Art Restart

Ja’ Malik is just wrapping up his fourth year as the artistic director of Madison Ballet in Madison, WI, but his path to leadership has been shaped by decades inside the field. A former professional dancer with a 25-year performing career, Malik danced with companies including Cleveland Ballet, North Carolina Dance Theatre, BalletX and Ballet Hispánico, performing a wide range of classical, neoclassical and contemporary repertory. Trained at the Joffrey Ballet School and holding a BFA from The New School, his artistic voice draws equally on rigorous classical technique and socially engaged contemporary practice. He also continues to serve as the artistic director of Ballet Boy Productions, an organization he founded in 2007 that provides young men of color access to classical and contemporary ballet performing opportunities and that also offers training and mentoring.Since arriving in Madison, Ja’ has led a period of significant artistic and organizational change, and the results are more than encouraging. At a moment when many ballet companies nationwide are grappling with shrinking audiences, Madison Ballet is growing its own, responding to programming that places contemporary work alongside the classics and reflects the community it serves. Six months into his tenure, Malik also stepped into the additional role of interim executive director, guiding the organization through a demanding transition with a small staff and limited resources.In this interview, Ja’ reflects on the risks involved in reshaping a regional ballet company, from extending dancer contracts to rethinking programming and institutional structure. He also speaks candidly about leadership during the in-between phase of change and the emotional, physical and ethical demands placed on artists and arts leaders alike.https://www.madisonballet.org/about/staff/ja-malikHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

For over 150 years, photography has played a powerful role in shaping how Indigenous peoples of the Americas are seen and too often misunderstood. Images made about Indigenous communities rather than by them have circulated widely in museums, textbooks and popular culture, reinforcing narratives of disappearance, distance or anthropological extraction. “In Light and Shadow,” the ambitious new book by photographers Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke, directly challenges that legacy, not by rejecting photography’s past but by radically re-centering who controls the archive, who tells the story and who the work is for.Adams, an Iñupiaq photographer based in Anchorage, and Stacke, a Brooklyn-based photographer, writer and archival researcher, approach photography less as image-making than as long-term relationship-building and storytelling. Their collaboration grew out of “The 400 Years Project,” an expansive initiative marking the anniversary of the Mayflower by foregrounding Indigenous photographers across generations, geographies and the full range of photographic practice — from 19th-century studio portraits to contemporary conceptual work.In this interview, Adams and Stacke discuss the ethical and logistical choices behind “In Light and Shadow,” the politics of archives and representation and what it means to be storytellers accountable to the people whose lives and histories they photograph.https://brianadams.photoshelter.com/indexhttps://sarahstacke.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

For more than a decade, conceptual artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida have collaborated on sharp, often darkly funny critiques of the art world’s economic and political machinery. One of their earliest projects together, a satirical telethon staged during the Great Recession, planted a seed they later returned to: What would happen if you ran an art fair where every work of art was free? That question eventually evolved into Zero Art Fair, a real, fully functioning event that uses a radically different contract to redistribute both artworks and power within the art market.Zero Art Fair invites participating artists to place selected works into a five-year “store-to-own” agreement with collectors who take the work home at no cost. During those five years, ownership vests gradually; if a collector later decides to sell the work, the artist receives half of the sale price as well as a 10 percent resale royalty. The result is a system that clears storage, builds new relationships across class lines, and asserts one of the Fair’s core beliefs, namely that price does not equal value. So far, Dalton and Powhida have staged two editions — the first in a barn in the Hudson Valley as part of Upstate Art Weekend, the second this fall at the FLAG Art Foundation in Manhattan — together seeding more than 400 works of contemporary art into new homes.In this interview, Dalton and Powhida explain how the Fair’s unconventional contract works, why prioritizing access for people who “need help to live with art” reshaped their second New York edition, and what kinds of unexpected relationships and ripple effects have emerged along the way.https://www.zeroartfair.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

