Release Date: January 30, 2025
It has been four years since Studio consciously elevated our internal conversations about equity and inclusion and embarked on a multi-year process of reflection and changemaking.
In meaningful ways large and small, Studio is a changed institution. We have diversified our programming and the cohort of artists we hire. We have institutionalized practices to better welcome and support artists and staff. We have increased the compensation of almost everyone who works here. We reach out more intentionally to populations underrepresented in our audiences. We have made numerous changes to policy and procedures to create a more equitable and inclusive workplace. Our Board recruits more transparently and broadly, and now has its own standing Equity & Inclusion committee.
In recent years, Studio has focused significant attention on opening the field to a diverse group of early-career professionals. We transformed our long-standing Apprentice Program into a Fellows-in-Residence Program. Our Fellows are now paid as full-fledged employees, housed by the theatre, with health insurance and other benefits. In addition, we have formalized a partnership with Theatre Lab’s Arts Institute for Creative Advancement, a program that takes young people who are disconnected at school and trains them in technical theatre, preparing them to enter DC’s creative economy.
We have also taken stock of our progress to date. Our staff EDI committee completed its first major assessment of Studio’s efforts to become more inclusive, equitable, and diverse, and identified several new areas of focus. Out of that came an expansion of our antiracism work, broadening our scope to include other groups who are marginalized or discriminated against on the basis of identity factors like gender, sexuality, class, age, ability, religion, nationality, or citizenship status. In a sign that our commitment to equity has become more deeply embedded in our everyday, the locus of much of this work is now intentionally more decentralized and plays out in individual departments throughout the theatre.
In many areas, our work is ongoing. This year, to make our art more available to all, we aim to pilot a more comprehensive affordability initiative. We also plan to engage in more meaningful and targeted show-specific outreach, in part by partnering with organizations whose missions align with the subject of each play. To better support a diverse group of artists and staff, we are creating new procedures to orient new hires to our practices and culture.
In still other areas, our ambitions are unfulfilled. We have not managed to eliminate 6-day rehearsal weeks, and our tech schedule is still more demanding of our production crew than we would like. Although there have been dramatic changes in the composition of our visiting artists and our audiences have begun to diversify, our staff and board remain less diverse than we’d like. Our pay increases, though significant, have failed to keep up with inflation, and our too-small workforce is stretched thin. It leaves us with the frustrating sense that much of what we would like to do next feels out of reach, at least in the short term.
But we’re happy to have developed muscles that help us interrogate ourselves. And we continue to be grateful for the evolving insights and suggestions offered by Studio staff, artists, trustees, and thought leaders in the field.
We expect this to be the last of our formal updates, at least for now. Which is not to say that our work is done, because it is very much ongoing. But the era of bulleted lists of policy changes and commitments has shifted as our focus has broadened and as the ongoing work of advancing equity and inclusion has become more embedded in our everyday practice.
We continue to invite any of our stakeholders to share thoughts or concerns with us at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you. And we look forward to seeing you at the theatre.
Sincerely,
David Muse
Artistic Director
Rebecca Ende Lichtenberg
Executive Director
Release Date: January 5, 2022
Dear Studio Community,
Last January, Studio Theatre published a statement reflecting on the demands for equity issued by We See You, White American Theater, a collective of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) theatre artists, and committing ourselves to a series of actions aimed at making Studio a more inclusive, equitable, and vibrant organization. Over the past year, regular and ongoing conversations have continued, at our staff Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) committee and our board Equity and Inclusion committee, at a series of working groups, at the departmental level, and among our full staff and board.
Some of our original commitments have now taken more concrete shape, and we have made new ones. We’re sharing this update to keep our community in the loop and to hold ourselves accountable. We acknowledge that the progress we’ve made is just a beginning, and that being an anti-racist organization means going on a journey that is never complete.
For their efforts, thoughtfulness, frankness, and recommendations about possible paths toward positive and systemic change, we would like to thank Studio staff, our board, artists, and other stakeholders who have shared their thoughts with us, as well as our field, which is full of insights from which we draw inspiration.
We have published a Land, Labor, and Legacy Acknowledgement, and will inscribe it on the wall of our newly renovated lobby that will welcome back audiences as we reopen the building. Given the particular history of our neighborhood and city, our statement focuses on both Native peoples and on the contributions of Black Washingtonians to building and enriching our city and neighborhood. The statement was created with input from members of both the Native and Black communities.
