This May, the Company One Theatre Season 24 Volt Lab brings you We Grow Together, a roundtable discussion on the challenges, inquiries, and discoveries of collaboration in a new play development process. Facilitated by Kirsten Greenidge and Shana Gozansky and featuring guest artists Diana Oh, Gab Reisman, Megan Sandberg-Zakian, and Nambi E. Kelley, We Grow Together is a case study that centers the importance of collaboration and its impact on collective and reimaginative storytelling.
Join our digital watch party on Wednesday, May 17th at 7pm ET to watch the roundtable and grow together as artists in dialogue!
RSVP required; 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.
>> About the Artists
Annalise Guidry (they/them)
Annalise Guidry is a Black and Puerto Rican non-binary theatre artist from New Orleans, with a background anthropology. Inspired by indigenous ways of “knowing-together” and feminist notions of “communion,” Annalise emphasizes collaboration and union in all their work processes to combat systems of domination through art. Annalise’s work centers the storyteller to amplify diverse voices and stories that are not frequently heard or valued. Cultivated during their time at Marlboro College (VT) and Emerson College in Boston, Annalise works as a translator to make life (our stories, superstitions, experiences) and art (playwriting, directing, performance) commune with each other. They have directed or co-directed six plays, three of which were original works exploring the intersection of theatre, anthropology, and social change, including: 3 Women, 3 Myths (Edinburgh Fringe Festival); and Just a Thing (2021). Annalise is a teaching artist with Hyde Square Task Force, amplifying the power, creativity, and voices of Afro-Latine youth by fostering an ensemble to teach, direct, and co-produce original performances as gifts to the Latin Quarter in Boston.
Fabiola R. Decius (she/her)
Fabiola R. Decius’ plays have been produced and/or developed within the Greater Boston area and beyond at Bryn Mawr College, Lesley University, Fade to Black Festival, Our Voices Festival, Company One Theatre, Wheelock Family Theatre, SpeakEasy Stage Company, the Roxbury Repertory Theater, Fresh Ink Theatre, the Office of War Information (Bureau of Theater), the Boston Theater Marathon, and the Boston Neighborhood Network channel among others. Her works include Ladies’ Night (BTM); If You Begin, Finish It (SpeakEasy Stage Resilience Project); First Night; Black Jesus (Long Island Theatre Collective); RX 3162020; The Test; Final Verdict; Man of the House; Fighting Forgiveness; and Mr. and Miss After-School. Fabiola was a Creative City grant recipient through the New England Foundation for the Arts in 2018, and founded Teens WRITE (Writing, Reading, and Investigating Theater Everywhere), a program for teenagers to write, revise, cast, direct, and produce original plays culminating in a festival. Although writing is Fabiola’s first passion, she also performs, and merges her passion for performing arts and working with young people as a high school theatre teacher. Fabiola graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a Bachelor of Arts, and received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Stage and Screen Writing.
Gayané Kaligian (she/her)
Gayané Kaligian is an actor, writer, and fight director from Boston by way of Armenia. After four years as a freelance entertainment news journalist, she turned to essays and playwriting as a way to link activism with the arts. Plays include The Freakshow Tunes In At Ten PM, Our Bloody Favorites, and A Table at Rocco’s, among others. Her work has been featured in Off the Cuff fashion & arts magazine, The Armenian Weekly, and the Armenian Student Association’s Trchnakir. Recent performing credits include The Salamander and the Impediment (BUCFA New Works Initiative); Richard II, Twelfth Night, and The Taming of the Shrew (BU Shakespeare Society), as well as the Student Production Award-winning music video “Ivory.”
Jupiter Lê (he/him)
Jupiter Lê is a theatre-maker, born and raised on the lands of the Massachusett people, presently known as Dorchester, Boston, MA. He is a queer transmasculine man, a Vietnamese-American child of immigrants, a predominantly public school student, a renter, and a descendent of intergenerational trauma. He studies Theatre and Cultural Anthropology at Northeastern University. Recent performing credits: Interstate (East West Players); Shrike (Fresh Ink Theatre Company); Sunday Swings An Old-New Gospel (Huntington Theatre); projects with Asian American Playwright Collective; and My Body Is a Season (SpeakEasy Stage); Jupiter is here to find community. Find him! Go, go, go!