For more than two decades, Ariel Fristoe has been at the center of one of the country’s most inventive experiments in how theater can live inside a community. As the artistic director of Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater, she has shaped an organization known not for occupying traditional stages but for embedding performance inside civic life, partnering with schools, nonprofits, public agencies and neighborhood groups to spark dialogue and move people toward collective action.Out of Hand’s work is now studied and replicated across the country, in part because it offers an alternative path at a moment when many arts organizations are searching for new models. Instead of focusing on season planning or ticket sales, Ariel and her team design programs that integrate theater with data, storytelling with civic participation and performance with tangible next steps for audiences who want to make change in their communities.In this interview, Ariel reflects on how this approach emerged, how her own leadership evolved alongside it, and why she believes artists are uniquely equipped to work on the most urgent social issues of our time. She also gives a glimpse into Out of Hand’s next chapter — including a major 2026 national initiative — and shares what she’s learned about building trust, building partnerships and sustaining purpose-driven work over the long haul.https://www.outofhandtheater.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

For more than two decades, composer and educator Byron Au Yong has created music that bridges performance, ritual and activism. His highly collaborative works have been presented by such varied institutions as the Seattle Symphony, BAM, the Smithsonian, the American Conservatory Theater and Nashville Opera. Among his many large-scale projects is his long partnership with writer and rapper Aaron Jafferis, with whom he created the “liberation trilogy”: “Stuck Elevator,” “The Ones” and “Activist Songbook.”Byron is also Associate Professor and Director of Arts Leadership at Seattle University, where he’s reimagining arts education as a space of equity, imagination and community. His teaching encourages artists to consider leading beyond or outside institutions and to learn from one another as collaborators in liberation. His many honors include a Creative Capital Award, a Doris Duke Building Demand for the Arts Grant and a Sundance Institute/Time Warner Foundation Fellowship.In this interview, Byron reflects on how his art and teaching are both rooted in listening, whether it’s listening through the feet to the language of trees to compose his newest work or listening deeply to students and collaborators to imagine new, more equitable forms of leadership.https://byronauyong.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Since the advent of artificial intelligence and its astonishing image-generating capacities, artists the world over have been both disturbed and fascinated by it. Some fear that these new tools could render human creativity obsolete, while others see in them a chance to reexamine what art and imagination itself can be. For “Art Restart,” this conversation marks the beginning of a deeper exploration of how AI might radically reshape the act of making art and the role of the artist in society.Painter Damian Stamer is an ideal guide for this inquiry. Known for transforming photographs of abandoned barns and rural landscapes near his North Carolina home into luminous, memory-laden canvases — both UNCSA and the Kenan Institute for the Arts have Damian Stamer originals in their collections — Damian has now begun experimenting with AI-generated images as source material for his paintings. Rather than replacing his hand or vision, the technology has become a provocative collaborator, one that helps him probe what remains uniquely human in the creative process.In this interview, Damian reflects on how working with AI has deepened his understanding of intuition, authorship and faith in an age increasingly defined by machines.https://damianstamer.com/home.htmlHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

When artist Sherrill Roland returned to grad school at University of North Carolina at Greensboro after nearly a year in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, he found himself haunted by the invisible weight of his experience. Determined to confront how incarceration had reshaped his body, psyche and place in the world, he — with the encouragement of then-faculty member, artist Sheryl Oring — turned that burden into "The Jumpsuit Project," a performance in which he wore an orange prison uniform on campus every day for a year. The project soon expanded beyond the university to public spaces across the country, where Roland sat inside a 7-by-9-foot square of orange tape, an echo of a prison cell, and invited passersby to step inside and talk with him, transforming uncomfortable encounters into moments of shared reflection and empathy.In the years since, Roland has become one of the most prominent conceptual artists in the South, translating that raw act of endurance into a studio practice that explores the architecture of confinement, the language of data and the humanity hidden within systems of control. His work, which is now in the collections of major museums including the Studio Museum in Harlem and the North Carolina Museum of Art, asks how objects and numbers can embody both memory and freedom.In this interview, Roland speaks about the fear and necessity of donning the orange jumpsuit, the emotional toll of transforming personal pain into public conversation, and how his practice continues to evolve toward accessibility, dialogue and compassion. https://www.sherrillroland.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

