Author: Arielle Julia Brown

Arielle is interested in how cultural institutions and arts initiatives can facilitate social justice and cultural equity through the championing of culturally specific performance. Emerging from her work and research around U.S. slavery, racial terror and justice, Arielle is committed to supporting and creating Black performance work that commands imaginative and material space for social transformation. In service of this work, Arielle's practice is necessarily multidisciplinary as it traverses cultural producing, cultural strategy, performance making, dramaturgy, public history and performance curation. Woven throughout her cultural work, Arielle teaches and facilitates workshops across various cultural and academic spaces. As a facilitator she has been most transformed by her work on The Love Balm Project, a workshop series and performance that centers the testimonies of mothers who have lost children to systemic violence (2010 -2015|more information below). Additionally, Arielle has taught performance at; Destiny Arts Center, Streetside Stories, Eastside Arts Alliance and Liberation Songs (at Morehouse College). She has been a guest lecturer at the Pomona College Department of Theatre and Dance. Arielle has facilitated workshops and or served on panels at Open Engagement, Common Field, Highlander Homecoming, ROOTS Weekend Atlanta, Theatre Bay Area Conference, College Art Association Conference, Alliance of Artist Communities, ASWAD and others. For her creative projects, Arielle has been awarded funding from CalHumanities, Center for Cultural Innovation, Akonadi Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Theatre Bay Area, USDAC, AlternateROOTS, Highlander Institute (We Shall Overcome Fund), the Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant, the JKW Foundation, Velocity Fund, The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and MAP Fund. Arielle was recognized by Intersection for the Arts as as 2014 Changemaker. She was a Mellon Artistic Leadership Fellow for the 2014 Encuentro at LATC. She was a 2017-2018 Inaugural Diversity and Leadership Fellow at Alliance of Artists Communities. Arielle was a 2019 Monument Lab National Fellow. Arielle received her B.A. in Theatre from Pomona College and holds an M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University where she was the 2015-2017 Public History of Slavery Graduate Fellow with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. www.ariellejuliabrown.com