Rachael Duarte Hunt (she/they)
Born into a bi-racial family and raised on multicultural mythology and Cape Cod beach plum foraging, Rachael continues to cobble together words and symbols into stories for healing, and towards a more joyful life for all. Using her life experience as a cross-disciplinary performing and visual artist and in the sphere of anthropological independent research, she integrates information from all walks of life into her colorful mosaics of meaning, creating a new mythology for the human sapiens of today to step into their true innate wisdom. In addition to wordplay and dramaturgy, Rachael offers Ayurvedic, astrological, and soul-tending consultations to clients around the world, while keeping time for sourdough adventures, dancing, and the ocean; always alongside her beloved partner and children.
Nontani Weatherly (she/her)
Nontani Weatherly is a dramaturg based in Boston, MA. She earned a BA in Theatre Studies from Central Washington University. In 2015, she joined Artists Striving to End Poverty, a New York-based non-profit focusing on the intersection of arts and activism. She is a recipient of the Black Theatre Network’s S. Randolph Edmonds Award (2018). She has dramaturged several productions, most notably Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog (University of Houston), which landed on Houston Chronicle’s The Best Theater Productions in Houston of 2017 list. As an all-around arts enthusiast, she enjoys sharing her love of theatre with anyone she can. These days, it’s usually with her residents at Sherrill House, a skilled nursing facility, where she works as a Recreation Assistant.
Julie-Anne Whitney (she/her)
Julie-Anne Whitney is a playwright and dramaturg. Her full-length play Little Girl Blue was nominated for the Open Meadows Foundation Nancy Dean Lesbian Playwriting Award and her 10-minute play An Umbrella for the End of the World won the 2022 KCACTF National Playwriting Program’s Planet Earth Award for a play “that addresses sustainability and our responsibility to the planet.” Her dramaturgy credits include Pause/Play/Stop (new work-in-progress), Into the Breeches! (HUB Theatre Boston), Machinal (Boston Conservatory at Berklee), and The Half-Life of Marie Curie (The Nora/Central Square Theater). She is also a National Committee Reader/Reviewer for Playwrights Foundation. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and a BA in Theatre Arts from Plymouth State University.
Wenxuan Xue (any pronouns/ta)
Wenxuan Xue is a queer migrant artist, educator, scholar, and dramaturg. They create and support new performance work that explores Asian/American migration, race, queer/transness, and ecologies towards collective liberation. Their artistic process centers on nurturing and awakening “the inner child,” who always sees love, tenderness, and kindness in the darkest corners, who is so curious, open, and playful about the world’s beautiful messes, and yet undisciplined to be ruled by norms of gender, borders, and adulthood. Wenxuan recently worked with Gung Ho Projects, Square Theatre, The Lark, New York Stage and Film, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and Ping Pong Productions. Ta is currently a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University.
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 a Playwright 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 HOUR 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.
Shana Gozansky (she/her)
Shana Gozansky is a freelance director, teaching artist, and children’s book author. She has directed at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Trinity Repertory Company, Gloucester Stage Company, Boston Playwrights’ Theater, Central Square Theater, Company One, The Hangar Theatre, The Calderwood Arts Pavilion, The Bowery Poetry Club, Dickinson College, Manhattan Theatre Source, and The Red Room. She has held teaching positions at Brown University, Clark University, and The College of the Holy Cross and has directed at all three as well as Emerson College and Boston University. She has assisted on productions at Berkeley Rep, The Geffen, Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, Henry Miller’s Theater, and Trinity Repertory Company. Shana holds a MFA in Directing from the Brown University/Trinity Repertory Company MFA Programs and a BA in Theater from Bard College, was an Artistic Associate at The Hangar Theatre, an Artist-in-Residence at both chashama and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Shana is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, is a Drama League Directing Fellow, and an Associate Member of SDC.
>> About C1's Volt Lab
The Volt Lab provides mentorship opportunities for pre-professional theater creatives to practice and enhance their craft while actively engaging with our productions and community engagement programming. This year, we are happy to announce that the Volt Lab cohort includes both playwrights and dramaturgs! The cohort will be placed into collaborative teams, and will spend the season with Resident Playwright Kirsten Greenidge learning best practices for giving and receiving feedback, nurturing the creative spark, and bringing a new project from early drafts through to workshop and showcase.