Black Women Directors, Makers, and Leaders on Brilliance, Glass Ceilings and What’s Next
Part of NETWeek Bay Area, this public conversation brings together Black women who direct, devise, and lead in the Bay Area, and is in partnership with Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, Understory, BAM House, SUMUD: Resistance Until Liberation, Bridge Live Arts, Calling Up Justice, and EastSide Arts Alliance.
About This Conversation
These conversations are powerful; we’re bringing the group chat out in the open.
On Record is NET’s national conversation series, dedicated to Black women directors, makers, and leaders. This live, public roundtable is facilitated by Lauren Turner Hines, Founding Envisionist and Executive Lead of the André Cailloux Center For Justice + The Performing Arts on historic Bayou Road in New Orleans. This event takes place at BAM House, the Black Arts Movement Business District home that Dr. Ayodele Nzinga (Featured Speaker) built. Featured Speakers also include Cat Brooks (co-founder and executive director of Anti-Police Terror Project and Justice Teams, host of Law & Disorder on KPFA, and long-time performer, organizer, and activist), Elizabeth Carter (regional director and actor), and Edris Cooper (acclaimed Bay Area actor and director).
Livestreamed in partnership with HowlRound, let’s witness what the field will get as a living archive forever. Black women direct, devise, produce, and lead at extraordinary levels, and the ecosystem fails them. Every time. This is NET’s ongoing commitment to a collective reimagining of this systemic failure. On Record puts that gap on the table and asks you what you want on ON RECORD for The Bay.
On Record is a national conversation series produced by the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) that puts critical questions about power, practice, and survival in the performing arts on the record, literally, through live public dialogue archived and accessible to the field.
Featured Speakers
ayodele nzinga (she/we/her/us) is the Founding Artistic Director of Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc., Oakland’s oldest North American African Theater Company. nzinga is an actress, playwright, director, and producer. She is the author of Performing Literacy, Horse Eaters, SorrowLand Oracle, and Incandescent. Her work appears in numerous journals; she is the only director to have staged August Wilson’s American Century Cycle in chronological order. ayodele is the Poet Laureate of Oakland.
Cat Brooks (she/her) Artivist Cat Brooks has been performing on stage & screen for 40 years. After receiving her BA in theater, she trained at the Royal National Theater Studio. Cat is an actress, poet, dramaturg, director, playwright, resident artist with the Lower Bottom Playaz in Oakland and was a member of the 2024-2026 resident playwright cohort with The Playwrights Foundation. Cat is also the co-founder/executive director of the Anti Police-Terror Project and has spent the last 18 years supporting families and communities impacted by state violence. Additionally Cat hosts Law & Disorder on KPFA Monday-Thursday at 8:00 am. She is grateful to God, the ancestors and for her amazing daughter and partner who hold her down everyday.
Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe (Actor/Writer) is an award-winning director, actor, and writer whose work in the San Francisco Bay Area spans more than three decades. Edris created Sugar Shack Performance Gallery in the Lower Haight (1991-93) and founded the experimental theater company Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience (BACCE). Edris has performed nationally and internationally with the SF Mime Troupe and on the stages of SF Playhouse, Aurora Theatre, Magic Theatre, TheatreWorks, the Los Angeles Theater Center, San Diego Rep, and Word For Word (where she is a core company member). For a decade, Edris was a lead artist for Rhodessa Jones’ The Medea Project; Theatre for Incarcerated Women. Edris has created five solo performances, including Traveling While Black and Adventures of A Black Girl in Search of Academic Clarity and Inclusion, which was published in the anthology solo/black/woman. Edris has directed locally for Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, Word for Word, Magic Theatre, TheatreWorks, American Conservatory Theater, SF Playhouse, Z Space, and Aurora Theatre, and nationally at Trinity Rep in Providence, Curious Theater in Denver, WaterTower Theatre in Dallas, Mark Taper Forum in LA, Southern Rep in New Orleans, and Alabama Shakespeare, among others. Edris has presented scholarship in Mexico, the UK, and the Netherlands; toured France and Germany; and studied at Theatre Arts/Ibadan, Nigeria, where she performed with the legendary university comedy troupe, Laffomania. Edris and BACCE are artists-in-residence at Brava Theater Center, where she has presented several seasons of critically acclaimed performances. Edris holds an MFA from the University of Iowa.
