ACCOUNTABILITY AND ANTI-RACISM

Acknowledging The Land

Ars Nova operates on the unceded land of the Lenape peoples on the island of Manhahtaan (Mannahatta) in Lenapehoking, the Lenape Homeland. 

We acknowledge the brutal history of this stolen land and the displacement and dispossession of its Indigenous people. We also acknowledge that after there were stolen lands, there were stolen people. We honor the generations of displaced and enslaved people that built, and continue to build, the country that we occupy. 
 
We are also gathered together in a virtual space. We encourage you to consider the legacies of colonization embedded within the technology and structures we use and to acknowledge its disproportionate impact on communities of color and Indiginous peoples worldwide. 
 
We invite you to join us in acknowledging all of this as well as our shared responsibility; to consider our way forward in reconciliation, decolonization, anti-racism and allyship. We commit ourselves to the daily practice of pursuing this work. 

(May 12, 2022)

The 2021/22 Transparency Report is here!

In this year’s report, while remaining true to our artistic values — and actively working against the pillars of white supremacy — we made refinements to our approach and creation of this living document.

The Transparency Report — the second of its kind for Ars Nova — incorporates feedback, research, survey responses, along with insights and approaches on new initiatives from our previous edition. In the spirit of transparency, we are showing receipts. We ask that you hold us accountable as we move forward in carving an anti-racist, equitable, accessible and culturally diverse theater landscape.

You can view the 2021/22 Transparency Report here

We hope to learn from your journey towards dismantling white supremacy.

We look forward to next year’s progress.

— The Team @ Ars Nova

(December 15, 2021)

In a previous update, we had announced that we would share our 2021/22 Transparency Report by the end of the calendar year. In an effort to be thoughtful as we process and incorporate feedback from last year’s report and welcome new staff members into the process, we are now planning on publishing this season’s Transparency Report by the end of March 2022. You can view the 2020/21 Transparency Report here In addition to our annual Transparency Report, we will also publish an update on our progress towards organizational EDI goals and commitments, building on last year’s Progress Matrix. This season’s document will be published by the end of July 2022. You can view the 2020/21 Progress Matrix here We will continue to use this page and our channels of communication to keep you up-to-date on how we are upholding our duty to fostering an inclusive and anti-racist enviroment within our walls and beyond. Thank you for holding us accountable.

(March 15, 2021)

As we work to uphold our commitment to strive to be an anti-racist organization, galvanized by the We See You White American Theater movement, and in the spirit of accountability and transparency, we are sharing our process and progress so far:

These are the goals we committed to meet by the end of February and their current status:

  • Commission and develop a majority of BIPOC artists;
    • 58% of our resident artists so far this fiscal year self-identify as BPOC*;
  • Develop and experiment with more equitable and power-sharing curatorial practices;
    • We launched the Vision Residency, designed to create more equitable and power-sharing curatorial practices;
  • Publish our FY21 Organizational Budget and its guiding principles;
    • Our FY21 Budget and its corresponding guiding principles, including our Fair Pay Guidelines and a description of our budgeting process, are now publicly available as part of our Transparency Report (more info below);
  • Triple our budget line item providing for regular anti-racism work;
    • We increased our budget line item for supporting anti-racist education and work five-fold, to a dedicated allocation of $65,800, and increased allocation throughout the budget in support of anti-racist policies and programs by an additional $250,000;
  • Publish explicitly anti-racist policies and share them, along with our extant Code of Conduct, with all collaborators prior to beginning work together;
    • Our new Art & Equity Values Statement, along with a revised Code of Conduct, is available publicly as part of our Transparency Report;
  • Expand our practice of ongoing, mandatory EDI Training, creating an educational arc that is flexible and supportive of our artists and the teams that support their work;
    • Our full-time team has engaged in multiple, multi-faceted trainings, including: The Woke Coach’s From Ally to Accomplice training program for the full staff and one-on-one “contextualized coaching” for executive leadership; bystander intervention training from Hollaback!; and a Living Land Acknowledgement workshop led by The Lenape Center;
  • Compensate artists for their performances at all donor events;
    • All artists have been compensated for their participation in fundraising events over the last six months, and we’ve paid over 115 artists for this work overall;
  • Begin meaningfully and respectfully acknowledging the history of the land we work on and benefit from;
    • All public events now begin with an acknowledgement of the history of the land we work on and benefit from;
  • Publish regular progress reports from our Working Groups and Organizational Teams as we further and deepen this work;
    • Today, we share our next report on our progress towards these goals.
* We use BPOC when a known group does not include an Indigenous person, as to not create a false sense of inclusion in a group that does not actually have Indigenous representation  We will build on these actions with ongoing, evolving and unwavering work towards our goal of becoming an anti-racist, equitable and just organization. We will periodically conduct a full internal review of our goals, strategies and practices and, after each review, we’ll update a public document which will report on extant goals and tactics, commit to continuing and future actions in support of these goals, and share metrics on progress so far.

