"Don't just study its history, seek to create teh future of every aspect of the theatre industry. 

My professional side hustle hobby is interior design. I’m really good at it effortlessly. Meaning I don’t lack ideas or solutions to room design and decor when I need to tap in for a project. I don’t just do the work and create a strategy I enjoy it immensely.

On my YouTube channel “Home Style and Design” I posted a photo of me at Ford’s Theatre in DC with students who completed my playwriting masterclass series. I started the post by saying I was in my sweet spot teaching the final class. One of my subscribers commented under the picture “you’re good at everything.” I responded “I’m definitely good at those things I’ve chosen to be good at!”

My response got me thinking about what I’m good at, why I’m good at it and how have I gotten better at what I’m good at.

I’ve always been an arts & science nerd. If I had several lifetimes to live I’d be a scientist in a few of them! As a result of my fascination with both arts and science I spend a considerable amount of time teaching theatre artists and listening to science focused podcasts.

From this weeks neuroscience nerdi-ness, I learned about the revolutionary power of “Tiny Experiments” from Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, and from Dr. Wendy Suzuki I learned how and why exercise is wonderful for the brain.

FULL ARTICLE on my Substack. Read More  

"In theatre we’re fond of saying the show MUST go on.” Starting today, let’s get in the habit of asking “but at what cost”. 

Theatre Performance is precarious... always.

Will the entire cast be healthy enough night after night to hit the stage and dazzle? Will the headliners be able to keep up the rigor month after month? Honestly, "the show must go on" signals... who cares about performer wellbeing.

Is theatre more than mere entertainment? I argue, yes it is and theatre artists deserve to be more than a human “cog” in the theatre machine.

The sentiment, "the show must go on" lies at the very heart of my developing research initiative, the Restorative Theatre Performance Project.

This oft used sentiment makes me think of the athlete who knows if they get hurt but can still move, see and blink they're getting a shot in the leg and they're back on the field/court because the top brass said so. People paid their money to be entertained!

FULL ARTICLE on my Substack. Read More  

"Howard University’s impact on Black theatre."

by Sholnn Freeman (MA '12, PHD '21)

For decades before the 1920s, even at historically Black colleges and universities, theatrical training meant performing the works of European playwrights. Shakespeare, the Greeks, and other white authors of the Western canon were considered the gold standard for “serious” drama, even on campuses meant to nurture Black minds.

However, at Howard University, Alain Locke — a young philosophy professor who would later be called the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance” — and Thomas Montgomery Gregory, an English professor, envisioned a new kind of theatre. Instead of simply mirroring the white classics they had been trained in, they sought to create a stage that centered Black stories and expressed the realities and beauty of Black life. This vision set the stage for a pivotal moment in Howard’s theatre history and, by extension, Black theatre more broadly. It led to a national revolution in how Black people were presented on stage and the subject matter they addressed in their productions.

FULL ARTICLE Read More 

"The theatre Industry isn’t quirky, it’s old and crotchety and slow to change." 

The arts get a really bad rap in higher ed when it comes to research. Many faculty in non-arts disciplines think theatre and performing arts faculty don’t do real research. 😲 

In fact, years ago when I arrived at my dean’s office for a meeting he asked me was I in my office reciting poems. He said it with a smirk of sarcasm! I tersely responded I was working on the narrative for my archival research project I’d be presenting at a conference the following week. His face was pinched like an owl “oh!” 😂

At this point in my academic career I’m 27 years in, honored to have helped hundreds of students to advance skillset, knowledge and mindset. I’ve achieved full professor and now contend with those who think once you’re a full professor WHY continue to do research at all! 

FULL ARTICLE on my Substack. Read More 

"Performing artists are the only people expected to accept abuse and toxicity just to get training and a job." 

Having experienced and witnessed both the joys and the ofttimes inhumane pathology of theatre training, I'd long been interested in the question "How can the culture of academic theatre training be changed for the better?" 

In fall 2025 at Howard University I started the journey to answer this question with the  launch of  a student play development program, Young Griots: New Works for the Stage, which serves as the vehicle for the application of my developing research initiative, Restorative Theatre Performance Project (RTPP). 

RTPP is a collaborative arts-based research initiative that employs restorative practices through theatre to engender social change and establish baseline standards and optimal methods for wellbeing and harm reduction in performing arts training programs. 

Theatre and the arts that embody restorative pedagogy do the heavy lifting of helping us to become better human’s and build a far better world. 

The arts teach audience and artist how to engage in critical thinking, acknowledge harm, avenues to access courage, remove barriers and seek solutions. 

The arts hold up a mirror of the world and help us embrace both tragedy and joy as meaningful and transformational aspects of the human condition. 

This is the kind of transformational culture work through the arts I’ve committed myself to for the past 27 years at Howard University...

FULL ARTICLE on my Substack. Read More 

"The code of silence makes us all complicit in an academic and arts industry that accepts the toxic teacher abusive personality trope masquerading as quirkiness."

It was 2019 when I first heard the term “psychological safety”. At my job a newly hired administrator expressed to me privately that there was no space in our work environment that was psychologically safe. 

In that moment it clicked “There wasn’t anything wrong with me. The systemically unaddressed psychologically unsafe culture was the issue.” 

One comment from someone new to the academic ecosystem changed everything and set me on the path to study wellbeing and harm reduction in performing arts training, audition, rehearsal and performance, in both academic and professional spaces, and to seek solutions to increase wellbeing and optimal training methods for performing arts students and practitioners.

FULL ARTICLE on my Substack. Read More