Theatre Director, Scholar, Playwright and
Community Engagement Specialist
From 2016-21, as part of Tara's dissertation work, she returned to her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma where she grew up never hearing about the Tulsa Race Massacre and Black Wall Street. Using story circles to engage with community members in North Tulsa who have long been affected by this buried history, she partnered with the Greenwood Cultural Center to hear stories and teach creative drama to children. She then created an original play, Tulsa '21: Black Wall Street which she directed with community members and produced for its 2018 premiere. In 2019, she worked with community members to develop an abridged version for school performances. It was produced with World Stage Theatre Company for the 2021 centennial in Tulsa.
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From 2016-2021, Tara Brooke Watkins co-led the ministry Shatter the Silence with Rev. Dr. Pastor Gloria White-Hammond at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston, MA. Shatter the Silence seeks to provide healing for victims of sexual violence through healing story circles and drama therapy techniques. It also offers training for those wanting to help survivors of sexual violence. Tara developed a short play in community with the inaugural group of women which played at sexual victimization awareness church services in Boston.
This signature play, created and continuously developed by Tara throughout 2014-2025, is an ongoing project that gathers young women from various backgrounds (predominantly raised in a Christian religious context) to engage in story circles discussing how traditional church experiences have affected their understanding of what it means to be a woman. This script changes with each group of women entering as new cast members. Themes include empowerment, abuse, sexual harassment, incest, grief, and rule-breaking. While the topics are difficult, the show has been lauded as an emotional rollercoaster taking people from tears to intense laughter in a matter of minutes. The Bible Women's Project was an official selection of the New York International Fringe Festival in 2016, toured internationally until Covid, and recently won three national awards at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival with the cast from Salve Regina University, and will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2025.
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In 2022-23, Tara worked with student actors at Salve Regina University who openly identified across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum to create The Strindberg Experiment. Based on research that Swedish playwright August Strindberg used theatre as a scientific experimental tool to explore gender identity within himself, Tara used the devising tool of moment work with the cast to create the original play which premiered in October 2022. Funded in part by the McAuley Institute on Mercy Grant highlighting Salve Regina faculty researching women and gender, the play was an early step in research that looks at how theatre is exploratory for gender identities.
