How can voice work enable actors to access their widest range of expression? What happens when vocal training is not about “fixing,” but play and connection? Madeline Sayet sits down with voice practitioner Sayda Trujillo to explore these questions in a conversation about liberatory vocal practice.
What levels of change and accountability are we responsible for? Professor Elizabeth McQueen sits down with artist-activist Sara Porkalob to consider this question in light of both her recent work on Dragon Baby, which completes the Dragon Cycle, and her experiences with virality and accountability at multiple scales.
An intergenerational conversation with playwright, director, and arts leader Torange Yeghiazarian and director, playwright, and arts leader Evren Odcikin.
A Public Conversation on Home, Displacement, and Collective Sanctuary
Friday 24 October 2025
Los Angeles, CA
Bringing together cultural workers, organizers, and artists across movements to share models, experiences, and stories about what is working and how we can build power towards a shared freedom.
The founder of About…Productions, Theresa Chavez, highlights the role of the arts in enlightening and moving people and centers equity in her theatre work and youth education. She speaks about creating art with an emotional and historical component and having optimism at the core of artmaking.
HERO Theatre founder Elisa Bocanegra reflects on mentor-mentee relationships, becoming an ancestor, and healing through the arts. Rooted between the Los Angeles Latine community and Bogotá, Colombia, Elisa’s theatre work is full of hope and trust in the disorder.
As part of the LINKAGES: Ukraine program, Ukrainian and US American playwrights come together to discuss their work, methods, worries, and strategies for living and writing in difficult times.
In ProyectoTEATRO’s Cabarex 2: RevoLUZiones, history is funnier, sexier, and messier than a textbook ever could be. Khristián Méndez Aguirre writes about the production’s queer, devised cabaret take on Latinx culture and history.
Alexandria Ramos shares about her experience of Rasgos Asiaticos, a site-specific performance installation. The performance installation shines a light on entangled histories of migration, colonialism, and displacement, and it highlights the forging of a Chinese Mexican identity in the United States-Mexico borderlands.
Hosts Marina Johnson and Nabra Nelson interview Palestinian African trans drag artist Mama Ganuush. They discuss the vibrant drag scene in San Francisco, Mama Ganuush's journey into drag, and the intersection of activism, identity, and performance.
Amanda L. Andrei uses an understanding of hapa identity to explore the liminal and voluminous identities at play in David Johann Kim’s Pang Spa—both onstage and off.
Hosts Leticia Ridley and Jordan Ealey interview Oscar winner and MacArthur genius Tarell Alvin McCraney about his work as a playwright, how Black people tell stories, and what it means to be an artistic leader.
Macy E. Kunke shares the practical steps she took to cultivate more sustainable stage management practices for a recent production of Men on Boats. By utilizing a variety of digital tools instead of more traditional printed paper methods, the stage management team created only a fraction of typical paper waste and found that their work that was cheaper, simpler, and more collaborative than typical stage management processes.
The Reception of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Theatre in North America
Friday 4 August 2023
California
In collaboration with the Middle Eastern Theatre focus group at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) annual conference, Golden Thread Productions invited Dr. Sarah Fahmy, a decolonial scholartist and co-founder of the Middle Eastern Theatre group at ATHE, and Marina Johnson, a scholar and director, to moderate a conversation on theatre criticism in the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) artistic and academic worlds across the region and the diaspora today. Panelists discussed topics of cultural competency, the multiple forms of criticism, and the ways that SWANA artists and academics seek to change the game.
Richard Falcon and Fran Astorga discuss the need for inclusive spaces that led to founding their own companies, the road blocks they've pushed against, and the legacy they hope to create as part of the teatro field.
Star Finch and Ellen Sebastian Chang, friends and artistic collaborators in the Bay Area, have a conversation about their local theatre scene’s recent but long overdue racial reckoning, scraping together a creative life, the institutionalization of artists, and more.
Playwrights at the 2023 Pacific Playwrights Festival Discuss Inspiration Behind the Plays and the Development Process
Sunday 7 May 2023
United States
Join South Coast Repertory for the Playwrights Panel, part of the 2023 Pacific Playwrights Festival. Festival playwrights include Charlie Oh (Coleman ’72); Michael Shayan (avaaz); Anika Johnson, Britta Johnson, and Nick Green (Dr. Silver); Clarence Coo (Chapters of a Floating Life); Noa Gardner (The Staircase); Bleu Beckford-Burrell (Crasiss); and Eleanor Burgess (Galilee, 34).
Miranda Wright, producer and executive director at Los Angeles Performance Practice, and Jeffrey Mosser discuss how Miranda has developed a presenting organization for sharing ambitious, collaboratively created work over the last ten years, as well as what she’s learned from some major arts funding research.
Artist and producer Rose Oser interviews Rob Ready and Duncan Wold about the closing of PianoFight, the San Francisco company and venue they co-founded that shuttered in March 2023.
Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas and Erin A. Cowling continue their interview with Octavio Solis, focusing primarily on the development of his most recent adaptation from Spanish Baroque literature: Quixote Nuevo.
When Campo Santo decided to film their production of Star Finch’s Side Effects early in the COVID-19 pandemic, they were embarking on a creative journey that felt entirely novel and a little overwhelming. In this conversation, the production’s directors discuss development of the production’s aesthetic and the generative process they embarked on at the intersection of “film” and “play.
This week, Yura Sapi is join by Tierra Allen who shares about creating The Real Work, a podcast about theatre culture and transformative justice that is co-produced with We Rise Production. This episode’s topics include learning from non-humans, sharing poems and songs, and being the change.
Theatremaker Maria Patrice Amon shares her experience watching La Carpa De La Frontera at Latinx Theatre Commons’ 2022 Comedy Carnaval and explains the significance of carpa theatre.