Recognizing that equitable and livable compensation for all is a key principle in a commitment to anti-racism, we have changed our pay structures as follows:
Set across-the-board rates for all Equity actors, directors, and designers at what used to be our top rates, eliminating our former tiered system and disparities of pay between different programming series.
Raised the salary floor for full-time staff above the living wage for Washington, DC, based on the MIT Living Wage calculator.
Increased compensation for overhire production crew and understudies.
Launched an internal pay transparency system that classifies all full-time positions into pay bands based on responsibility level to ensure that staff are paid fairly for their position and that there is transparency around salaries.
To further our commitment to creating a space that makes BIPOC theatre-makers central to our work and nurtures their processes, we have:
Announced an upcoming season that includes BIPOC artists on every production and in which roughly half of our visiting artists are BIPOC.
Met our goal of having 50% of plays actively considered for production authored by BIPOC writers.
Hired a Resident Intimacy Consultant for all productions in our 2021-2022 season to ensure that the rehearsal room is a safe space for artists.
Studio made a commitment to ensuring that all members of our community have participated in learning around anti-racism and allyship. To that end:
Studio partnered with the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, who led a two-part Allyship Training for all full-time staff and Board and are designing customized sessions for Studio’s Front of House Staff and for all artists/production teams at the start of each rehearsal process.
Studio’s full-time staff participated in a full-day workshop with Equity Quotient and had the encouragement, access, and funds to attend other learning and training sessions through the year.
Front of House staff and full-time staff will take a Bystander Intervention Workshop led by DC Peace Team.
All Studio volunteer ushers are now required to participate in anti-bias and inclusivity training, which is being offered in coordination with several DC theatres.
Studio focused on updating our policies and procedures to create a more equitable and inclusive workplace, including:
Rewriting On Working Together—our code of conduct that is shared with all staff, board, and artists, to introduce them to our organizational culture—to reflect our commitment to anti-racism and set expectations about power sharing, preventing harm, and respecting boundaries.
Updating Studio’s staff handbook based on recommendations from the EDI committee with expanded anti-harassment and disability policies, increased paid time off, additional eligibility for late night transportation, and more equitable cancelled work, attendance, and appearance policies.
Establishing a new annual evaluation process for full-time employees that eliminates quantitative assessments to encourage open and productive conversation, and provides a system for employees to share feedback about their supervisors.
Creating a new guide to pronoun usage at Studio to make individuals of all gender identities feel welcome.
Instituting a new hiring process to ensure a more transparent and equitable search process for applicants, with the intention of reaching a more diverse talent pool to foster a more diverse staff.
Hiring Production on Deck, a search company that specializes in identifying diverse candidates for production positions, to help with our Director of Production and Technical Director searches.
The Board created an Equity and Inclusion Committee, which identified three areas of focus: membership, governance, and learning and leadership. Over the past year, the Committee recommended the following actions, which the full Board then approved:
Removing the set minimum amount for annual Board giving to help diversify our Board and eliminate barriers to participation.
Expanding the annual evaluation of Executive Leadership to include an assessment of their work around equity, diversity and inclusion, and implementing a system to solicit feedback from the entire staff about Studio’s leaders.
Participating in the two-part Allyship Training led by the Alliance Theatre.
Building reciprocal relationships with an array of professional organizations to create new pathways to Board membership and connect with new audiences.
As we reopen to audiences following the pandemic, we are taking the following actions to welcome and build an audience that better reflects the population of the DC-metro area and the work on our stages:
Establishing a new partnership with the DC Public Library to offer $10 tickets across the DC-metro area to all productions, in addition to new discounts on tickets for all students, educators, members of the theatre industry, and first responders.
Expanding the volunteer usher pool through our partnerships with community organizations to create a more diverse and welcoming usher cohort.
Issuing an Invitation to Participate to our audiences to ensure that all members of the audience, and especially new members, feel comfortable in our spaces.
Collaborating with theatre artist Psalmayene 24 to plan a series of in-person “Psalm’s Salons” featuring Black artists and creators, that expands on the online series we hosted this past year.
NEXT STEPS:
We believe that these actions and goals are meaningful steps toward shifting our organization in permanent and impactful ways. We also acknowledge that they are early steps in a years-long effort, and that some changes remain aspirational for us.
In the coming year, we intend to continue the work of assessing and changing our processes, policies, practices, and culture. A few of the things we’ve identified to focus on include rewriting the language we use in all our public communications to better express the values of the institution, creating a plan to work with and invest in more BIPOC-owned businesses, creating a system to track and analyze the make-up of our constituencies to better understand who we are and who we are serving, and regrowing resources to continue to invest in our full and part-time staff, artists, and apprentices.
