Fifteen Years of Growing the Commons

For the past few years, we have published an end of year essay reflecting on the past twelve months and forecasting what is ahead. This year, I’d like to do something a bit different.

After fifteen years co-creating HowlRound in a variety of roles, and the last eight years as director, I am stepping down at the end of the year on the occasion of HowlRound’s fifteenth anniversary to make way for new leadership. This shift will also mark the start of independent operations for HowlRound as we move out of Emerson College to being fiscally sponsored by Producer Hub.

Given all of these changes, I want to look back not just at the last year, but the last fifteen, highlighting some of my journey with HowlRound and areas I’m most proud of. I’ll leave the looking forward to Ramona Rose King and Julia Schachnik, who will share more with you all about HowlRound’s upcoming plans in the new year.

I firmly believe that our field needs decommodified third spaces like HowlRound where we can illuminate what is already working, ideate on what’s not, and rehearse a better future together.

Growing the Commons

My journey with HowlRound has been one of unexpected twists and turns, learning and unlearning. I never could have imagined what began (for me at the ripe young age of twenty-six!) with P. Carl, David Dower, and Vijay Mathew out of a deep love for artists and a profound dissatisfaction with the institutional theatre status quo would have grown into the HowlRound we know today—a digital knowledge commons connecting thousands of cultural workers and theatre practitioners across the globe in real time.

At HowlRound our work has been a daily exercise in resisting enclosure through commons-based practice. What does this look like? A commitment to open participation, to inclusion, to access, and to a worldview that centers “we” over “me,” collaboration over competition, and abundance over scarcity. It’s an intentional cultivation of democratized space where power and privilege do not dictate whose voice is heard. 

In “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,” theorist Lauren Berlant writes that the commons is “a powerful vehicle for troubling troubled times…The commons is an action concept that acknowledges a broken world and the survival ethics of a transformational infrastructure.” HowlRound, as a commons-based platform, at its highest aspiration, models this transformational infrastructure. In a time of great precarity and possibility, I firmly believe that our field needs decommodified third spaces like HowlRound where we can illuminate what is already working, ideate on what’s not, and rehearse a better future together.

I am so proud of what we’ve accomplished over these years.

Discourse and Digital Publishing:

• Fostered field-wide discourse and exchange through digital publishing of essays, conversations, events, and podcasts from artists and culture workers all over the world, proudly connecting upwards of forty thousand theatremakers a month (more like 60,000 monthly in the early months of the pandemic!). 
• Created and stewarded a now fifteen-year (four thousand essays, more than one thousand videos from HowlRound TV events, fifteen podcast series) open access archive of theatre thought and practice devoted to understanding and interrogating how we make the nonprofit theatre field more equitable, just, and sustainable. 
• Ensured our digital content and website conforms to the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at the AA level. 
• Grew HowlRound from its initial domestic focus into a truly global platform with one third of visitors and contributors now coming from outside of the United States.

Artist Gathering and Field Organizing:

• Produced more than thirty-five convenings in Boston and with partners around the country on wide ranging topics from arts, culture, and commoning; to the intersection of theatre practice and climate change; to Latinx theatre; to international cultural exchange; and more (Check out the full list of these convenings!)
• Since 2020, stewarded the work of the International Presenting Commons (IPC), a group of United States-based performing arts presenters and creative independent producers who have joined forces to keep international cultural exchange and engagement alive and vibrant now and into the future. It’s always a joy to be in the presence of such a powerhouse group!
• Since 2013, stewarded the National Playwright Residency Program with the Mellon Foundation, putting playwrights (look at this incredible cohort!) in residence at theatres around the country with salary, benefits, commitment to full production, and self-directed artistic development support. This program is predicated on supporting the whole person and focused on process not product. Having the opportunity to produce each playwright’s weeklong workshops, readings, and research trips hosted at Emerson in Boston was an inspiring reminder of the power of story and the brilliance of these artists!
• Stewarded—from 2012 through summer 2025—a long-term partnership and collaboration with the Latinx Theatre Commons, a national movement that uses a commons-based approach to transform the narrative of the American theatre. What a gift it was for HowlRound to grow up alongside the dedicated artists and cultureworkers organizing this movement! 

Education and Learning: 

• Published an anthology of superlative HowlRound essays and conversations from the first ten years of HowlRound along with companion free lesson plans for theatre educators.
• Co-created and co-taught an upper level undergraduate and graduate course at Emerson College called the HowlRound Seminar: Topics in Contemporary Theatre and Performance, which brought some of the most exciting working artists today from around the country into conversation with the next generation of theatremakers.
• Piloted Learning Circles, a virtual facilitated co-learning cohort that invites theatre practitioners to reflect and build knowledge about the way justice shows up in our rehearsal rooms. Stay tuned for the launch in 2026!

Organizational Development:

• Created a holistic organizational Theory of Change and robust qualitative and quantitative evaluation framework for continued learning and growth.
• Created HowlRound’s first long-term reserve fund to help ensure financial stability in periods of challenge.

