PERFORMING OUR FUTURE:
F O R U M
AMY BROOKS
Amy Brooks is the Program Director and Dramaturg for Roadside Theater, the theater wing of Appalachian grassroots arts and media center Appalshop. She coordinates the ensemble's core programmatic areas of New Play Creation, Community Cultural Development, Teaching in Colleges and Communities, and Advocacy; she also oversees special publishing, performance, and arts- and culture-based economic development projects and helps build, sharpen, and disseminate Roadside’s 40-year body of literature, keeping its “living library” at the fore of public discourse on arts and cultural equity.
A 5th-generation West Virginian who returned to Appalachia just before the 2016 election cycle, Amy investigates the confluence of dramatic narrative (“What is the story we choose to tell onstage?”) and public narrative (“What is the story we are called upon to tell about ourselves, our community, and our future?”) in intercultural rural-urban performance. Amy holds a BFA in acting from West Virginia University and an MFA in dramaturgy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she co-founded and produced the first two seasons of the UMass New Play Lab. She is the former Humanities Director of the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, and received the 2016 Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas Residency Program Grant for her work with Roadside Theater.
Amy is also a co-founder and moderator of Rural Arts Weekly, a two-woman Twitter forum for artists, educators, media producers, funders, public sector employees, entrepreneurs, and cultural advocates to ask pressing questions about rural creative placemaking in the digital age. In addition to using web platforms to explode binaries of digital and analog, creative and analytical, rural and urban, and academic and community-based organizing, Rural Arts Weekly has provided official social media coverage of national convenings for organizations including Imagining America, Next Generation Rural Creative Placemaking, and ArtPlace America.
A 5th-generation West Virginian who returned to Appalachia just before the 2016 election cycle, Amy investigates the confluence of dramatic narrative (“What is the story we choose to tell onstage?”) and public narrative (“What is the story we are called upon to tell about ourselves, our community, and our future?”) in intercultural rural-urban performance. Amy holds a BFA in acting from West Virginia University and an MFA in dramaturgy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she co-founded and produced the first two seasons of the UMass New Play Lab. She is the former Humanities Director of the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, and received the 2016 Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas Residency Program Grant for her work with Roadside Theater.
Amy is also a co-founder and moderator of Rural Arts Weekly, a two-woman Twitter forum for artists, educators, media producers, funders, public sector employees, entrepreneurs, and cultural advocates to ask pressing questions about rural creative placemaking in the digital age. In addition to using web platforms to explode binaries of digital and analog, creative and analytical, rural and urban, and academic and community-based organizing, Rural Arts Weekly has provided official social media coverage of national convenings for organizations including Imagining America, Next Generation Rural Creative Placemaking, and ArtPlace America.