In June of 2025, multidisciplinary artist Esther Hernandez posted two videos on Instagram that she herself described as rants, though she was fully composed through each. In each video she called out arts institutions and funders for expecting artists to provide evermore work gratis. As she herself put it, “I am tired of watching artists be expected to carry so much to make socially engaged work, to give back, to support the community, to hold the weight of healing or justice when most of us aren’t even resourced to pay our bills, let alone afford health care or rest.” She also lamented that nonprofits were, in a time of admittedly frightening fiscal precarity, leaning on underfunded artists for financial support. Esther clearly hit a nerve with artists everywhere, and her rants amassed thousands of views and messages of commiseration and support. She can also rant with some authority because not only is she an artist, but she has also worked in the arts nonprofits sector. A self-taught maker of stop-motion animation and movable or mechanized sculptures and zoetropes, she is currently Chief Curator at Union Hall, a six-year-old nonprofit in Denver, CO that provides support and professional development to emerging artists as well as curators.In this interview, Esther reflects on the inequities that drove her to speak out and on how her posts sparked broader conversations about the invisible labor of artists. She also shares how her dual perspective as both artist and curator informs her ideas for more sustainable funding models and healthier creative practices.https://www.instagram.com/esther.hz/https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKxcWHfyhpb/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKxdIksyoRh/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Wanda Dalla Costa, a proud member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, has built a groundbreaking career by weaving Indigenous knowledge systems into contemporary design. As the first First Nations woman to become a licensed architect in Canada, she is Principal and Founder of Tawaw Architecture Collective, which has offices in Calgary and Phoenix. Through her leadership, Tawaw has shaped cultural, civic and educational projects across North America, from Calgary’s Arts Commons Transformation to Toronto’s David Crombie Park Revitalization.Her work is defined by deep engagement with communities. Over the past two decades, she and her team have conducted hundreds of sessions in dozens of communities, ensuring that every project reflects the lived experiences, cultural practices, and aspirations of the people it serves. At Arizona State University, where she is a professor and directs the Indigenous Design Collaborative, she mentors emerging Indigenous architects and demonstrates how architecture can carry forward cultural continuity while also addressing the urgent realities of climate change.In this interview, Dalla Costa discusses how she is redefining what it means to design “in a good way,” what she has learned from decades of listening to elders, youth and knowledge-keepers and how Indigenous ingenuity offers crucial lessons for building in a rapidly changing climate. She also shares how her firm reimagines the business of architecture itself through an Indigenous ethos.https://www.tawarc.com/aboutHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Davian Robinson’s artistic journey has never followed a straight line. As a student at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, NC, he discovered ballet and tap, launching a lifelong relationship with dance even as his vision continued to fade. At the same time, he was excelling in competitive athletics, eventually earning medals on the national stage as a para-cyclist. Years later, he returned to dance at UNC Charlotte, where he recommitted to the artform that had first taught him how to express his strength and resilience through movement.Since then, Robinson has emerged as both a powerful performer and an advocate for more inclusive ways of teaching and experiencing dance. His “Sensory Beyond Sight” workshop encourages participants — whether artists, athletes or professionals far outside the arts — to move beyond vision and tap into the body’s other senses. He also continues to expand his creative reach through collaboration, most recently with celebrated multimedia artist Janet Biggs in “Misregistration,” on view through September 22, 2025, at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte.In this interview, Davian reflects on how he developed his methodology as a dance student, the breakthroughs that shaped his teaching and choreography philosophy and how the world of dance can make itself more welcoming to visually impaired dancers and audiences alike.https://www.empower23.net/aboutHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Few artists have woven their creative practice so seamlessly into the fabric of their home place as Shanai Matteson. A visual artist, writer, community-based researcher and environmental-justice organizer, Shanai works in northern Minnesota’s rural Aitken County, where she was born and raised. Her projects — whether they take the form of printmaking, collaborative public art, documentary storytelling or social gathering spaces — are grounded in reciprocity, ecological care and the conviction that creativity can help repair the frayed relationships between people, land and water.Over the past two decades, Shanai has co-founded and led some of the region’s most inventive and socially engaged cultural initiatives. Her celebrated Water Bar & Public Studio has invited thousands in her community and around the state to “belly up” for a free tasting flight of water while discussing water equity and environmental health with scientists, activists and even policymakers. Her mobile mine-view platform, Overburden/Overlook, offers overlooked histories and community perspectives on the extractive industries that have shaped the Iron Range. And her newest collaboration, Fire in the Village — co-led with Anishinaabe artist Annie Humphrey — bridges Native and non-Native communities through art, music and the radical act of gathering around metaphorical and literal shared fires. In this interview, Shanai reflects on