On Fifteen Years 

On a more personal note, as I reflect on this time, I find myself transported to core memories. I’d like to take you through them with me: 

It’s 2011. I’m marveling at the newly launched online journal called HowlRound and delighting as comments come in from artists around the country engaging with our first published essays. 

It’s 2012. I’m producing Becoming a Citizen of the Theatre Commons, and hearing Melanie Joseph, Diane Ragsdale, Todd London, Jonathan McCrory, Matthew Glassman, and many more of our field’s best thinkers help us grapple with the notion of the commons as our organizing principle. This gathering would form the basis of HowlRound’s first advisory council.

It’s 2013. I’m supporting the gathering of the largest group of Latinx theatremakers in over twenty-five years (in the U.S.) in an Emerson black box, cementing the creation of the Latinx Theatre Commons.

It’s 2014. I’m producing the first cohort convening of the National Playwright Residency Program, humbled to be surrounded by the genius of playwrights Aditi Brennan Kapil, Andrew Saito, Dan LeFranc, David Adjmi, Julie Marie Myatt, Kira Obolensky, Luis Alfaro, Marcus Gardley, Melinda Lopez, Nathan Louis Jackson, Pearl Cleage, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Robert O’Hara, and Will Power. 

It’s 2015. I’m producing the Trans Theatre Artists Convening, a gathering inspired by a conversation between Sylvan Oswald, P. Carl, MJ Kaufman, and Kate Bornstein, hosted by New Dramatists in New York. I can feel the power of cultivating a space where trans artists can share and dream and just be together. 

It’s 2016. I’m hearing playwrights and HowlRound staff read scenes from works in progress at the second cohort convening of the National Playwright Residency Program. 

It’s 2017. I’m seeing a dazzling array of eleven shows at the 2017 LTC International Convening at the 2017 Los Angeles Theater Center Encuentro de las Americas. I am marveling at the LTC’s first entirely bilingual convening and the vision of the Latino Theater Company to bring together this series of Encuentros. 

It’s 2018. Theatremakers are creating tableaux of extractive and regenerative practice as part of the Theatre in the Age of Climate Change Convening. 

At HowlRound our work has been a daily exercise in resisting enclosure through commons-based practice.

It’s 2019. I’m watching DeafBlind theatremakers use protactile sign language in conversation with other conveners during the Deaf Theater Action Planning Session, a convening organized in partnership with Tyrone Giordano, DJ Kurs, Patty Liang, Alexandria Wailes, Ethan Sinnott, and Rachel Grossman, 

It’s 2020. I’m tracking the HowlRound TV numbers tick up to over five thousand real-time viewers from thirty-nine countries as culture workers convene together virtually on 16 March 2020 for the livestream of “#ArtistResource: Artists In a Time of Global Pandemic“ organized by Nicole Brewer, Hannah Fenlon, Anne Marie Lonsdale, and Abigail Vega, Months later, we hear that the United States Library of Congress selected this specific event and other pages on HowlRound for inclusion in its web archives as an important part of the historical record. 

It’s 2021. I feel like I am in a horror movie as I walk back into our office for the first time since March 2020 and see it frozen in time, St. Patrick’s decorations strung across the front desk next to dead plants, everything covered in a thick coat of dust.

It’s 2022. I’m hosting the virtual book launch for the HowlRound anthology, Essays and Conversations from the First Ten Years, featuring work published on HowlRound between 2011 and 2020! At the launch we hear excerpts and reflections by writers Nicole Brewer, Will Davis, Lauren Gunderson, and Michael Rohd.

It’s 2023. I’m listening to catchy original songs by Laotian pop star Ketsana Vilaylack during Saymoukda Vongsay’s workshop of In the Camps: A Refugee Musical. I’m hearing a readthrough of Betty Shamieh’s supremely funny Malvolio. I’m sitting at the table in the black box with J. Nicole Brooks leading a group discussion about her afrofuturist piece in progress Black Moon Lilith. 

It’s 2024. It’s incredible to see Ronee Penoi and David Howse so powerfully embodying their vision of Black and Indigenous co-leadership and solidarity during the Black and Indigenous Futures Convening. 

It’s 2025. I listen to presenters, creative producers, and field leaders engaged in global cultural exchange share ideas about how to advance the infrastructure to support this work at the International Presenting Commons Convening. 

It’s almost 2026. I’m thinking that none of this would have been possible without the stellar and deeply committed HowlRound team past and present, advisory council, funders, partners, and the longstanding support of Emerson College (and in particular Rob Orchard’s initial championship) who incubated our work for so long. And, of course, you—the global theatre community who shows up to read, watch, or listen; to write, comment, or livestream. However you intersect with HowlRound, I’m glad you’re here.

Leading HowlRound has been the honor of my career. 27,039 emails later, I take my leave. Claudia Alick, one of our advisory council members, recently offered that “HowlRound has always been a letter from the future.” I just love that. May it remain ever so!