Past Initiatives

PAST
INITIATIVES

CRAFT Courses

CRAFT Courses are free courses that examine what’s happening in our pressing social, cultural, historic realities as it intersects with performance and performance training, rooted in the long standing movement towards a new way of being and learning together.

See our past CRAFT Courses here.

Pay It Forward

Fostering relationships across career levels is key to thrivability and professional success. Pay It Forward is a one on one mentorship program designed to help scholars and artists expand their networks and share knowledge and resources that lead to professional growth and advancement.

Learn more about PIF here.

African Diasporic Network

We are reimagining a 21st-century Black Theatre and Performance Circuit—one that sustains the vitality of Black storytelling across platforms and communities. This initiative empowers Black theatres to exercise creative and economic control, build local and global collaborations, and generate new opportunities for performance, touring, and knowledge exchange across the African Diaspora.

CRAFT Consultation

The CRAFT Institute offers strategic consultation to organizations, artists, and institutions seeking to build culturally inclusive ecosystems in arts and entertainment. Grounded in our mission of equity and access, we provide guidance in curriculum and pedagogy, creative content development and production—helping partners align vision, values, and impact to amplify the work of the people of the global majority and culturally specific institutions.

See our past CRAFT Courses here.

CRAFT at ATHE 2023 Program

Past Initiatives Directors:

Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley

DIRECTOR OF THE BLACK VITALITY COMMISSION

Associate Dean, Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley is an associate professor of theatre at the University of Kansas and served as acting chair and chair of the department from spring 2016 to fall 2017. She also served as a co-director of the School of the Arts during the fall 2017 semester. As associate dean, she will work to build proactive efforts to ensure attention to DEI concerns at the institutional and individual level. Professor Hodges Persley is a sought-after campus facilitator and speaker on issues of diversity and inclusion in higher education and the arts. She is an award-winning teacher, mentor and community leader whose scholarship and creative work offer important strategies to address racial and social injustice.

Katelyn Hale Wood

DIRECTOR OF PAY-IT-FORWARD PROGRAM

Katelyn Hale Wood is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History at the University of Virginia and the author of Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States. Their previous writing has been published in Performance Matters, Theatre Topics, QED: A Journal in GLTBQ Worldmaking, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, and the Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance.

Mauricio Tafur Salgado

CO-PRODUCER OF CRAFT COURSE PROGRAMMING

BFA, Acting, Juilliard School
MFA, Directing, Brown University

Mauricio Tafur Salgado is an Assistant Arts Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Drama at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Salgado is mestizo + first gen + born to proudly subversive Colombians + brown skinned + amateur bio-regionalist + aspiring theologian + cis-hetero + married + artist, pursuing justice and healing through a decolonial framework. He collaborates to organize space where folx rehearse revolution, compromise, rage, tolerance, strength, trust, and vulnerability.

Prior to joining Tisch Drama, Salgado co-founded Artists Striving to End Poverty (ASTEP). At ASTEP, he recruited, trained, and supported more than 325 teaching artists and created and implemented 23 programs for artistic youth. He is currently a founding creative producer with the Remember2019 Collective, which supports local black cultural workers in Phillips County, Ark., as they facilitate spaces for self-determination, memory, and reflection that are directly related to the Elaine Massacre. He has worked as a facilitator, actor, deviser, and director with communities in Peru, the Dominican Republic, South Africa, India, Belgium, Germany, Scotland, and across Turtle Island (the United States). He has taught at the Boston Conservatory, Brown University, Santa Clara University, La Guardia Community College, and Kingsborough Community College.

Ciara Diane

CRAFT EMERGING CREATIVE FELLOW

Ciara Diane is a New York-based writer, performer, dramaturg, and facilitator. She is currently The CRAFT Institute's Emerging Creative Fellow and a facilitator for Equity Quotient, a national training and organizational development firm dedicated to supporting arts and culture nonprofits interested in becoming more just and equitable community partners. She was previously an editor at HowlRound Theatre Commons and her journalistic work has been featured in American Theatre Magazine (AT), including serving as contributing editor for their September 2020 issue. She works with an array of nonprofit and theatre organizations across the country and strives to create brave spaces where people of color, particularly Black people, can feel included, joyful, supported, and above all, like they're not alone.

Faedra Chatard Carpenter _ Mosaic CROP.jpg

Dr. Faedra Chatard Carpenter

DIRECTOR OF DRAMATURGY AND COMMUNITY CURATION

Dr. Faedra Chatard Carpenter (Ph.D. in Drama from Stanford University, M.A. in Drama from Washington University, B.A. in English from Spelman College) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Performing Arts at American University, a professional dramaturg, and cultural critic. As a professional dramaturg, Carpenter has worked on innumerable projects at venues such as Ford’s Theatre, Round House Theatre Company, Woolly Mammoth, Olney Theatre Company, Everyman Theatre Company, Baltimore Center Stage, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Mosaic Theatre Company, Theater J, Dance Place, Crossroads Theatre Company, and Arena Stage.

Dr. Carpenter is also the author of the critically-acclaimed book, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance, and her scholarly analysis can be found in a number of anthologies and peer-reviewed journals such as 50 Key Figures in Queer US Theatre, Cambridge Companion to American Theatre, Diverse Dramaturgy, College Literature, Theater Magazine, The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre, Theatre Survey, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Topics, Women & Performance, and Callaloo.

Dr. Eve Graves

DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION AND FORMAL TRAINING PROJECTS

Dr. Eve Graves is a graduate of Spelman College. She began her professional academic career at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA., where she received several awards, published several articles, and was elected to head a national professional organization. Dr. Graves was awarded a Teaching Fellowship from the Carnegie Center for Teaching and Learning at Stanford University. At the end of her final residency at the Carnegie Foundation, Dr. Graves decided to pursue work as an intercultural pedagogue by accepting a teaching position at the prestigious Xiamen University in China. She lived and successfully taught Western Theatre History and Literature in China for four and a half years.