New Marigny Theatre | Church of the Arts & Sciences’ TK FUSION ARTS Residency Program supports artists, performers, educators and creative organizations as they develop new work, explore new ideas and build meaningful connections within New Orleans’ creative community. Rooted in our mission to educate, incubate and curate individual and collaborative works, the program provides residents with access to space, mentorship, professional development, resources and a supportive cohort of fellow artists.
Each year, we welcome a diverse group of creators working across disciplines and at different stages of their artistic journeys. Through the residency, we aim to give artists the time, space and community they need to experiment, collaborate and move ambitious projects from idea to realization.
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Meet our 2026–2027 Artists in Residence and explore the projects they are developing below:
Journey Allen
Journey Allen is a New Orleans visual artist, muralist, arts educator, and community leader whose practice exists at the intersection of storytelling, cultural memory, healing, and community transformation. A magna cum laude graduate of Texas Southern University’s renowned John Biggers Art Department, her creative path has been deeply shaped by muralism, social sculpture, African and African American artistic traditions, and a belief in art as a catalyst for connection and change.
From her years with Houston’s Project Row Houses to the Artist Journey Allen Gallery-Studio in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward, and through her ongoing work with young people and Spectrum Arts NOLA, Journey has built a practice that reaches far beyond the traditional studio, creating spaces for reflection, agency, imagination, and collective healing.
As a member of New Marigny Theatre’s 2026–2027 Artist Residency cohort, Journey will turn her attention toward an unexpected new work that represents another evolution in her artistic practice. The details remain intentionally under wraps for now, but we are thrilled to provide Journey with space to explore this next chapter!
Kanyinsola Anifowoshe
Kanyinsola Anifowoshe is a New Orleans-based dance-maker, writer, researcher, and administrator whose work explores memory, movement, storytelling, and collective liberation. Drawing on her background in human rights studies, public art, and cultural research, she creates collaborative, inquiry-based projects that examine how individuals and communities carry, transmit, and transform memory. Her experience includes work with the Yale University Art Gallery, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Monument Lab, and the Justice Arts Coalition, as well as research in Santiago, Chile focused on the role of performance and visual culture in preserving historical memory. She currently serves as Program Manager for Freedom to Grow and continues to develop interdisciplinary work at the intersection of artistic practice, community engagement, and social change.
During her residency, Kanyinsola will develop The Memory Palace, a collaboratively devised dance-theater work exploring how memory lives within and moves between bodies. Through movement, storytelling, writing, and embodied research, the project invites performers and audiences to reflect on memory, grief, cultural inheritance, and collective remembrance. Developed in collaboration with local dancers and inspired by New Orleans’ rich traditions of cultural memory and communal expression, The Memory Palace examines how movement can serve as both an archive of the past and a tool for imagining new futures.
Laura Bernas
Laura Bernas is a New Orleans-based disabled performing artist, educator, and interdisciplinary creator whose work blends theater, movement, music, visual art, and community-centered practice. Holding an MFA in Acting from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and a BA in Performing Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, Laura has performed and created work nationally and internationally across theater, dance, film, and devised performance. Her artistic practice is informed by her background in physical theater, trauma-informed methodologies, disability advocacy, and public health research.
During her residency, Laura will develop a new multidisciplinary performance work inspired by her experience of acquiring a disability as an adult. Combining clown, dance, music, devised theater, visual art, and scientific research, the project explores disability, grief, embodiment, and the relationship between public health, identity, and self-expression. Through an integration of artistic and scientific perspectives, the work examines how individuals and communities navigate change, healing, and belonging in a post-pandemic world.
Jaclyn Bethany
Jaclyn Bethany is an Emmy® Award-winning filmmaker, theatermaker, writer, actor, and producer whose work explores complex femininity, Southern identity, and contemporary storytelling. Originally from Mississippi and now based in New Orleans, she holds an MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute and an MA in Screenwriting from the London Film School. Her films have screened internationally at major festivals, including Edinburgh, Deauville, and NewFest, while her theater work spans regional, Off-Broadway, and independent productions. Bethany is the Artistic Director of Irene Collective, a New Orleans-based theater company dedicated to amplifying female and nonbinary voices, and serves as the incoming Media Arts Chair at NOCCA.