what it means to create art that belongs to a place and its people, how frontline activism reshaped her approach to community organizing and why persistence matters more than perfection. She also shares lessons from years of linking art, science and public policy and explains why, in her corner of rural Minnesota, tending to one another may be our surest path to a more just and sustainable future.https://shanai.work/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Much of Angela Washko’s work begins with a simple question: What if we took the media we consume every day — the video games, the reality shows, the online chatrooms — as seriously as we take traditional art spaces? What if we examined them not just as distractions or products but as public arenas where identity, power and belonging are actively negotiated?With a practice that spans performance, social engagement, video games and film, Angela has spent more than a decade doing just that. Her work doesn’t just critique digital culture from the outside; it embeds itself within it, creating space for dialogue in places not usually known for nuance. Whether she’s convening feminist councils in the fantasy worlds of online gaming or crafting interactive experiences from the textures of real life, her projects ask how we behave when no one — or everyone — is watching. In 2012 she launched The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an in-game social practice project that sparked multi-hour dialogues between initially hostile players. Later she created The Game: The Game, an RPG in which a player could try to negotiate a bar packed full of male pickup artists following the same seduction playbook. And just last year, fascinated by the allure and promises of reality television, she directed her first documentary, “Workhorse Queen,” about a few members of the tightknit drag community in Rochester, NY and their complicated relationship with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the commerce of 21st century drag celebrity.In this interview, Angela, now a full professor and the MFA Program Director at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, reflects on how she found her voice as an artist inside a male-dominated gaming culture, why she continues to work in and not against the media she critiques and how becoming a mother during a global crisis reshaped her ideas of creativity, care and time.https://angelawashko.com/home.htmlHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

At a time when theaters everywhere are competing with an ever-expanding array of at-home entertainment and struggling to fill seats, some artists are asking not what plays to produce but how to produce them differently. Graham Wetterhahn’s answer was to found his own company, After Hours Theatre Company in Los Angeles. With a background that spans traditional theater, theme parks and digital media, he has spent recent years creating “immersive-enhanced” productions that invite audiences not just to watch a story unfold but to step directly into it.In After Hours’ 2018 production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” for instance, audience members were admitted to a fictional 1960s psychiatric hospital and cast as patients, free to explore hidden rooms and interact with characters for a full hour before the scripted performance even began. The production cleverly merged immersive design with a fully staged, licensed play, creating an experience that theatergoers of all stripes — and with varying levels of comfort with the notion of participation — could embrace. And it worked, selling out night after night and drawing in an audience that was overwhelmingly under 40.After Hours has gone on not only to produce a broad array of successful immersive-enhanced productions but also to organize the Los Angeles Immersive Invitational, a collegial competition that brings together the city’s most adventurous immersive storytellers under one roof and gives them 48 hours to create a new 10-minute piece based on a single prompt. The L.A. Invitational just completed its fifth iteration, and After Hours is now producing Invitationals in other American cities.In this episode, Graham shares why he believes After Hours’ hybrid experiences may hold the key to live theater’s future, how the company has built a sustainable — if still scrappy — for-profit model, and what his journey has taught him about turning casual eventgoers into passionate theater fans.https://www.grahamwetterhahn.com/https://www.afterhourstheatre.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

To call conductor Jessica Bejarano an outlier in the American orchestral world is a mild understatement. Not only is she female at a time when there are still astonishingly few female conductors of professional orchestras — according to Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, in the 2024-25 season, only 20.8% of concerts by the top 21 orchestras in the U.S. were conducted by women, and today only one of the 25 largest American orchestras has a female music director — but she is also Latina and lesbian. When Jessica Bejarano steps onto the podium, therefore, she doesn’t just conduct; sporting visible tattoos — her favorite conductor Tchaikovsky is prominently featured on her right forearm — and projecting a down-to-earth warmth and grit she learned from her immigrant mother in working class East L.A., she redefines what leadership can look like in the orchestral world.By 2019, Jessica was already building a solid resume, leading community orchestras in the Bay Area as well as accepting freelance directing gigs around the world. Continually faced with the glacial pace of change in the classical music world, however, she took a leap of faith and