Pictured left to right: Gabriel Barrera (Founder of ScenicG), Seena Hodges (Founder + CEO, The Woke Coach), Carmen Morgan (Founder and Executive Director of artEquity), Mica Cole (Producer), and Leslie Ishii (Artistic Director, Perseverance Theatre) seated around a table for this deeply honest conversation.
Check out this great discussion hosted by artEquity.
Four Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) artists and administrators gather for a deeply honest discussion of the emotional and personal costs involved in working with and in predominantly white theatres.
In a workplace of daily humiliations and microaggressions, what is it like to be asked by white leadership to not only represent the “diversity” of their organization, but to help them become better people?
What are the rewards and successful strategies for support and survival?
This conversation was hosted by Carmen Morgan (Founder and Executive Director of artEquity), and featured Gabriel Barrera (Founder of ScenicG), Mica Cole (Producer), Leslie Ishii (Artistic Director, Perseverance Theatre), as well as our very own Seena Hodges.
Hosted by artEquity Founder and Executive Director, Carmen Morgan, Talking Back brings artEquity's practice of facilitating hard and necessary conversations to a broader audience. The curtain is pulled back and viewers gain insight into the activism and progress that has been achieved by theatre practitioners across the field. Through engagement with founding Artistic Directors, newly appointed leaders, and activists who have operated at all levels of leadership in arts organizations across the US, we learn what it takes to transform, not just an institution, but an entire field.
Talking Back was filmed in September of 2019, before the first case of COVID-19 was recorded and prior to the global uprisings in 2020 in response to the ongoing violence and murder of Black people by police officers and civilians in the United States and abroad.
This series was created in partnership with Oregon Shakespeare Festival and produced by Sharifa Johka, OSF Director of Equity.