I developed the Restorative Theatre Training Method (RTTM), as an intervention which focuses on deconstructing and reimagining audition, rehearsal and performance practices and processes.

RTTM is a new model that places wellbeing at the center of applied practice for theatre actors, directors and writers. In support of my ongoing research I engage professional development to explore advancements in the social sciences.

My commitment is to deepen my craft and practice through regular professional development. During August I had 2 amazing days of professional development through the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) Graduate School's course, Restorative Practices for Educators, I learned more tools and further refined my methods. Shout out to our facilitator Chella who was top notch!

These are my day 1 takeaways and paradigm shifts to build impactful community with students…

1. Create room atmosphere that centers voice and choice.

2. The art of crafting agreements in collaboration versus isolation.

3. When students are disruptive and it’s not a crisis, be curious versus furious.

4. Strive to engage with students versus not being present or doing things for them.

5. Use the 5 central Restorative practices questions for conflict resolution.

Day 2 takeaways and paradigm shifts to help build impactful community with students of all ages…

1. Circle work is 100% an act of resistance and a vital tool to initiate, develop, reset and strengthen community

2. When working with adult and college aged students prepare in advance for disruption by collaborating on how we'll respond to disruption and add this to "Collaborative Agreements" before hand. 

3. When harm is caused, after an appropriate cooling off period, lean into the 5 restorative questions to foster conflict resolution

4. As facilitator you model how to use language to create a psychologically and emotionally supportive environment

5. Shame and guilt shape our identities and they're taught to all of us at a young age as a mechanism to exert control over our personhood. How you facilitate can either cause more harm or help students learn to trust themselves and heal

6. Create circle topics that support wellbeing and harm reduction during audition, rehearsal and production.❤️🌟❤️

"This is history being told. It’s not fictionalized. It’s not a fabrication. It is true history… told through a form that brings it into contemporary conversation." 

By Chad Eric Smith, Director of Marketing and Communications, Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts

Denise J. Hart, Professor of Playwriting and Dramaturgy in the Department of Theatre Arts at the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, is bringing a powerful convergence of research, performance, and personal history to the stage this summer in Boston.

Commissioned by the Boston-based Museum of African American History, Hart will present How I Met My Cousin: The Genealogical Saga of the Bailey Family Tree, an original autoethnographic docu-play rooted in years of genealogical research and centered on the life and legacy of her third great cousin, Sue Bailey Thurman.

The work will be presented alongside a public lecture, A Blueprint for Freedom & Justice: The Life and Legacy of Sue Bailey Thurman, during Juneteenth weekend, offering audiences both a historical framework and an immersive artistic experience.

At its core, the project is about recovery—of history, of lineage, and of stories too often pushed to the margins.

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"Let's build a world where no ones humanity is in question." 

Wether you identify as an artist practitioner or academic theatre is likely your second home and in many cases, when we were young, theatre became our first love and home away from home because as a home place it was where we finally felt safe, free and courageous enough to be ourselves.

But as we transitioned from adolescent theatre camp and high school performing arts musicals, into collegiate undergrad/graduate training and professional practitioner and academic careers the love of our second home began to wane.

We start to see our beloved industry for what it’s always been, a site where capitalistic patriarchal systems are designed to take more than give and dehumanization is the price of admission to the “big leagues”.

In my developing research, Restorative Theatre Training Method (RTTM), where I reimagine and deconstruct nostalgic archaic dehumanizing theatre training and performance practices and instead position wellbeing at the center of applied practice for theatre actors, directors and writers, I theorize that all theatre training and performance spaces function as a temporary homeplace.

I draw inspiration for my definition of homeplace from activist, author and Black feminist bell hooks’ essay HomePlace: a site of resistance.

FULL ARTICLE on my Substack. Read More  

"Yes we can learn to live with anxiety and make it work for us too." 

In her book “Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion” neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki argues that not only can we learn to live with anxiety but we can make it work for us too.

Now that’s a really different way of thinking.

Mostly I’ve only thought of anxiety as being bad for me. I mean, who wants to have an anxiety attack or feel your face flush as your heart rate beats faster than you want it too? I think you’ll agree, we prefer to feel like we’re in control and anxiety isn’t the most comforting feeling.

Suzuki is clear that she’s not referring to clinical anxiety, but to everyday anxiety. In her book she points out that the way to make the most of anxiety is to do things that turn down the volume of anxiety.

Taken as a whole Suzuki’s interventions are really about regulating your nervous system.

In my career as a theatre professional and acting/playwriting teacher and founder of my research initiative, the Restorative Theatre Performance Project, which studies and creates tools for students to incorporate nervous system regulation and wellbeing practices into theatre training and performance, I find Suzuki’s perspective and scientific interrogation to be a perfect bridge between arts and sciences.

FULL ARTICLE on my Substack. Read More  

"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.

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"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