Facing Race: A National Conference in St. Louis, MO — November 20-22, 2024

Much Ado About Dead White Men—Working with the "Classics" while BIPOC in 5 Acts

Thursday, 11/21
2:00 pm to 3:30 pm

The norm of the Western Canon privileges the white, cis-gendered male experience while it marginalizes and dehumanizes everyone else. Through storytelling and examples of professional productions on stage, podcast, and screen, we will interrogate and explore how we can deconstruct these biases and find opportunities to re-center multi-identity artists in new cultural models.

In this session, we will unpack our history’s inequitable practices in cultural arts and present ideas that challenge socialized assumptions. We will lift up real-life examples and what we learned from pushing back and taking ownership of art in the image of our diverse world. We will leave the session having stretched our radical imagination and created visionary fiction that inspires our work forward.