The first of these updates is included HERE.

Additionally, as this is the first of these documents, we are sharing it with a comprehensive Transparency Report for additional context, which outlines:

  • What We Do
    • Mission
    • Programs
  • How We Do It
    • Values
      • Art & Equity Values Statement
      • Code of Conduct
    • Practices
    • Infrastructure
      • Organizational Structure
      • Budget Process & Priorities
      • Revenue
      • Expenses
      • Fair Pay
    • Process
  • Who We Are
    • Artists, Audiences, Staff, & Board
    • Our Donors

and is available HERE.

All that to say, we are working, and there is much to do. We acknowledge that we are deeply imperfect, and know we surely will learn more about how our efforts fall short, or have a different impact than intended. We are here for it. We owe you nothing less.  In solidarity.

(February 24, 2021)

Hi there! In our August 25, 2020 update we committed to publishing our organizational budget and a progress report on our Equity, Diversity & Inclusion work within 6 months. We have combined these updates with a comprehensive transparency report and progress matrix, and we have discovered that to complete this work in a thoughtful and inclusive manner, we need to take a little more time. Please watch this space where we will file our next update, and publish these documents, no later than March 15, 2021.

(August 25, 2020) A Progress Report

On July 8, a collective of multi-generational, Black, Indigenous and People of Color theatermakers released a “comprehensive but by no means exhaustive” list of demands for the White American Theater. This powerful document can be used as a guidebook for both becoming an anti-racist organization, and for communally co-creating an anti-racist theatrical landscape. Ars Nova both honors and is grateful to the collective for their labor creating and sharing this document, and acknowledges that their demands stem from the years of exclusion, exploitation, and erasure of their Black and brown bodies and stories by predominantly white arts and culture institutions. We recognize that we are one of these predominantly white organizations, and that we have been both complicit in and the beneficiaries of the same culture of white supremacy and anti-Blackness that has caused them harm.

We reaffirm our commitment to doing the work required to dismantle these harmful, racist systems and to building a more equitable, just and participatory organizational culture and framework for art-making.

In the spirit of transparency, we are “showing our work” and sharing our process and pathways as they exist now.  In the spirit of accountability, we are sharing our next steps towards these goals.

TRANSPARENCY:

In the past six weeks we have:

  • Formally incorporated the BIPOC Demands for White American Theater into our existing Organizational Goals for equity, representation, and anti-racism;
  • Taken a comprehensive inventory of these demands and completed a full-team self-assessment and audit of our performance across each one;
  • Created a structure for pursuing these anti-racist Goals that complements our horizontally collaborative operational structure by:
    • Creating mandatory Working Groups in Immediate Response, Equity and Justice Plans, Education, and Data/Surveying that meet weekly;
    • Creating a leadership structure for these Working Groups that does not directly correspond to existing organizational hierarchy, and that also meets weekly;
    • Explicitly including anti-racist work in the job descriptions of every team member and on the agenda of every extant organizational team’s weekly meetings;
    • Assigning each of these demands to one of these Working Groups or Organizational Teams; and
    • Activating our Board’s Equity, Justice & Inclusion Task Force in response to these demands and to forge and activate a work-plan at the Board level for the year ahead.