founded her own ensemble, the San Francisco Philharmonic. The SF Phil’s mission is to center diversity, equity and inclusion not just as a tagline but as a lived experience for musicians and audiences alike. In the last six years, under her leadership, the SF Phil has collaborated with everyone from Grammy-winning composers to local rap icons, while also offering masterclasses for emerging conductors and commissioning new works by underrepresented composers. In this interview, Jessica shares the winding, impassioned path that led her from East L.A. trumpet player to visionary conductor and founder. She discusses how she built the SF Phil from scratch — including funding its first concert out of her own savings — and how she continues to push the boundaries of what a 21st century orchestra can be.https://www.sfphil.org/aboutHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Gonzalez, two of the founding members of Primera Generación Dance Collective, both grew up in Southern California households where dancing was a vital part of family life, though neither was encouraged to pursue it professionally. Alfonso’s first training was in ballet folklórico, a form he embraced as a child largely thanks to his own curiosity and insistence. Irvin, inspired by early seasons of “So You Think You Can Dance,” taught himself pirouettes in secret in his parents’ garage. Both men eventually studied dance at UC Riverside (UCR), where they also first came out to their families, not only as queer but also as dancers. UCR is also where the two met and fell in love.It was during graduate school that Alfonso and Irvin, along with fellow dancers Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier and Patty Huerta, realized the creative power of coming together. Each brought a unique movement background and a shared desire to explore and celebrate their Mexican American identities on the concert stage. The resulting collective, Primera Generación, now almost ten years strong, continues to challenge conventional notions of contemporary dance with work that is joyous, confrontational and often intentionally messy. That messiness is key. The collective embraces the concept of “desmadre,” a Spanish term that can refer to disorder, exuberance or both, as both a choreographic strategy and a call to reflection and social change.In this interview, Alfonso and Irvin, now professors at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH, discuss the origins of Primera Generación Dance Collective, how they’ve navigated nearly a decade of creative collaboration and why their messiest pieces are often their most meaningful. They also reflect on what it means to be first-generation artists in the Midwest today and how they hope the next generation of dancers can shape the collective’s future.https://www.instagram.com/primerageneraciondance/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Gonzalez, two of the founding members of Primera Generación Dance Collective, both grew up in Southern California households where dancing was a vital part of family life, though neither was encouraged to pursue it professionally. Alfonso’s first training was in ballet folklórico, a form he embraced as a child largely thanks to his own curiosity and insistence. Irvin, inspired by early seasons of “So You Think You Can Dance,” taught himself pirouettes in secret in his parents’ garage. Both men eventually studied dance at UC Riverside (UCR), where they also first came out to their families, not only as queer but also as dancers. UCR is also where the two met and fell in love.It was during graduate school that Alfonso and Irvin, along with fellow dancers Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier and Patty Huerta, realized the creative power of coming together. Each brought a unique movement background and a shared desire to explore and celebrate their Mexican American identities on the concert stage. The resulting collective, Primera Generación, now almost ten years strong, continues to challenge conventional notions of contemporary dance with work that is joyous, confrontational and often intentionally messy. That messiness is key. The collective embraces the concept of “desmadre,” a Spanish term that can refer to disorder, exuberance or both, as both a choreographic strategy and a call to reflection and social change.In this interview, Alfonso and Irvin, now professors at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH, discuss the origins of Primera Generación Dance Collective, how they’ve navigated nearly a decade of creative collaboration and why their messiest pieces are often their most meaningful. They also reflect on what it means to be first-generation artists in the Midwest today and how they hope the next generation of dancers can shape the collective’s future.https://www.instagram.com/primerageneraciondance/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Even before his diagnosis of long COVID in 2020, cellist Joshua Roman had carved a unique niche in the classical music world. A former principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony turned soloist and curator, Joshua built a career that combined artistic excellence with a passionate commitment to making music relevant and accessible. Whether premiering bold new works or improvising in unexpected settings, he was—and remains—a restless innovator with an unshakable belief in music’s power to heal, connect, and transform.Long COVID has altered nearly every aspect of Joshua’s life, from his physical stamina to how he plans his days to the way he relates to his instrument. Yet instead of sidelining him, the illness has led Joshua to reevaluate the very foundations of his artistry. The result is a new clarity and focus—not only about which projects deserve his limited energy but also what kind of artistic legacy he wants to build. His latest initiative, “The Immunity Project,” exemplifies this shift: a collection of performances and reflections that foreground music’s emotional and restorative capacity, drawn directly from his personal experience of illness and recovery. The project now also includes a recently released album titled “Immunity.”In this interview, Joshua opens up about the physical and existential recalibrations he’s made in order to keep performing, why he now only practices when he truly wants to and how chronic illness has deepened his artistic mission. He also shares his hopes for a classical-music ecosystem that makes space for artists to be fully, honestly human — onstage and off.https://www.joshuaroman.