In this moment of great social and civic shifting, please support our fellow citizens who are Black, Indigenous, and Persons of Color/Culture with donations and other support. Here are some suggestions for BIPOC led arts organizations to support with money and time, but please do give to the organizations enriching your own community. Here’s to us all banding together for an anti-racist future.
A very short list for your consideration:
photo: David Higgins
Vanessa Gilbert is a creative producer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator from Providence, RI who works with humans, objects, and digital media. She makes, produces, and directs performance works of varying scales, from miniature puppet theatre to multi-day performance festivals and opera. In 17 years with Perishable Theatre, Vanessa directed and produced scores of plays and events and founded both Blood from a Turnip-RI’s only late night puppet salon and the Resident Artist at Perishable Theatre program. She has developed and taught classes in theatre history, theatre for social change, directing and producing for learners of all ages. Vanessa is a proud member of the Magdalena Project, an international network for women in contemporary theatre for which she instigated Magdalena USA, the first of only two Magdalena Project festivals in North America. Vanessa is also an associate artist with Sleeping Weazel, an expansive theatre company based between Boston, MA and the internet. Her work has been featured at Perishable Theatre, the HERE Arts Center, The Castle of Imagination Festival (Ustka and Gdansk, Poland,) the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, among others. She received her MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts from Brooklyn College in May 2015. Since moving to DC in 2018, Vanessa has worked with Rorschach Theatre, Voices Festival Productions, and ExPats Theatre.