ACCOUNTABILITY:

In the next six months we will:

  • Commission and develop a majority of BIPOC artists;
  • Develop and experiment with more equitable and power-sharing curatorial practices;
  • Publish our FY21 Organizational Budget and its guiding principles;
  • Triple our budget line item providing for regular anti-racism work;
  • Publish explicitly anti-racist policies and share them, along with our extant Code of Conduct, with all collaborators prior to beginning work together;
  • Expand our practice of ongoing, mandatory EDI Training, creating an educational arc that is flexible and supportive of our artists and the teams that support their work;
  • Compensate artists for their performances at all donor events;
  • Begin meaningfully and respectfully acknowledging the history of the land we work on and benefit from; and
  • Publish regular progress reports from our Working Groups and Organizational Teams, as we further and deepen this work.

Our process is iterative; while we can’t promise it will always work, we can promise we will be intentionally flexible and responsive to change if it does not. Further, this list of commitments and actions is not exhaustive; it represents neither the extent of the work to be done, nor the extent of the work we’ll do. But, we will endeavor to become a more racially and culturally just organization that creates art more equitably and inclusively by immediately taking at least these steps.

And, we promise we will continue.

(May 31, 2020) Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter. Ars Nova recognizes that we operate within systemic racism, and that neutrality and silence only feeds it further. We are committed to the work of anti-racism and anti-oppression in our organization, in our lives and in our art. We know that we have just begun this work and that there is much yet for us to learn and to do. We hold ourselves accountable for working to dismantle the systemic racism, oppression and violence that permeates our country and our industry. Below are just a few of the funds to which our staff have donated over the past several days. Today, we ask you to consider joining us in supporting these or others that are dedicated to social justice, if you are able:

We also continue our work by:

  • Using our platform to amplify the voices of Black, Indigenous, People of Color artists;
  • Identifying, confronting and addressing the barriers to attendance that keep BIPOC audiences mostly out of our spaces;
  • Calling on the white people within our community to acknowledge their own racism, decenter themselves, and actively engage in anti-racist practices;
  • Committing to our continued education as individuals and as an organization so that we can uproot the system of racism on which we are built.

We stand in solidarity. We hope you will join us.

The Staff & Board Leadership of Ars Nova

Ray Jordan Achan, Artistic Fellow
Chelsea Barker, House Manager
Judy Bedol, Board Secretary
Renee Blinkwolt, Managing Director
Nicole Brodeur, Board Member
Immi Chaudhry, Executive Assistant
Jack Dentinger, House Manager
Jason Eagan, Founding Artistic Director
Victor Edozien, Board Member
Rick Feldman, Board Member
Lizzy Florence, Board Member
Deeksha Gaur, Board Member
Miranda Hanson, Development Associate
Jake Haungs, Operations and Facilities Manager
Kalen Sierra Hughes, Production Apprentice
Dena Igusti, Marketing Fellow
Mac Ingram, Director of Development
Sarah Ivins, Marketing Manager
Jason Kemper, Board Treasurer
Ben Klein, Audience Engagement Associate
Dana Kirchman, Board Vice Chair
Simon Lass, Technical Director
Alisa Lessing, Board Chair
Maura Le Viness, Management Fellow
Jes Levine, Director of Production
Francis Madi Cerrada, Development Fellow
Greta Mansour, Board Member
David Miner, Board Member
Kris Pritchard, Associate Production Manager
Justin Samoy, Individual Giving and Special Events Manager
Eric Shethar, Artistic Programs Manager
Jessie Shinberg, Rentals Coordinator
Emily Shooltz, Associate Artistic Director
Tina Simpson, Management Assistant
Jenny Steingart, Founding Board Chair, Co-Founder
Tamara Vallejos, Director of Marketing and Communications
Kate Weber, Interim Business Manager
Casey York, General Manager

Updated May 31, 2020.