Journal Series

Creative Labor, Creative Conditions is a national campaign led by the Doris Duke Foundation bringing together coordinated activations across the U.S. to center artists in a national conversation about the future of artistic labor. This series explores the activations and the various answers to the question: What are the conditions artists need in order to thrive?

I Don’t Know How They Do It! lifts the curtain on the often invisible caregiving labor that many artists do to support their families and their artistic practices. Each month, we publish a week in the life of a theatre professional with caregiving responsibilities. In the variety of caregiving and artistic perspectives captured—from young children to elderly parents, from tech week to school vacation week—I Don’t Know How They Do It! makes visible the range and experience of the caregiving artists working in theatre today. We hope to foster solidarity among artist caregivers, inspire advocacy toward a field where all artist caregivers are embraced in their fullness, and celebrate the hard work that makes the rest of us say “I don’t know how they do it!"

This column is a partnership with Parent Artist Advocacy League for Performing Arts and Media (PAAL), the national hub and solutions generator for caregivers and organizations in the performing arts and media.

This series combines content from and about the 2026 Under the Radar Symposium, produced by the Under the Radar Festival and ArkType.

The climate crisis has been called a “crisis of imagination.” The phrase refers to our inability to grasp the magnitude and violence of the changes we are facing, our reluctance to let the reality of it permeate our collective consciousness, and our resistance to envision positive futures. But imagination is the currency of artists. Here, theatre artists, practitioners, and scholars reflect on the ways in which they use their imagination to create the stories that will support us through, and lift us out of, this transformative moment. This ongoing series was originally prompted by Chantal Bliodeau, playwright and artistic director of the Arts and Climate Initiative, and it was curated by her from 2015-2025. Since then, the HowlRound team has added additional pieces. Interested in contributing your own piece? Send us your ideas through the contribute content form!  

This series combines content from and about the 2025 Under the Radar Symposium, produced by the Under the Radar Festival and ArkType.

There’s a pattern in the American theatre that mirrors centuries of broken treaties, forgotten promises, and surface-level gestures of inclusion. By examining decades-long patterns of silencing Native voices that have protested work that has negatively impacted our sovereignty, our continued resistance to stereotypes, and our humanity, the American theatre will finally break the last treaty. This series aims to expose how the theatre's complicity in cultural silencing extends far beyond simple oversight and is a continuation of colonial violence that demands immediate and sustained action. It will offer community-generated, tangible best practices for comprehensive Native American representation. Let’s move forward, better and together.

The Cultivating Cultural Resilience series is curated and hosted by the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics and the Center for International Theater Development. Pieces in this series are edited, abridged transcripts of events from Cultivating Cultural Resilience, an ongoing series of solidarity workshops, discussions, and resource exchange for artists and allies in times of duress. How can artists change cultures of fear and harm while working under those systems? Using our unique skill sets, we have the ability to block harm, bridge divides, build trust, and envision a better future. 

The Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) hosted the 2025 María Irene Fornés Institute Symposium at the Lewis Arts Complex at Princeton University on Saturday, 22 March 2025. This was a one-day convening of scholars, artists, students, advocates, and others invested in the life, work, and legacy of playwright, director and educator, María Irene Fornés (1930-2018).

Leaders of the national arts and health initiative One Nation/One Project (ONOP) reflect on their learnings and share best practices in achieving a monumental moment on 27 July 2024, when eighteen cities and towns across the United States premiered eighteen distinct participatory public art projects–each designed to improve community health and wellbeing. Started in 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ONOP led and supported all eighteen projects in developing up to three years of unprecedented collaboration between municipal, artistic, and health sector leaders. These projects represented vastly different economic, social, racial, and geographic experiences–each working together to explore the change possible at the intersection of arts and health. The series starts by charting parallels between theatremaking and movement building and then shares how the arts can be a tool in values-based research, equitable community engagement, and building social cohesion. It goes on to explore the future possibilities of this work and, finally, its implications more broadly in today’s socio-political landscape.