Riffing off the great tradition of black theatre artists like James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry and contemporaries like Afro Pomo Homos and Root Wy'mn, Freedom Train Productions organizes theatre artists and audience communities around a common purpose: centering black queer protagonists in struggles that matter to all. Performance, new work development, and artist/community dialectics are the current tools of our underground movement.
The totality of Freedom Train Productions’ work is an argument for a citizen theatre artist with responsibilities toward connecting the on stage struggle with the off stage struggle. The artists with whom we work and the productions that we put up are informed and shaped by tenets that Freedom Train Productions holds dear: re-memory, stage democratics, and canaries rule.
Read "A manifesto for citizen theatre artists" on the theatre's new blog, A manifesto.
History
Founded in 2006 with an OSI Foundation/NYU Wagner Social Justice Fellowship, Freedom Train Productions is a theatre and a movement. The dramatic stories of our resident playwrights have gone on to be performed at The Public Theater's Emerging Writer's Program, Emerging Artists Theater's One Woman Standing Performance Series, New Dramatists, New York Theatre Workshop, Ensemble Studio Theater's Youngblood Residency, Fire & Ink: Cotillion Conference, Northwestern University, Columbia University, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Dixon Place, Subjective Theatre Company, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and the Audre Lorde Project. Thousands of people all over the country have been affirmed by and introduced to the struggles and aspirations of the black queer protagonists birthed at Freedom Train Productions.
Freedom Train Productions is a member of The Alliance of Resident Theatres of New York, The Audre Lorde Project's Leadership Roundtable for Queer People of Color-Led Organizations, and is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions in behalf of Freedom Train Productions may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extend permitted by law.
Current and past major funders include The Union Square Arts Awards, a project of the Tides Foundation, Stonewall Community Foundation, NYU Wagner School of Public Service, OSI Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, and S/HEROES FOR THE FUTURE.
