Announcing a New Home and New Leadership!

We’ve got some exciting news to share: Beginning in January, HowlRound Theatre Commons will operate independently and with new leadership, as co-founder and director Jamie Gahlon steps into an advisory role and Ramona Rose King and Julia Schachnik assume the positions of co-directors. 2026 is our fifteenth anniversary, and the start of the next era for HowlRound.

Looking back on her tenure, Jamie said,

When HowlRound launched, we set out to create a third space where diverse theatre practitioners could ideate and share knowledge in pursuit of a more equitable and just theatre field. Now, almost fifteen years later, the experiment of HowlRound has grown into essential, shared field infrastructure as a global digital knowledge commons connecting tens of thousands of theatremakers and culture workers monthly across seventy countries. It has been an honor to steward this work, and I will be forever grateful for this experience and for Emerson College’s long commitment to nurturing this possibility into being. Looking ahead, I am excited to support HowlRound and Emerson from a different seat as we each evolve to meet the moment.

Moving forward, HowlRound will be fiscally sponsored by Producer Hub, a New York-based nonprofit organization and connective space for independent producers, artists, and other arts workers creating live performance. As a sponsee of Producer Hub, all our core programs and values will remain the same. Ramona and Julia will continue to work alongside current team members Vijay Mathew, Ashley Malafronte, Munroe Shearer, Thea Rodgers, and Yaşam Gülseven.

Julia, who is currently HowlRound’s creative producer and joined the team in 2023 from the American Repertory Theater, said,

Ramona and I are so excited to guide HowlRound into the next phase of operations, building on the work we’ve accomplished under Jamie’s leadership. As we look to the future, we’ll continue to curate progressive and disruptive content, to model commoning, and to provide the free and open access that has defined our work while also creating new digital content streams and pathways for connection, co-learning, and collaborative resourcing.

Ramona, who currently serves as HowlRound’s digital content and communications manager and who has held multiple positions in the organization since 2015, added,

HowlRound is stewarded by a small group of administrators who are also working theatremakers. This work is personal to us—we are building the field that we need. This transition strengthens what has always made HowlRound distinct: our belief that theatre can model the systems of equity and care we hope to see in the world, and that cultural infrastructure can be co-created out of abundance rather than scarcity, collaboration rather than competition.

HowlRound launched as an online journal in 2011, created by P. Carl, David Dower, Jamie Gahlon, and Vijay Mathew as part of the American Voices New Play Institute (AVNPI) at Arena Stage. In 2012 the co-founders relocated much of their work to Emerson under the banner of HowlRound. During HowlRound’s time at Emerson, HowlRound produced more than thirty-five convenings in Boston and with partners around the country, including many with the Latinx Theatre Commons, the International Presenting Commons, and the National Playwright Residency Program. The HowlRound Journal has grown into an open-access archive of four thousand essays, with more being published every week. HowlRound TV has livestreamed over one thousand events, and on-demand videos are available to watch any time. HowlRound Podcasts has supported fifteen series created by theatremakers around the world. In 2021, in celebration of the tenth anniversary, HowlRound published an anthology, Essays and Conversations from the First Ten Years.

We look forward to sharing more about our fifteenth anniversary programming; new written, audio, and video offerings; and more about our future direction in January. Signing up for our mailing list is the best way to stay in the loop! And of course we continue to welcome content contributions from anyone in the global theatre community.