Quenna Lené Barrett

Quenna Lené Barrett is a theater artist + practitioner, beginning to understand her artistic practice through gathering folks of diverse backgrounds, centering marginalized identities, learning from Black radical wisdom, and then dreaming collectively to act boldly through those learnings. She is: the Associate Director of Education and Engagement at the Goodman Theatre, a company member with ICAH’s For Youth Inquiry company, an Associate Artist with Pivot Arts, and adjunct professor at DePaul University. Quenna received her BFA from NYU Tisch Drama,  MA in Applied Theatre from the USC, and is an EdD candidate in Educational Theatre at NYU Steinhardt. 

Based: Chicago: Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa, Miami, Peoria

Super powers / areas of practice: Youth and teen whisperer, culture-based DEI, being a Black woman, Theatre of the Oppressed, devised + participatory performance

M. Simone Boyd

M. Simone Boyd dreams of a day when her neighborhood will be free from violence, have thriving schools and loving connected neighbors. As a novelist, neighbor, and speaker...she is working towards that day. After decades of disinvestment and neglect, Simone’s advocacy helped secure $3 million dollars of infrastructure investments for her neighborhood and helped raise $35,000 from developers, investors, and private foundations to pay LOCAL artists to perform during a street festival. At least once a month, people—some incarcerated—share that her novel, The Day Sonny Died, has made them hopeful. 

Based: Nashville, Tennessee, Cherokee, Shawnee, Yuchi Land 

Superpowers/areas of practice: Amplifying others' voices, navigating bureaucracy, listening with my heart, community development, cross-sector collaboration, and laughing loudly. 

ESTEFANÍA FADUL

Estefanía Fadul (she/her) is a theater artist interested in the potential of story and community to spark change. Born in Colombia and raised in New Hampshire, she is interested in amplifying underrepresented narratives through her work, and aims to center collaboration, process, belonging, and joy. Most recently, she directed Carla’s Quince, an ensemble-created, part-theater, part-party, participatory experience to mobilize the Latinx vote in the U.S., that toured virtually around the country in partnership with local organizations. She is an alumna of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership and Advocacy Institutes, and Vassar College.

Based: Brooklyn, NY on the ancestral lands of the Lenape and Munsee-Canarsie people

Super powers / areas of practice: dreaming and visioning, connecting people, adapting to new ideas and places, designing process, fluency in Spanish, facilitating collaborative and caring spaces, impromptu dance party enthusiast

ASHLEY HANSON

Ashley Hanson (she/her) is a social / civic practice artist, theater maker, rural arts advocate and lover of rural places. She is the founder of PlaceBase Productions, a theater company that creates original, site-specific musicals celebrating small town life and the founder of the Department of Public Transformation, an artist-led organization that collaborates with local formal and informal leaders in rural areas to develop creative strategies for community connection and civic participation. She was recently named a 2018 Obama Foundation Fellow and a 2019 Bush Fellow for her work with rural communities. She believes deeply in the power of  play and exclamation points! 

Based: Granite Falls, Minnesota / MniSota Makoce, Traditional Dakota homeland 

Super powers / areas of practice:  enthusiasm, deep listening, dreaming and visioning, facilitation,  rural arts / community advocacy, designing interactive, joyful, playful experiences, driving across the country and sleeping in rest areas, showing up / visiting, meeting people where they are at, and inviting them along to co-create the adventure! 

Rebecca Martinez

Rebecca Martinez (she/her) is a theatermaker, director and choreographer with deep ancestral roots in the Southwest. As a theater artist, Rebecca is interested in work that connects people to people and people to physical space. She seeks to center folks with historically excluded identities and to create joy-filled collaborative processes. She is a member of Sojourn Theatre, an artist with CPCP, the BOLD Associate Artistic Director at WP Theater and is one of the 2021 TCG Rising Leaders of Color. 

