Racial Justice Institute
Racial Justice Institute

The Woodshed Fellows

Woodshed Community Outreach Fellow

Nina Angela Mercer

Nina is a cultural worker and interdisciplinary artist from Washington, D.C.

Nina’s plays include Gutta Beautiful (The Warehouse Theater, The Woolly Mammoth for DC’s Fringe, Abrons Arts Center, Little Carib Theatre); Itagua Meji: A Road & A Prayer (Brecht Forum, Alternate Roots, Rutgers University Newark and New Brunswick, The Nuyorican Poets Café); Gypsy & The Bully Door (The Warehouse Theater, Brooklyn Public Library – Grand Army Plaza, and the former Dumbo Sky); Elijaheen Becomes Wind (Anacostia Arts Center); Charisma at the Crossroads (Dorothy Young Arts Center); Sparrow (The Langston Hughes House); and A Compulsion for Breathing (The Schomburg Center and Target Margin Theater). Nina is currently collaborating with Urban Bush Women as writer for Haint Blu, a site responsive and proscenium dance-theater work.

Nina’s writing is published in The Killens Review of Arts & Letters (2013); Black Renaissance Noire (2014); Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance (2017); Break Beat Poets Vol 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Press, 2018); Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century (Duke University Press, 2020); Performance Research Journal (Taylor and Francis, 2020); Represent! New Plays for Multicultural Young People (Bloomsbury Press 2021); A Gathering of the Tribes Online Literary Magazine (2021); and the upcoming Oxford Handbook on African American Women’s Writing (Oxford University Press, 2023) and So We Can Know (Haymarket, 2023).

Nina has collaborated with Angela’s Pulse as a dramaturge, performer, and writer for Paloma McGregor’s Building A Better Fishtrap/From the River’s Mouth/A’we deh ya (2017 – 2021). She directed Theater for Social Change’s devised theatrical performance (In)Visible Freedom at The Segal Center in NYC in 2018. Nina has also collaborated as dramaturge for Kayhan Irani’s There Is a Portal (2019) and Ebony Noelle Golden’s 125th and Freedom, produced by Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre in 2019. Nina performed in the video poem she created in collaboration with director Toshi Sakai, “Invocation for Josè Antonio Aponte,” for the Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom exhibition which toured galleries nationally and internationally.

Nina has taught at Howard University, American University, Drew University, Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn College, and City College. She also worked as a teaching artist with several arts education organizations throughout her career, facilitating poetry and theater workshops for middle school and high school youth at public schools in Washington, DC; Newark, New Jersey; Brownsville and Bed Stuy in Brooklyn, New York. Nina holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

Nina’s Work 2022-2023

Conferences and Visiting Scholar Talks

Productions and Creative Residencies 

Teaching 

Mentorship

Publications

Georgetown Events

Dissertation Title: Transnational Ritual Poetics of Blackness in Performance

Defense: April 2023 at The Graduate Center, CUNY

Woodshed Student Community Outreach Fellow

Kendall Bryant

Kendall Bryant is an undergraduate senior at Georgetown University majoring in Business Management with a minor in African-American studies with a passion for art, entertainment, and radical imagination. At their heart, Kendall is a storyteller. With extensive experience in both academic and corporate research settings, they have built the skills and knowledge to use data to tell stories about what consumers want from their entertainment media. Outside of the professional sphere, they have used their talents to produce, write, perform, and release their own musical projects as well as taking on logistical and creative roles for student-run art showcases centered around themes of liberation and joy. They have also used their knack for storytelling and their knowledge of sociological dynamics in an educational capacity as a facilitator, mentor, and leader of Georgetown’s Young Leaders In Education About Diversity pre-orientation program. All in all, Kendall is highly interested in using their many different experiences, skills, and passions to make waves and tell stories in new and exciting ways within the entertainment industry.