art in a democracy
I created the social media account and website for Art in a Democracy, a two-volume book set anthology that, through essays and play scripts, told the story of Roadside Theater, a legendary working-class Appalachian theater company that over its 45 year history toured the country, made national headlines, and, in the words of the book’s editors, “developed ways to bring poor, working-class, and middle-class communities together across lines of race and class — in the face of the forces of organized exploitation, which continue to divide us.”
short form video content
The Art in a Democracy website wasn’t just about the anthology itself and its accolades: it also needed to act as a portfolio for the theater’s founders and collaborators that could bring the plays on the pages of the books to life. Roadside fans are lucky in that almost every play has a publicly available archival recording, which I brought together for the first time in a library for all to access.
While it often didn’t look like it from the outside, Roadside’s work was also deeply political. Their longstanding partnership with Junebug Productions (the continuation of the Free Southern Theater, the theater wing of SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement) led to the creation of the story circle, today a widely used tool for cross-partisan dialog in community organizing. But that’s just one of dozens of tools that were developed and used at Roadside for theater that led to projects for real, material social change. The website also provides resources for digging deeper into this theory and history and a library of training documents for anyone asking how they can bring people with vastly different ideas together and build power alongside one another.
website
The Art in a Democracy website wasn’t just about the anthology itself and its accolades: it also needed to act as a portfolio for the theater’s founders and collaborators that could bring the plays on the pages of the books to life. Roadside fans are lucky in that almost every play has a publicly available archival recording, which I brought together for the first time in a library for all to access.
While it often didn’t look like it from the outside, Roadside’s work was also deeply political. Their longstanding partnership with Junebug Productions (the continuation of the Free Southern Theater, the theater wing of SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement) led to the creation of the story circle, today a widely used tool for cross-partisan dialog in community organizing. But that’s just one of dozens of tools that were developed and used at Roadside for theater that led to projects for real, material social change. The website also provides resources for digging deeper into this theory and history and a library of training documents for anyone asking how they can bring people with vastly different ideas together and build power alongside one another.