These updates will be regular and recurring, and we look forward to sharing our ongoing planning, learning, and growth with you. We also hope that institutional change begins to become self-evident to you, as you experience the vitality and diversity of our art and feel welcomed into our building and community.
We invite you to share any thoughts or concerns with us as this work unfolds. We would love to hear from you. You can reach out to us at [email protected].
Sincerely,
David Muse
Artistic Director
Rebecca Ende Lichtenberg
Managing Director
Release Date: January 27, 2021
To Our Community:
We hope that this message finds you and your loved ones safe and hopeful at the start of this new year.
These are extraordinarily challenging times, both for our company and the American theatre field. Artists and other theatre professionals are facing devastating levels of unemployment, institutions that produce theatre are under fierce economic pressure, and all of us are in the tenth month of a forced absence from our continued source of inspiration: the production of plays for live audiences.
But this has also been a time for reflection that offers the potential of renewal and reinvention. In particular, calls for racial justice and reckoning have gripped our country, the world, and our field since this summer. In the theatre, those calls have taken specific form in a series of demands issued from the We See You, White American Theater collective (We See You, WAT). Many artists who have created theatre at Studio for years helped shape these demands, which are a critical and instructive contribution to the well-being of the field and of our company.
It is past time for us at Studio to reckon forthrightly with entrenched inequalities and our role in perpetuating them, to acknowledge shortcomings throughout our theatre’s history and the impact of those shortcomings on valued members of our community, and to create more equity within our organization. We are a predominately white institution with a professed value of inclusion, and while we have diversified some aspects of our art and company in the past five years, we had not fully devoted ourselves to combating racism across the organization or to actively dismantling barriers to the creation and celebration of live theatre by all. We cannot fully fulfill our mission of using theatre to foster a more thoughtful, more empathetic, and more connected community if we do not serve and represent our entire community.
Recognizing that we had work to do, Studio chose to engage in a process of internal conversation and commitment to change-making before we offered this public statement. Since our staff returned from furlough in July of 2020, a committee comprised of the entire senior staff and others throughout the organization has been meeting weekly. This group has been examining our systems, structures, practices, and behavior, using the We See You, WAT demands as our framework. A Board committee, working in parallel to the staff committee, is focusing on questions of governance, membership, and Trustee leadership.
We are also in the process of building the relationships that will inform our formal land and labor recognition process, which will acknowledge that Studio Theatre sits on traditional land of the Piscataway people, that we have benefited from systems created by the free labor of Black people, and that our theatre has played a role in the gentrification of our neighborhood and displacement of Black communities with roots here. As part of that process, we are currently working to create restorative, reciprocal relationships with Indigenous artists and members of the Piscataway tribe, and with people from the Black community with roots in the Logan Circle neighborhood and Black theatre-makers in the DMV area.
All of this work is ongoing, by its nature and because there is much to examine and change. What follows is a list of actions that we will pursue as first steps. We share them publicly to make these changes transparent, and so that you, our community, can hold us accountable to these commitments, and to the process of ongoing change.
The resident theatre movement that created theatres like Studio was born of audacious dreaming. We hope that this challenging moment and its forced pause encourages us, and our field, to dream anew. We hope to help create a changed field, where what we make next and how we make it will be different and better. We are buoyed by the belief that anti-racism can lead to abundance—new and exciting aesthetic approaches and points of view, new stakeholders and audiences, and the ongoing relevance of our work in a rapidly changing world. In short, we believe that this work, challenging as it can and should be, ought to bring us hope, and that its fruits are joy and an environment that helps all members of our community thrive, in art and in life.
To create a more inclusive community and more vibrant art form, we at Studio Theatre will take the following actions, make the following commitments, and set the following goals, starting now:
We commit to creating a space that welcomes BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) theatre-makers and makes them central to our work, nurtures their processes and artistic visions, and fairly compensates them for their work by:
Ensuring that plays by BIPOC theatre-makers are a central part of our programming, producing them regularly and robustly. To that end, we will critically examine our season planning "inputs," with a goal that at least 50% of the work we consider is written by BIPOC artists; diversify the team who reads and recommends plays for programming with at least 50% BIPOC readers in the coming season; continue our current trend of commissioning at least 50% BIPOC artists; and continue to commission directors to propose projects, which is one of the ways we widen the notion of where programming ideas can come from.
