Teacher, Community Engagement Specialist, Director, Playwright
Tara Brooke Watkins is a New England-based theatre artist specializing in community engagement practices. Currently an assistant professor at Salve Regina University in theatre where she also runs the theatre program, she holds a masters in theatre education from Emerson College and a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University. She is a story circle facilitator and advocate for its use in creating dialogue across boundaries. Using applied theatre techniques in collaboration with story circles, she promotes an embodied communal healing experience around oft-hushed topics like interracial relations, sexual violence, and fatphobia. Out of this desire, she has co-led groups such as “Shatter the Silence” at Bethel AME church in Boston with Rev. Gloria White-Hammond and antiracism accountability groups such as “1619 Reading and Action Group.” As a playwright, she develops theatre productions rooted in the story circle process. Such plays include her signature play, The Bible Women’s Project, an official selection of the New York International Fringe Festival and winner of three national Kennedy Center College Theatre Festival Awards, Tulsa ’21: Black Wall Street about the Tulsa Race Massacre, The Father Bill’s Play about homelessness in Massachusetts and Shatter the Silence, a short play about sexual victimization in religious institutions. In 2019, she directed Sleeping Weazel’s The Audacity: Women Speak, which received the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Theatre Production (small/fringe). She is the founder of South Shore School of Theatre and an award-winner for experimental theatre work on the south shore of eastern Massachusetts, like her immersive production of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (adapted as . . .Or Dreaming) and her traveling neighborhood production of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. She is a paid public speaker, story circle trainer and facilitator, commissionable playwright, and community project consultant. For more: tarabrookewatkins.com.
