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Tara Brooke Watkins

Bio

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.

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Education

PhD, Theatre and Performance Studies

            Tufts University, May 2021

            Dissertation: Performing History in North Tulsa: Black Wall                Street and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

            Professor Kalman A. Burnim Prize for Scholarly Excellence in                Drama and Dance

            Finalist Rob Hollister Award for Community Service and           

            Citizenship

 

MA, Theatre Education

            Emerson College, 2013

            Graduate Thesis Award: Revealing Her Voice Through Her                    Body: The Performance Art of Robbie McCauley

 

BA, Theatre Arts

           Eastern Nazarene College, Magna Cum Laude, 2002

           Department Award: Betty Rice Award for Excellence in                           Directing

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