During the residency, Jaclyn and Irene Collective will continue developing innovative theatrical work that reexamines classic texts through a female-centered lens while championing new plays by female-identifying and nonbinary writers. An ensemble-driven company with roots in New Orleans and collaborators nationwide, Irene Collective creates bold, contemporary productions that challenge traditional narratives and elevate underrepresented perspectives. Building on recent projects including A Streetcar Named Desire and the development of Laurel Canyon 1979 by Grace Curley, the residency will support the collective’s ongoing exploration of new works, reimagined classics, and collaborative performance-making.
Ariadne Blayde
Ariadne Blayde is a fiction writer and playwright whose work focuses on New Orleans history, climate resilience, and social justice. Her debut novel, ASH TUESDAY, was published by Nashville-based April Gloaming Press in 2023 and her second book, a short story collection exploring New Orleans’ 300-year relationship with water, is forthcoming from Crescent City Books in 2027. Her play The Other Room, which won the VSA Playwright Discovery Award, has been produced internationally, and her short fiction has won awards including the 2023 Saints and Sinners Fiction Prize and the 2020 Quantum Shorts Prize.
Ariadne’s residency will focus on the creation of a site-specific theatre piece exploring the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, a natural disaster that pitted the New Orleans’ wealthy against its poor and foreshadowed the city’s decisions around water and human life for the rest of the century and beyond. With the goal of producing the play on the hundred-year anniversary of this momentous event, Ariadne hopes to contribute to the multi-disciplinary conversation around historical geography, environmental racism, and climate resilience as they connect to our city’s past and future.
Monty Loo Cherry
Monty Loo Cherry is a New Orleans-based multidisciplinary artist, playwright, performer, community organizer, and self-described magic-maker whose work thrives in the space between whimsy and logic, the spiritual and the absurd. Originally from Paducah, Kentucky, and shaped by Chicago’s vibrant performance scene, Monty creates theatrical, immersive, and deeply connective experiences informed by both traditional training and queer lived experience.
Through this residency, Monty seeks to expand the scope of their artistic practice, develop new performance work, and build a sustainable creative foundation rooted in community, authenticity, and transformative storytelling. Audiences can expect bold, interactive events that blur the line between performance and participation, inviting people into what Monty calls “a love revolution.”
David Chervony
Pamela Davis-Noland
Writer/ Director, Pamela Davis-Noland (‘BADU-Izms: A Tribute to Erykah’, ‘Room for Dessert’) and her son, Music Engineer, Mr. Ryan (Fedi) Davis have teamed up to workshop the fantastical historical musical in preparation for its 2027 World Premiere featuring some of New Orleans finest actors, performers, dancers, musicians & puppeteers.
Her goal for the Residency is to reintroduce and continue development of, CHEMIN du BAYOU, a completed, originally commissioned historical musical that pays homage to the City of New Orleans. The play , slated to be staged late 2027, honors the people who carved out the very first road (Bayou Road) and the many culture bearers that worked and thrived as a community from its inception and continues to the present day.
Anna M. DiMaggio
Anna M. DiMaggio is a New Orleans-based composer whose atmospheric, narrative-driven work blends music, philosophy and immersive storytelling. A graduate of Centenary College of Louisiana with degrees in Music Composition and Philosophy, DiMaggio draws from musical technology, historical styles and diverse instrumentation to create works that invite audiences into rich and unexpected worlds.
During her residency, DiMaggio will develop two distinct projects. Creation is an intimate, interactive theatre experience that uses improvisational performance and audience participation to explore core values, choice-making and concepts of divinity. Later in the year, she will develop the Louisiana Myths Project, a symphonic work celebrating New Orleans myths and legends through classical orchestration and traditional Louisiana musical textures, including washboard, fiddle and spoons. Together, the projects reflect DiMaggio’s interest in creating immersive experiences that connect philosophical exploration, musical storytelling and the cultural heritage of Louisiana.
Ben Fox
Ben Fox is a playwright, performer, and co-founder of Queer New Theatre whose work blends camp, comedy, horror, and heartfelt storytelling to explore queer identity and community. Since debuting his original musical Personal Space at the 2019 New Orleans InFringe Festival, he has written, produced, and performed in several original productions, including Killing Christmas, Go Cup, and You Really Suck. Through his residency, Ben will focus on developing two new scripts while expanding his professional writing practice and audience reach.
Residency Project: During the residency, Ben will develop The Loneliest Place in the Universe, a surreal dark comedy about a grieving New Orleans playwright whose deceased dogs reappear as humans across parallel dimensions, blurring the boundaries between loss, obsession, and reality. He will also write Dead Meet, a one-act queer horror comedy in which a group of friends weathering the COVID-19 pandemic must confront both a zombie outbreak and the fractures within their own relationships.
