Join us at the Boston Public Library on Saturday, August 5th from 9am-5pm ET for a free in-person experience led by C1 Director of New Work Ilana M. Brownstein, C1 Resident Playwright Kirsten Greenidge, and guest artist Shanaé Burch.
As our season comes to a close with Kickstarting Our Creativity, C1 presents Rest, Resistance, & Radical Creativity: a skill-building workshop on developing a burnout-resistant personal mission for artmaking and social change.
This program is for civically-minded artists, creatives, and theatremakers, at any level of expertise, who want to connect more fully to their communities. We will identify personal and artistic values, explore how to navigate creative work & collaborations within them, and leave with a toolbox and resources on how to deepen a values-based practice.
This is a Pay-What-You-Want experience with $0 minimum. All proceeds support C1's mission to build community at the intersection of art and social change.
ASL interpretation will be provided during the event.
>> RSVP for Special Early Bird Opportunities
Ticketed full day attendees who sign up in advance have the opportunity to receive guided feedback from facilitators during special working sessions, as a model for the larger group.
- Opportunity #1: Story Circle. Don't miss this rare chance to be part of guest artist Shanaé Burch's guided community story circle. Space for this opportunity is limited, no preparation or previous experience with story circles is required. Indicate your interest in being part of the Story Circle on the ticketing & check-out page.
- Opportunity #2: Case Study. A limited number of participants will be invited to share specific experiences from their own practice, in response to a prompt that will be sent in advance. Using a case study model, Resident Playwright Kirsten Greenidge & co-facilitators will work with these participants to connect the share-outs to their deepening artistic and personal value statements. Indicate your interest in being a featured participant on the ticketing & check-out page.
>> About the Artists
Shanaé Burch (she/her)
Dr. Shanaé Burch believes in the power of storytelling to revive health and reconcile hearts. Her hunch has led her to pursue a doctorate in public health education at Teachers College, Columbia University where she studied health equity through the lens of better leveraging arts and culture for wellbeing with contemplative arts-based research methods such as theatremaking, collaging, and public health dreaming. She previously attended Emerson College and Harvard Graduate School of Education where she received her B.F.A in Acting and Ed.M in Arts in Education respectively. Integrating all aspects of her learning and personal lived experience, her dissertation is titled, In Pursuit Of Healthful Narratives: Black Women And Gender-Expansive Citizens Creating And Performing Art And Cultural Work In Service Of “Good Health" and features her play-in-progress, GriefLove, along with poetry featured in Health Promotion Practice's Poetry for the Public's Health section where she is a co-Associate Editor along with Dr. LeConté Dill and Dr. Ryan Petteway. Dr. Burch is proud to have been funded as a Gates Millennium Scholar and RWJF Health Policy Research Scholar. Committed to health justice, she champions workers' rights as a member-leader within her union, Actors' Equity Association, and serves with Community Conversations: Sister 2 Sister -- a health community in Cambridge, MA. Born in North Hollywood, CA and later raised in Buena, NJ, her path is deeply influenced by her parents who are both storytellers --- one as an arborist and the other a social worker. Time with her loved ones (especially the niblings!), training with her service dog, Dodger; and community building with Double Love Experience Church add depth to her life while extensive traveling, practicing her golf swing, and marathon training add further spice. She’s run 3 of the 6 World Major Marathons, and hopes to run in Tokyo, London, and Berlin in the near future. www.shanaeburch.com
Ilana M. Brownstein (she/her)
Ilana M. Brownstein is the Director of New Work at C1, and a parent-artist specializing in new plays, social justice, and public advocacy. She is the Founding Dramaturg at Playwrights’ Commons. Previously, she created the Playwriting Fellows program and Breaking Ground Festival at The Huntington; led the dramatic literature and dramaturgy curriculum at Boston University for 10 years; and has served as a freelance dramaturg for new play festivals, including The O’Neill, New Harmony, and the Kennedy Center among others. Dramaturgy with C1 includes works by Kirsten Greenidge, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Young Jean Lee, Aditi Kapil, Natsu Onoda Power, Lauren Yee, Mia Chung, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Josh Wilder, Kristoffer Diaz, A. Rey Pamatmat, Qui Nguyen, and Idris Goodwin. She is the senior dramaturg for the C1 PlayLab program, which has provided script and professional development to 60+ playwrights over 11 seasons. She is a member of the 2019 NAS Creative Community Fellows Cohort, artEquity’s 2017 anti-racism facilitator cohort, and holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Yale. Ilana has been a Kilroys nominator, served on the National Advisory Board for HowlRound, and is a two-time winner of the LMDA Elliott Hayes Award for excellence in dramaturgy.
Kirsten Greenidge (she/her)
Kirsten Greenidge’s work presents African American experiences on stage by examining the nexus of race, class, and gender. Kirsten is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Company One Theatre in Boston Massachusetts, where she helps run Company One’s playwriting program, PlayLab. She is the author of Baltimore, a commission from the Big Ten Consortium at the University of Iowa, which toured to the National Black Theatre Conference; Bud Not Buddy, an adaptation of the children’s novel by Christopher Paul Curtis, with music by Terence Blanchard, which will be produced this winter at Metro Stage Company in St. Louis; The Luck of the Irish (Huntington Theatre Company; LTC3); and Milk Like Sugar (La Jolla Playhouse; Women’s Theatre Project; Playwright’s Horizons), which was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award and received an Independent Reviewers of New England Award, and San Diego Critics Award, and an OBIE Award. She is a 2016 winner of the Roe Green Award for new plays from Cleveland Playhouse for Little Row Boat; or, Conjecture, a play about Sally Hemings, James Hemings, and Thomas Jefferson, commissioned by Yale Rep. Her play As Far As a Century’s Reach toured to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August, after being part of the Royal Exchange’s B!RTH Project. She is a proud author of Audacity, part of Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Every 28 Hours Plays, and she’s enjoyed development experiences at Family Residency at the Space at Ryder Farm, the Huntington’s Summer Play Festival, Cleveland Playhouse (as the 2016 Roe Green New Play Award recipient), The Goodman, Denver Center Theatre’s New Play Summit, Sundance, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Sundance at Ucross, and the O’Neill. Kirsten is currently working on commissions from Company One, La Jolla Playhouse, OSF’s American Revolutions Project, The Goodman, and Playwrights Horizons. She is an alum of New Dramatists, and has proudly graced the Kilroys list of New Plays by women and women identified Playwrights several years running. Her play Familiar, a winner of the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival New Play Award, was presented by Harvard’s A.R.T. Institute this winter. She is an alum of Wesleyan University, and the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa. She oversees the Playwriting Program at the School of Theatre at Boston University.