Theatre for the Free People
Theatre for the Free People is an organization which is dedicated to using the arts as a vehicle for social change by:
1Providing community based arts programming and education to people all over the world.
2Offering services and support to youth, emerging artists/activists, and community based organizations.
3Producing, Inspiring, Promoting and Presenting artistic work which addresses the most defining social issues of our time.
Artist as Activist
Joi M. Sears is an artist : activist and the Executive Director of Theatre for the Free People, an organization which is dedicated to using the arts as a vehicle for social change.
An Internationalist, she has traveled around the world discovering the innate ability of the arts to transform lives and mobilize communities; studying the Theatre of the Oppressed technique with August Boal in Rio de Janeiro Brazil, to mask making in Puerto Rico, exploring Girls Empowerment with young women in Ghana and most recently spending six months living and working at an artist collective called Heesterveld in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
She is an educator, currently teaching courses in poetry, dramatic writing and arts and social change for students in New York City public schools and offers workshops for schools, universities, businesses and community based organizations across the globe. She has earned her Masters degree in “Arts and Social Change” from New York University’s Gallatin School of the Arts.
Contact: theatreforthefreepeople@gmail.com
The Artist as Activist program examines the artist as environmental, ethical, humanistic and social activist. By using the concept of artists as transformative agents from social, cultural and political perspectives, this project provides venues for literary, visual and performance artists to create art, to engage in conversations about the impact of their art on society, and to raise societal awareness of the use of art as a tool for liberation.
Theatre for the Free People is a sponsored organization of Artspire, a program of the New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA).
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