilling to experiment with a curatorial model that resembles a devising process and encourages emergent possibilities."

This new model evolves the traditional structures of literary management by making space for more entryways into our artistic development pathways, more touch points for artists, more voices in the room, and more visions for what theater can be. Integrating this Artistic Caucus into the artistic development practices at Baltimore Center Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, the Repertory Theatre of St Louis, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company bridges a key gap between freelance artists and theater institutions towards ever increasing transparency. By combining the forces and resources of these four institutions, the Artistic Caucus represents an investment in interconnection and abundance.

The Artistic Directors of these theatres formed a cohort as four newly appointed artistic directors of color at major regional theatres, sharing a singular goal of creating artistic homes across the country that are inclusive, intersectional and focused on the liberation of all people, using transparency, shared learning and collective resource mining.