Elizabeth Carter (she/her) is a regional director based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of her favorite productions include FAT HAM (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Confederates (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis), WOLF PLAY (Shotgun Players), SWEAT and THE LEGEND OF GEORGIA MCBRIDE (Center REPertory Co.), STEEL MAGNOLIAS (TheatreWorks SV), AS YOU LIKE IT (California Shakespeare Festival), Stoop Stories (Aurora Theatre Co.), FOR COLORED GIRLS… (African American Shakespeare Co.) and the new musical SIGN MY NAME TO FREEDOM (SF Bay Area Theatre Co.). She was associate director on the ripple the wave that carried me home (Berkeley Rep/Goodman Theatre) and assistant director on HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED (Oregon Shakespeare Festival). She directed the groundbreaking 2020 virtual King Lear (SF Shakespeare Festival) and FEEL THE SPIRIT (Shotgun Players/Colt Couer NYC). Her directorial film debut BOTTLED SPIRITS won Best Narrative at the London Pan African Film Festival. She was the inaugural SDCF Lloyd Richards New Futures Resident Director at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is a current Lucas Arts Fellow. As a Black queer director, Elizabeth is passionate about creating theater that examines and celebrates the complexity of identity and the joy of embodied liberation. As an actor, Elizabeth Carter’s theatre credits includeYOU NEVER CAN TELL, OTHELLO, AS YOU LIKE IT, ROMEO AND JULIET, RICHARD II, for California Shakespeare Theater, THE CRUCIBLE andTHE CONVERT for Marin Theatre Co. where she was nominated for both San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award and Theatre Bay Area Awards, FENCES, JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE at Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, NICKEL AND DIMED at TheatreWorks, MERRY WIVES OF WINSOR for SF Shakespeare Festival and THE BLACK RIDER at Shotgun Players. At the Aurora Theatre Co. she has been seen in TROUBLE IN MIND, WITTENBURG, where she was nominated for a SFBATCC Award and THE HEIR APPARENT and most recently the acclaimed EUREKA DAY!, winner of the Theatre Bay Area Award for Best World Premiere and one of the SF Chronicle Top Ten plays of 2018. In 2019 she reprised the role of Carina Off Broadway in the Coult Couer production. Elizabeth continues to dive into new works with The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep.
Facilitator
Lauren Turner Hines (she/her) is a cultural strategist, renowned theatre director, producer, and administrator with a profound dedication to fostering spaces where Black performing artists can thrive locally in New Orleans and across the broader national artistic landscape. Over the past two decades, she has committed to addressing the systemic barriers hindering artistic power, liberation, and agency within Black communities. Drawing from her intimate understanding of the consequences of space inequities and cultural displacement resulting from gentrification and oppression, Lauren envisions the André Cailloux Center as more than just a performing arts venue. Her vision extends to creating a co-designed space that doubles as an economic development incubator for Black-led performing arts organizations. These organizations have historically been denied access to the resources necessary for long-term sustainability. In the face of cultural and historical erasure threatening Black communities’ sense of belonging and self-knowledge nationwide, the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts & Cultural Justice stands as a beacon of hope. Inspired by the legacy of freedom fighter André Cailloux, it serves as a symbolic “ghost light,” illuminating the stories that define our many lived experiences throughout the African Diaspora and calling us to gather in our ongoing struggle for freedom. With its dual focus on local impact in New Orleans and national significance, the André Cailloux Center represents a groundbreaking model for justice-centered cultural institutions. It embodies a paradigm shift in how organizations can lead cultural reclamation efforts while simultaneously serving as indispensable community assets and utilities. Through Lauren’s leadership, the center preserves the past and paves the way for a more equitable and inclusive future for all.
Accessibility
This event will feature live human captioning. The archived video will include post-production captions. If you have additional accessibility needs, please contact [email protected].
Social Media
- Network of Ensemble Theaters: @netensembles (Instagram)
- HowlRound: @howlround (Instagram)
Hashtags: #NETWeek #NETWeekBayArea #TheFutureIsEnsemble #FederatingFreedom
About NETWeek Bay Area
On Record is part of something bigger.
Gathering is our medium. It is how we build, how we fight, how we stay alive.
In the Bay, gathering has a sharper name: solidarity. This is the region where liberation refuses to stay single-issue. Indigenous, Black, and Palestinian struggle held as one image on one Oakland wall. Land moving back into Indigenous hands. Restaurants owned by the people who cook in them. NETWeek Bay Area is a week of building infrastructure between movements: cultural workers, artists, and organizers at the same tables, on the same land, in the same street.
We are not visiting the Bay. We are returning to the Bay. And we are staying for a residency in collaboration with the vibrant work that has been alive for so long.
Produced By Network of Ensemble Theaters
Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) is a national solidarity network of ensemble-based theater makers, collectives, and collaborators, thirty years deep in the belief that making together is organizing. We gather knowledge, resources, and people. We bring together the performing arts field, build cooperative infrastructure for cultural workers, and move the knowledge of ensemble practice into more hands. Isolation is a weapon. Relationship is the resource. NET is led by Co-Network Directors Alexandra Meda and Monica Montoya and Federation Pilot Architect Rad Pereira. Learn more at ensembletheaters.net and on Instagram at @netensembles. Support NET at ensembletheaters.net/donate-net.