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Cyrus Moussavi has carved out a career that is as improbable as it is original. Raised in Iowa in a bicultural Iranian American household, Cyrus grew up spending summers in Iran and the rest of the year steeped in his father’s love of prog rock and his mother’s passion for traditional Iranian music. That early immersion in disparate sound worlds laid the groundwork for a lifelong obsession with music—not as a performer, but as a listener, connector, and storyteller. After studying economics and philosophy in college, Cyrus gravitated toward filmmaking, not to make conventional movies but to explore how visual storytelling could capture, preserve and transmit music and the lives of those who make it.As a filmmaker, Cyrus has developed a body of work that’s both deeply collaborative and boldly inventive. His films include “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship,” a science-fiction documentary co-directed with the visionary artist and musician Lonnie Holley that screened at Sundance and BlackStar, among many other festivals and galleries, and the upcoming “Somebody’s Gone,” a feature-length film about gospel legend Brother Theotis Taylor that he is co-directing with Brother Theotis’ son, Hubert. And as a music archivist and promoter, since 2019 Cyrus has led the influential reissue label Mississippi Records, where he works closely with artists and their families to bring overlooked and under-celebrated music from around the world to new audiences.In this interview, Cyrus discusses how his early experiences shaped his eclectic sensibility, what it means to ethically archive music across cultures and how he sees his work as both creative practice and cultural preservation. Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

It’s no secret that arts non-profits across the country are struggling to survive, but few closures have hit their communities as hard as the recent shuttering of Big Medium in Austin, TX. For more than 20 years, Big Medium was one of the most influential visual-arts organizations in the city. It produced the beloved and sprawling Austin Studio Tour, presented exhibitions that championed historically marginalized artists and served as an essential convener for the city’s creative community. At the heart of its work for many years was curator and, more recently, artistic director Coka Treviño, whose passion for equity and for platforming emerging artists helped shape the organization’s inclusive mission.In this conversation, Coka, who continues her own curatorial work via her company The Projecto, reflects on her tenure at Big Medium and the complex web of challenges that led to its sudden closure. From shifts in city grantmaking priorities to the skyrocketing cost of living that made staffing nearly impossible, the interview offers a candid window into just how difficult it has become for arts organizations—even in culturally rich, economically booming cities like Austin—to maintain operations. https://www.theprojecto.org/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Ryan J. Haddad is an actor and playwright whose work across theater and television consistently challenges outdated narratives around disability, queerness and identity. He made a striking Off-Broadway playwriting debut with “Dark Disabled Stories” at The Public Theater, which enjoyed a sold-out, extended run and earned him the Obie Award for Best New American Play. His autobiographical solo show “Hi, Are You Single?” has become a defining part of his artistic voice, touring nationally and earning critical acclaim. Ryan’s television credits include memorable appearances on Hulu’s “A Murder at the End of the World” and Netflix’s “The Politician.”In addition to performing, Haddad is a dedicated writer and access advocate. His essays have appeared in The New York Times and Out Magazine, and he is a contributor to the anthology “Disability Intimacy,” curated by Alice Wong. His creative work and activism have earned him a Drama Desk Award, a Paula Vogel Playwriting Award from Vineyard Theatre and a Disability Futures Fellowship. He is also a proud alum of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group.In this interview, conducted just a few days before he premiered his latest solo piece, “Hold Me in the Water,” at Playwrights Horizons in New York City, Ryan reflects on the pivotal experiences that shaped his journey as an artist, from performing fairy tales in his childhood living room to commanding major stages and screens. He speaks candidly about navigating the entertainment industry as a gay man with cerebral palsy, building a career on his own terms and advocating for authentic representation and accessibility in the arts.https://www.ryanjhaddad.com/https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/about/production-history/2020s/2425-season/hold-me-in-the-waterHosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.