Tara Brooke Watkins

Tara Brooke Watkins is a theatre scholar-artist specializing in community engagement practices, directing, and playwriting. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University and an MA in Theatre Education from Emerson College. Much of her work focuses on partnerships with communities and artists engaging with historically marginalized individuals. These have included trans children, queer immigrants, people experiencing homelessness, cultural trauma and sexual assault survivors. Major partnerships: Father Bill's and Mainspring in Quincy, Massachusetts; Bethel AME Church in Boston; Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Out of these projects in which she runs story circles and applied theatre exercises to listen and facilitate communication around charged topics, have come plays and theatrical presentations: The Bible Women’s Project ('15-'25), The Strindberg Experiment ('22), Shatter the Silence ('19) Tulsa ’21: Black Wall Street ('18-'21), and The Father Bill’s Play ('20).  As the creator of the award-winning The Bible Women's Project, she offers story circle interventions, retreats, and performances in churches seeking to understand the Bible in new ways through women's eyes and experiences. She is an award-winning director for Sleeping Weazel Theatre company in Boston where she directed The Audacity: Women Speak. She founded the Theatre for Social Justice Program at Eastern Nazarene College and is the founder and South Shore School of Theatre in Quincy, MA, a children's theatre school.