Theatre-maker, educator, community advocate, and Artistic Director of Naked Empire Bouffon Company using performance to subvert apathy.
Based in Boston, Nathaniel is a queer, Cali-Rican theater artist.
He is the founding Artistic Director of Naked Empire Bouffon Company (www.nakedempirebouffon.org), which began in San Francisco in 2009 with an activist mission to devise hilarious, cutting, and visually-provocative satires to catalyze urgent discourse. Since then, Naked Empire has toured across the continent with award-winning new works and training intensives becoming North America’s premier bouffon company. Their productions have been awarded Best of the Fringe twice in San Francisco, the Talk of the Fringe Award in Vancouver, the Artist’s Choice Award in Edmonton, as well as Official Selections from the Toronto Festival of Clowns, Vancouver’s Dancing on the Edge Festival, Victoria’s UNOFest, Berkeley’s Blast Festival, Xfest in Edwardsville, Illinois, and Philadelphia's Cannonball Festival. The company uses bouffon, a rarely-seen form of highly physical and extremely irreverent comedic satire leading the Huffington Post to praise the work as “devilishly dangerous theatre.”
As an actor, he has worked with Shakespeare Orange County, Son of Semele Ensemble, Cornerstone Theater Company, The Dell’Arte Company, Thrillpeddlers, We Players, and Cutting Ball Theater.
As a community advocate, he cut his teeth as a manager for programs out of the LA Gay & Lesbian Center, the National Conference for Community & Justice, and Cornerstone Theater Company. His recent advocacy work focuses on social justice in the workplace and in performance pedagogy and is highly influenced by the teachings of ArtEquity’s national facilitator training, Nicole Brewer’s foundational anti-racist theatre training, adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy work, and Claire Warden’s intimacy direction training, among several others.
Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Comedic Performance at Emerson College and he has served as the Director of Physical Comedy for the Sacramento Shakespeare Festival, Movement Designer at UC Berkeley, core faculty of the SF Clown Conservatory, and guest faculty at the Juilliard School. www.nathanieljustiniano.com