Making BIPOC directors, designers, and other theatre personnel a regular part of all of our creative and production teams. That will involve building relationships with and hiring artists we haven’t worked with before; increasing the number of BIPOC artists working on productions not written by BIPOC writers; and actively recruiting and hiring BIPOC production crew.
Empowering BIPOC artists who work here and actively supporting them. We will share information about known members of a production’s creative team with artists considering joining the project; proactively orient new artists to our spaces; and budget for and hire cultural consultants, counselors, conversation facilitators, BIPOC casting directors and consultants, hair/make-up support, and intimacy directors, whenever a project warrants any of them.
Compensate artists and other personnel more fairly and support them more robustly by: paying artists for talkbacks, donor events, and other work done outside of the rehearsal process; eliminating differences in pay for artists working in our Main Series and Studio X programming series; and exploring ways to actively support families and caregivers, such as continuing our practice of not scheduling marathon “10-out-of-12" technical rehearsals, setting and sharing rehearsal schedules in advance, and proactively soliciting requests for how we can better support those in caregiving roles.
We commit to building a shared understanding of systemic racism and anti-racist practices, to infusing that understanding into our work at all levels of the organization, and to dismantling the barriers that have prevented our Board and staff from diversifying by:
Holding regular anti-racism learning sessions and facilitated conversations for staff and Board members, starting with a full-day session in early 2021 with Equity Quotient; integrating anti-racism training into onboarding for new employees and visiting artists; and creating a dedicated budget line to support the trainings, workshops, and facilitated conversations needed to create and maintain an anti-racist organization.
Interrogating and improving processes for recruitment, hiring, and onboarding, aiming to lower barriers for entry and foster a more inclusive workplace. To that end, we will disclose salary ranges for available positions, eliminate educational and years-of-experience requirements from job postings, and institute bias awareness training for hiring managers.
Revising our codes of conduct, “On Working Together,” to better reflect our anti-racist commitment; ensuring that systems for reporting and remedying discrimination and disrespect are in place; supporting affinity groups that staff self-define and encouraging them to meet during working hours; holding regular financial seminars for staff and artists and offering free financial consultants to all active employees; and, recognizing that the work is ongoing, making our EDI committee a standing group that meets regularly, composed of members from all departments and levels of the staff.
Actively seeking out BIPOC Board members that better reflect the diversity of the DC metropolitan region and using the newly-formed Board EDI working group to examine, and recommend changes relating to, a variety of issues, including financial commitments, opportunities for ongoing Board learning and awareness-building, Board composition, and hiring and evaluation of theatre leadership.
Beginning a process to critically examine and restructure our apprentice program, with equity, opportunity, and meaningful mentorship in mind.
Conducting an audit of external vendors and looking for opportunities to better support BIPOC-run businesses and businesses that actively work to advance equity and inclusion.
We commit to building an audience that better reflects the population of the DC-metro area and the work on our stages, and to serving them better, by:
Launching a ticket affordability program to make our work more financially accessible, and reserving more prime seats for single ticket buyers, made available throughout runs of our productions.
Intentionally reaching out to a more diverse audience. That will involve targeting BIPOC audiences in marketing plans for all productions, with resources to support that effort; continuing the work of meaningful audience demand-building, building on the successes of artist Psalmayene 24’s residency at Studio; and involving artists – directors especially – in audience visioning and marketing strategy.
Deepening and broadening engagement with community organizations, including our current partners: CreativeWorks at Joe’s Movement Emporium, DC Public Library, Duke Ellington School of the Arts, the Howard University Department of Theatre Arts, Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, N Street Village, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Team Rayceen, Us Helping Us, and Whitman-Walker Health.
Providing front of house staff and volunteers with learning and training opportunities, including bystander intervention training, to better prepare them to welcome and support diverse audiences.
Using social media to celebrate BIPOC artists and collaborators, share resources, and amplify civic voices that align with our values.
This letter is our first public step after months of internal work. It will not be our last.
We see these plans as a departure point, a series of first steps in what we imagine to be an ongoing, years-long effort. And we acknowledge that there are changes of real importance that remain aspirational for us, like compensating artists and staff significantly better, and eliminating 6-day rehearsal weeks.
We will provide regular updates to our community as our work progresses through direct communication, updates on our website, and information in our annual report.
We will also be soliciting feedback from our constituents to help us improve, inviting them to share with us their experiences with Studio and their ideas. Should you have any thoughts or concerns to share with us, please do so. We welcome them.
Thank you for joining us on this journey to make Studio more inclusive, more equitable, and more vibrant.
Sincerely,
David Muse
Artistic Director
Rebecca Ende Lichtenberg
Managing Director