Jakki Kalogridis
Jakki Kalogridis is a New Orleans-based dancer, choreographer, visual artist, writer, and arts administrator whose interdisciplinary practice spans movement, visual art, costume design, installation, and experimental storytelling. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A former choreographer-in-residence at Space Station Dance Residency in St. Louis and a member of the inaugural International Dance Festival New Orleans Incubator Residency cohort, Jakki is also the founder of New Orleans Colorguard Arts and currently serves as Co-Director of Shoestring Dance Residency. Her recent works include I’m Not Daedalus Yet, Pestilence, I’m Thoreau Waiting, Fast-Paced World, and Untitled (Ode to a New Atlantis).
Shoestring Dance Residency, is a two-week residency program designed to provide dance artists at all stages of their careers with time and space for research, experimentation, critical dialogue, and artistic growth. The program emphasizes process over product, encouraging choreographers to explore ideas, engage in feedback sessions, and develop their practice within a supportive environment. The residency culminates in a public performance and artist discussion featuring participating residents.
Jakki will also continue developing TANGENT SPACES, an immersive interdisciplinary work that combines visual art installation, performance, and poetic fiction. Structured through three interconnected elements—The Book, The Guide, and The Ritual—the project invites audiences into a speculative world shaped by themes of grief, memory, and loss. Through immersive storytelling and participatory experiences, TANGENT SPACES explores how people seek meaning in difficult experiences and imagine alternatives to the realities they face.
MaeDea ov Moon
MaeDea ov Moon is an interdisciplinary artist, vocalist, ritual maker, and researcher whose work explores ancestral memory, ecology, and embodied performance. Working across voice, movement, poetry, installation, and ritual practice, They create immersive experiences that investigate how bodies, landscapes, mythologies, and collective memory shape one another.
They are the director of the Serpentine Choir, a community vocal ensemble cultivating communal practices of embodied voice. MaeDea’s broader artistic practice draws upon animist belonging, Irish folk traditions, ritual ecologies, femme sovereignty, and experimental approaches to voice and performance.
Thier residency project is an interdisciplinary exploration of diasporic animacy through the evolving figure of Bríd: from the Irish sovereignty goddess, to St. Brigid, and later to Maman Brigitte. Centering Bríd as an ancestral and transpersonal presence, the research asks how spiritual figures migrate, transform, and carry their animism across histories of displacement and cultural exchange.
Through interdisciplinary and collaborative research, they aim to explore the diasporic archive as a living ecology of songs, gestures, landscapes, altars, and embodied memory. The residency will support the development of vocal compositions, movement research, oral histories, and public sharings that trace Bríd’s many manifestations as goddess, saint, Loa, and diasporic spirit. The work invites participants into an immersive journey of cross-pollination and ritual reimagining.
Monique Lorden
Monique Lorden, New Orleans-based visual artist and author, this artist creates immersive, site-specific works that explore the intersections of truth-telling, faith, community, and social transformation. Guided by the belief that “Love is the Revolution,” their practice combines visual art, text, and environmental storytelling to examine the human condition while inviting audiences to imagine more just, compassionate, and connected futures. Through installations that function as both reflection and invitation, their work seeks to foster dialogue, spiritual inquiry, and collective healing.
During the residency, the artist will develop a large-scale immersive exhibition designed specifically for the unique architecture and atmosphere of New Marigny Theatre. Combining visual art, written narrative, and spatial storytelling, the installation will transform the venue into an experiential environment that invites visitors to move through themes of grief, hope, faith, justice, and human connection. Conceived as both an artistic experience and a communal reflection space, the project encourages audiences to engage deeply with questions of where we are as a society and what becomes possible when love, empathy, and collective care are placed at the center of our shared future.
David Polk
David Polk is a New Orleans-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, and performer whose work spans jazz, hip-hop, electronic music, funk, and contemporary classical traditions. Trained in classical saxophone at Louisiana State University’s School of Music, Polk is also a self-taught pianist, guitarist, audio producer, and orchestral composer. His performances blend original electronic compositions with live saxophone, piano, and guitar, creating dynamic experiences that blur the boundaries between DJ and musician.
Drawing inspiration from artists as diverse as Chopin, Allen Toussaint, and Jonny Greenwood, Polk’s work reflects a deep commitment to exploration across genres and musical forms.
