Grantee Database

TheatreWorkers Project

Grant Year

2026-27

Grant Program

Impact Projects

Award Amount

$20,000.00

Project Description

With support from the California Arts Council, TheatreWorkers Project (TWP) will partner with The Prism Way reentry community to create “Life Without…..”, a filmed performance piece that will uplift the voices of people impacted by Life Without the Possibility of Parole (LWOP) sentences. TWP artists will engage intergenerational community participants in an incentivized creative process that will enable them to explore their stories through theatre, writing, and movement exercises, culminating in a filmed theatrical collage performed by people with lived experience.

Organization Summary

Using theatre to illuminate social and political issues has been our goal since 1983 when founder Susan Franklin Tanner was awarded a CAC Artist in Communities grant to create theatre with unemployed steelworkers in southeast LA. With that grant, Tanner founded TheatreWokers Project (TWP) and pioneered a form of documentary theatre where the participants, supported by professional artists, provided the content and became the storyteller/actors. TWP went on the create theatre projects with and/or about shipbuilders, meat packers, longshoremen, critical nurses and Latinx immigrant workers. Over time, our focus expanded to include collaborating with community-based re-entry programs serving the formerly incarcerated and prison programs serving incarcerated youth and adults, workshops for community and university medical centers, and providing classical and contemporary theatre experiences for youth through ongoing school residencies and performances. COVID-related restrictions have prompted us to embrace and incorporate filmed performance collages, virtual program delivery and correspondence courses as centerpieces of our programming.

Organization

TheatreWorkers Project

Address

1795 La Loma Rd

Pasadena

91105

County

Los Angeles

Region

South – Los Angeles & Orange

Website

Email

Congressional District

California's 28th congressional district

State Assembly District

41

State Senate District

25

Subscribe to the California ArtBeat weekly newsletter

Skip to content