Based: Lenapehoking, the ancestral lands of the Lenape and Munsee-Canarsie peoples, aka Brooklyn, NY.

Super powers / areas of practice: deep listening, patience, good sense of humor, putting trust in the abilities and talents of others, interested in cultivating non-hierarchical leadership, designing connective and playful experiences. First language English, working knowledge of Spanish.

Nikiko Masumoto

Nikiko Masumoto (she/her) is an organic farmer, memory keeper, and artist. She is Yonsei, a fourth-generation Japanese American, and stewards the same soil her great-grandparents worked at Masumoto Family Farm. Summer brings rituals of slurping nectar from organic stone fruit and grapes. Nikiko’s leadership is grounded in ancestral connection, seasons, and resilient futures. In addition to CPCP, Nikiko is active as co-founder of Yonsei Memory Project, with University Advisory Board (CSU Fresno), Western States Arts Federation, and Art of the Rural. In 2020, she was named one of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Creative 10. 

Place-based context: Central Valley, rural California, between the towns of Del Rey and Fowler, ancestral and present day home to Tachi Yokut people, neighbors to the Mono and Chukchansi people. 

Superpowers / areas of practice: intergenerational memory keeping, designing for courageous dialogue, systems thinking, community-centered experiential learning, personal narrative for performance and storytelling, homemade dinner from scratch when you only have 20 minutes.

MICHAEL ROHD

Michael Rohd is an ensemble member at Sojourn Theatre, an Artist for Civic Imagination at Center for Performance and Civic Practice, and an Institute Professor at Arizona State University.  He is author of the book Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue. Raised  Jewish in Baltimore and currently living in Phoenix with his family on the ancestral territories of the Akimel O’Odham and Pee Posh Indian Communities, he sees his work with the redesigned and now collectively-led CPCP as an opportunity to more definitively center accountability in his practice and personal journey.

Super powers / areas of practice: process design, facilitation, story-shaping, co-imagining, asking questions

shannon scrofano

Shannon Scrofano is a Los Angeles-based designer whose work includes interdisciplinary performance, public space, exhibition, curation and dialogue projects internationally and throughout the US.  She was a part of the founding team of artists who hatched the Center for Performance and Civic Practice. She is a company member of Sojourn Theatre, and is on the design faculty at California Institute of the Arts, where she leads sustainability, climate-focused, and other design-for-impact partnerships.

Based: Los Angeles, California, on the ancestral and present day unceded lands of the Gabrielino, Tongva, Tataviam, and Chumash peoples.

Super powers / areas of practice: Mutualism, championing weird thinking, creative problem solving, experiential design, fighting for mama earth.

Mark Valdez

Mark Valdez is a director, writer, cultural organizer, and consultant based in Los Angeles (the unceded territory of the Tongva and Gabrielino peoples). Mark partners with communities, organizations, civic institutions, and others, using theater and creative tools to address community needs and to lift up community voices. He is the recipient of the 2019 Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. At present Mark is working with housing advocates and activists to create a new play that aims to influence housing policies, culminating in a national tour in 2022. 

Super powers: praising and appreciating people, convincing people who don't see themselves as artists to make art, imagining, and dreaming big.

Anu Yadav is an Indian heritage actress, playwright, and cultural worker. She recently hosted “Getting into Step: A Movement Podcast for the Long Haul” produced by the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice.  She was the inaugural 2019-2020 Creative Strategist Artist-in-Residence at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, funded by  the Department of Arts and Culture. She produced “Healing Through Story: A Toolkit on Grassroots Approaches”, a 70-page guide on arts-based methods for community-building.  She is a member of the Actor’s Equity Association, Alternate ROOTS, the Dramatists Guild, Network of Ensemble Theaters and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and holds an M.F.A. in Performance from University of Maryland, College Park. She is a 2021-2022 Civic Media Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at University of Southern California. You can visit her website here.

Super powers / areas of practice: storyteller, code-switcher, bridge builder, shape shifter and making people laugh