During his residency, he will focus on developing and recording new original music while continuing to expand his unique interdisciplinary approach to composition and performance.
Celeste Mercadel
Celeste Mercadel is a New Orleans born & based movement architect, arts educator, and founder of Celartise Creative. Her work lives at the intersection of dance, cultural research, community engagement, and storytelling, drawing from Southern Black traditions, ritual practices, and embodied memory. Celeste’s choreographic and research projects have been presented through residencies, festivals, and community partnerships across the country, including Keshet Makers Space experience, MONAD at SXSW and MONAD NYC, Binge Dance Festival, and National Institute of Health. Through her creative practice, she explores movement as a tool for healing, cultural preservation, and collective transformation.
Moved by the Spirit is an interdisciplinary research and performance project exploring how Southern Black women embody and transmit spiritual knowledge through movement. Rooted in Afro-diasporic traditions including Hoodoo/rootwork, the Black Spiritual Movement of the 1920’s in New Orleans, and ritual gesture, this work positions the body as a living archive of memory, belief, and cultural practice.
Ned Moore
Ned Moore is a playwright, dramaturg, director, and arts leader whose work explores the intersection of classical texts, ritual performance, and contemporary theater. A specialist in adaptation and new play development, he has collaborated with organizations including New York Theatre Workshop, The New Group, New Georges, and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. His translation of Euripides’ Bakkhai premiered at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and was later staged at New Orleans’ Marigny Opera House. Ned holds degrees from Bard College and Columbia University and currently serves as Director of the Dr. Rodney R. Lafon Performing Arts Center in Luling, Louisiana.
Residency Project: X3
During his residency, Ned will develop X3, a contemporary theatrical adaptation that weaves together three Greek tragedies—Agamemnon, Women of Trachis, and Medea—into a single interconnected performance. Blending poetic language, movement, chorus work, ritual, humor, and contemporary performance techniques, the project examines cycles of violence, inherited trauma, gender, power, and the enduring influence of myth on modern life. The residency will focus on exploring the work’s physical and ritual dimensions through an ensemble-driven development process.
Tatum Robertson
Tatum Robertson is a New Orleans native, vocalist, songwriter, and creative storyteller whose work explores identity through the lens of contemporary R&B. Her artistic practice combines narrative-driven songwriting with classical and soul influences, creating work that bridges musical traditions and speaks to modern experiences.
Tatum’s training is rooted in New Orleans, where she attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) and Benjamin Franklin High School, and extends to a B.M. from The Juilliard School, an M.M. from Longy School of Music, and a Performance Diploma from Boston University.
During the 2026–2027 residency at New Marigny Theatre, Tatum Robertson will develop and complete an original R&B (Rhythm and Blues) song cycle, a multi-movement work created in collaboration with composer Jake Landau. This EP builds on 4th House, a grassroots interdisciplinary music project developed with support from a YoungArts microgrant. The residency at New Marigny Theatre represents the next phase of Tatum’s artistic portfolio: deepening collaborations, expanding arrangements with local and national musicians, and bringing the project to completion and public presentation.
Samille
Samille (she/her/we) is a performance artist, storyteller, musician, puppeteer, breathwork practitioner and land steward that calls Bvlbancha home. With a strong theatre background, holding a degree in musical theatre from New Jersey City University, Samille loves the art of bringing a character to life, communicating through song, and world building. She is currently arriving in a moment in her own artistry where she wants to uplift stories that hardly or never get told. Stories of the oppressed, of the forgotten, of the extracted – rooted in oral tradition, ancestral keeping- that connect to the black diaspora and all indigenous beginnings. Knowing art has a way of softening hearts, expanding minds and connecting people, she has committed her life to being forever artful, relying on the magic and spirit of creativity itself.
Samille is excited to work on a few different projects this year that require a lot of space to try them out and stand them up. As puppetry has been the latest artform to capture her attention. They are exploring their identity as an interdisciplinary artist with theatre roots and are deeply interested in the places art, the environment, politics and social constructs overlap and get people talking.
Pieces in Progress : Butter Woman, What’s eating you in the Bayou, CockMoo, The GRAND Mothers, Artist Uprisings, and more…
Noah Smith
A graduate of Louisiana State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Studies, Noah Smith focuses on creating theatrical experiences inspired by the surrealist theater movement of the 1920s. Their work explores dream logic, symbolism, and immersive storytelling as tools for expanding perception and provoking reflection. Through interdisciplinary performance, they seek to challenge conventional theatrical forms and create transformative experiences for audiences.
Residency Project: The Nostalgia of Able Gabe
The Nostalgia of Able Gabe is a 90-minute surreal performance work that blends film, puppetry, dance, original music, lighting design, and immersive environments.. The story follows Able Gabe, who retreats to a bathroom to write his mother’s eulogy and is swept into a dreamlike realm.
Drawing inspiration from surrealist traditions, the work explores grief, memory, transformation, and the subconscious through a richly imaginative theatrical experience.
Dusky Waters
COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
Lullabies for the Earth
Lullabies for the Earth is a collaborative music project exploring the relationship between sound, listening and the natural world. Created by Shay Nichols, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, Martin Masakowski, and Steve Gilliland, the project brings together an extraordinary range of musical traditions and creative practices to ask a deceptively simple question: What can happen when we truly listen to nature?
Working with field recordings, voice, acoustic and electronic instrumentation, improvisation and immersive sound, the artists create musical experiences inspired by the rhythms and living intelligence of the natural world. Their performances invite audiences into a collective act of listening, often simply closing their eyes and allowing sound to lead them on a journey.
During their residency at New Marigny Theatre, Lullabies for the Earth will continue developing immersive works incorporating nature field recordings, offer public workshops centered on listening and creating music with nature, and explore new collaborations with music and organizations.
At its heart, the project considers music as a means of connection and healing, an opportunity to deepen our relationship with ourselves, one another and the ecosystems of which we are a part.
SUPPORT LULLABIES FOR THE EARTH WITH YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION HERE
The Marigny Tapes
The Marigny Tapes is a new music web-series focusing on New Orleans musicians of today stemming from various cultural pockets throughout the city. These are 10-15 minute performances, captured with a cinematic approach thanks to a team of seasoned local artists and technicians, and released in bi-weekly episodes throughout the year. Spanning a wide range of genres and styles, it captures a broad snapshot of the city’s evolving musical landscape at a specific moment in time.
The project is headed by Paris-born and New Orleans resident photographer and filmmaker Noe Cugny, known for his work around the music scenes of New Orleans throughout the 2010s and 20s, notably alongside the local publication OffBeat Magazine. Noe partners with seasoned music producer and sound engineer Keenan McRae and fellow photographer Patricia Moscardo.
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The Mudlark Puppeteers
The Mudlark Puppeteers are developing an expanded production of Blue Book, an original puppet theater work inspired by the history of Storyville, New Orleans’ famed red-light district. Rooted in extensive historical research, the production explores the complex intersections of race, class, sexuality, and power that shaped Storyville during its brief but influential existence from 1897 to 1917.
Originally presented at the 2013 New Orleans Fringe Festival, Blue Book combines rod puppetry, shadow theater, marionettes, live music, and visual storytelling to bring the pages of Storyville’s historic “Blue Books” to life. Through the voices of musicians, madams, sex workers, laborers, and entrepreneurs, the production traces the rise and reinvention of Lulu White, the legendary “Diamond Queen” of Storyville, against the backdrop of a rapidly changing city and the growing influence of Jim Crow segregation.
During the residency, The Mudlark Puppeteers will reimagine the work on a larger theatrical scale, expanding both its visual impact and emotional reach. Featuring live performances of original and period-inspired New Orleans music by music historian Salvatore Geloso, alongside new scenic and puppet designs, the production will transform its intimate origins into an immersive theatrical experience.
NANA NANA
NANA NANA is a multidisciplinary performance work that investigates Black womanhood, labor, and power through the historical and cultural lineages of Black women across the Black Atlantic. Inspired by powerful women traders who dominated the importation and distribution of Dutch wax textiles in West Africa, this project merges contemporary dance, African diasporic movement vocabularies, sound design, oral history, using the Nana Benz as a portal to interrogate deeper questions of Black feminine survival, elegance, softness, labor, sensuality, and resistance between West Africa and New Orleans.
The project brings together Caleb Dowden, a New Orleans choreographer, anthropologist and Fulbright scholar whose research in Benin examines dance, spirituality, gender and diasporic memory, and High Heal Doula, a multidisciplinary soul activist whose practice explores healing and transformation through sound, movement, birth, death and parenthood. During their residency, the artists will deepen the research and creative development of NANA NANA, bringing scholarship, embodied knowledge and artistic experimentation together in the creation of a powerful new performance work.
PB&J
PB&J is the collaborative musical project of New Orleans artists J.Mix and Pat Smith. Together, they write and perform original songs that sit at the crossroads of pain, healing, and honest storytelling. With J.Mix’s dreamy vocals and Pat’s rhythmic piano, PB&J creates intimate, immersive performances for audiences navigating their own healing journeys. Their ongoing work, Music Therapy: Healing Through Song, reclaims stories of trauma & resilience not as spectacle, but as shared experience.
Pain, trauma, and healing often become more accessible through music. Songwriting has the unique ability to create emotional bridges between artists and audiences, allowing difficult experiences to be processed in ways that feel safe, honest, and deeply human. Through vulnerable storytelling and original music, PB&J seeks to create performances that transform personal hardship into collective healing.
With J.Mix’s debut album “Cycle Breaker” on the horizon and Pat Smith’s debut album “Functioning?” recently released, this duo is carving out a space for emotionally transparent and healing-centered songwriting. Their work reclaims stories of trauma, resilience, and survival, offering audiences songs rooted not only in pain but also in triumph.
Music Therapy: Healing Through Song. PB&J is expanding their evolving multisensory experience, Music Therapy: Healing Through Song.
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Tales Of Many Tongues
Sal Geloso is a storyteller, tour guide, musician, and visual artist in New Orleans. They were deeply involved in the occupation of Standing Rock and worked with folks in the creation of youth-led indigenous organizations like the International Indigenous Youth Council.
Sal is the frontman of Sally Baby’s Silver Dollars, an acclaimed band blending New Orleans Jazz with funk, rock and R&B (recently featured on NPR Tiny Desk).
As a storyteller, puppeteer and musician, they have worked on many productions in collaboration with The Mudlark Puppeteers, Playdoh Puppet Productions, and other theater troupes. Sal has a deep knowledge of local New Orleans histories, rooted in their own exploration of their ancestry (Haitian, Sicilian, D’ne) which they trace to New Orleans, and serves as meaningful context in their history tours of the French Quarter and Marigny.
Playdoh Kolo connected with Sal over shared experience as supporters of the Lakota Sundance Ceremony, as well as their work as water protectors at Standing Rock. Playdoh’s involvement in the resistance to Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) led to their audio installation, All You Hear is Prayer, featuring listening stations of a dozen interviews with elders and resistors at Standing Rock.
Playdoh worked for years with the Anishinaabe Theater Exchange, supporting indigenous storytelling through theater productions of local indigenous histories and contemporary issues facing native folks.
Playdoh runs Playdoh Puppet Productions, creating new, original puppet performances and experiences. Their shows have toured nationally and they’ve collaborated with String & Shadow, Bread & Puppet, Habitat Recovery Project, Sunrise Movement, and others. Playdoh is a co-coordinator for the New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival. They collaborated with Sal to create the music video for “Mother Mary” as well as the immersive haunted house experience “Shadow Hours” at the New Marigny Theatre in October 25&26.
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Youth Theatre Initiative
During this residency, the Theatre Education team will focus on the development, rehearsal, and staging of theatrical work- including Taste of Freedom in Oct. 2026. This theatrical work is deeply rooted in heritage, storytelling, and the collective pursuit of liberation. Through this residency, we aim to refine its staging, expand its community reach, and utilize theater as a vital vehicle for historical reflection and justice.
Educator Sallay, a New Orleans-born theater educator, actress, and arts integration specialist holding a BFA from the Academy of Art University. A Young Audiences nationally credentialed teaching artist, her practice centers on a psychologically grounded pedagogy prioritizing sensory truth, crystallized in her framework “The Mirror of Reality.” She wrote and directed the theatrical work Taste of Freedom, and her performance credits include stage roles in The Black Nativity (Lorraine Hansberry Theatre) and onscreen roles in Boots Riley’s I’M A Virgo and NCIS: New Orleans. Sallay’s vision intersects theater with historical narrative to build safe, transformative environments.
EDUCATOR – Rodney C. Graham II, is a New Orleans actor, director, and certified Teacher of Talented in Theatre. A Teach For America and Dillard University theater alumnus, Rodney brings deep regional stage experience with companies like Southern Rep and No Dream Deferred. His extensive acting credits include Gem of the Ocean, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Everybody, and A Raisin in the Sun.
Together, they merge rigorous performance pedagogy with profound community and restorative impact.
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