Drew Woodson, Playwright in Residence

man in plaid jacket wearing glasses leaning against a wall with skyline behind him

Drew Woodson

April 14, 2025

Indigenous Performing Arts Residency Program 

Drew Woodson

Playwright-in-Residence

April 14 – 18, 2024

Co-presented by the Arts Research Center and the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, in partnership with Alternative Theater Ensemble, and with support from the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities, the Department of Ethnic Studies, the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, the Native American Studies Program, the Puffin Foundation, and the California Arts Council

SCHEDULE

Script Development Workshops for From Above
Playwright, Director, Dramaturg & Actors

Monday April 14 through Friday April 18, 2025 

Workshops Open for UC Berkeley Student Observation:
Tuesday April 15 - times tba
Wednesday April 16 - times tba

Location: Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex D23, UC Berkeley
*closed to the public

Artist Talk with Drew Woodson
in conversation with Philip Gotanda

Thursday April 17, 2 - 3:30pm 

Location: Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex D23, UC Berkeley
*free & open to the public, seating 1st come 1st served

Public Reading: From Above
followed by Talk Back with Drew Woodson  

Thursday, April 17, 2025 at 6pm

Production by: Alternative Theater Ensemble
Playwright: Drew Woodson
Director: R. Réal Vargas Alanis
Producers: Leah Sanginiti, Zoë Sonnenberg, & R. Réal Vargas Alanis
Dramaturg: tba
Actors: tba

Location: Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex D23, UC Berkeley
*free & open to the public, seating first-come, first served

Class Visits

Tuesday April 15, 2025 

Location: Dept of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

The Arts Research Center and Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies with Alternative Theater Ensemble are proud to welcome Playwright and Berkeley Alum Drew Woodson for a residency at UC Berkeley, April 14 - 18, 2025. Woodson will spend the week developing a new play (From Above) in workshops with local Indigenous actors, give an Artist Talk in conversation with TDPS Professor Philip Gotanda, present a public reading of From Above, and visit classes in TDPS. 

Drew Woodson is a Western Shoshone playwright based in New York City. He has had his work read in multiple theaters across New York, including Rattlestick Theater where he was asked to open the first annual Northeastern Native Arts Festival with his play “Your Friend, Jay Silverheels.” For this same work, Drew was named Yale's Young Indigenous Playwright of 2021. More recently, Drew completed a two month artists residency on Governors Island for AICH, and completed a workshop of a new work “From Above” under the direction of Madeline Sayet. As a writer, Drew seeks to tell stories where Native people are allowed to take up space, be complicated, and ultimately be more than a storytelling device. Drew is an MFA Graduate from the Dramatic Writing department at NYU, and an alumni of UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies.

These programs ware featured in collaboration with Alternative Theater Ensemble’s Indigenous Performing Arts Residency, a collaborative initiative piloted by Berkeley’s Arts Research Center and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. AlterTheater’s residency extends from 2024-2026, offering the opportunity to produce new work by an Indigenous performance-based artist each spring of the residency’s duration. 

From Above

In the middle of an unnamed desert sits a lone church just at the edge of town. Sister Karina, Sister Maggie, and the Father all lead the small Native congregation that comes through its doors. In the five years since Sister Karina has found God and joined the church, calamity has struck the small town, leading to a string of deaths that some in the community believe to be God punishing them. Inside his darkened room, the Father believes he's hearing the voice of God, and what God has told him to do reverberates through the Native community, causing an uproar inside and out – leading to a decision that the community must make that tears each other apart.

From Above is a recently announced contest winner of the 10th Annual Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP). Woodson will present a staged reading at Yale on April 9th, 2025.
three logos in blue and white text

About the Indigenous Performing Arts Residency

The Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS) in collaboration with the Arts Research Center (ARC) have created a multi-year Indigenous Performing Artist Residency Program, which allows us to host a performance by emerging Indigenous performing artists yearly, along with a visit to campus by the artist for a public talk and an opportunity to work with students in class visits. Alternative Theater Ensemble (ATE) was chosen as Berkeley’s inaugural residency company. Their residency will run 2024-2026, and offer them the opportunity to workshop or present a play by an Indigenous playwright each spring on campus. 

AlterTheater seeks to create a more just, equitable community by supporting the creative growth of theater artists from historically underrepresented communities, and telling stories that reflect the full complexity and diversity of our community. Their work centers the spiritual and emotional well-being of Black and Indigenous people, casting roles in ways that break stereotypes rather than reinforce them and creating opportunities for both established and emerging artists to learn and support each other in their craft. 

The mission of the artist residency program is to strengthen relationships with Indigenous community partners and to create ongoing financial and material support for upcoming Indigenous performing artists so that Native stories can be told on our campus now and into the future. It utilizes the longstanding collaborative partnership that ARC and TDPS have established with each other over many years, and utilizes both our units’ connections to local California theater and performing arts organizations off campus. 

The program stems from the idea that embodied theater and performance practices are a site of historical remembering and knowledge production. The Indigenous Performing Artist Residency builds a relationship with a local performance company for multiple years, to premiere Native or Indigenous creative works in their theater/performance space. ARC and TDPS will then collaborate to reprise those artistic worksin one of our campus performance spaces. During the presentation of the performance, the artist(s) will be invited to campus to meet with our community, give talks, engage with our students in a variety of ways that best support the artistic production. 

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DIRECTOR & PRODUCER
R. Réal Vargas Alanis

R. Réal Vargas Alanis is an acclaimed indigiqueer, 2-Spirit artist from Winton, CA (Yokut). Réal is a descendant of the Purépecha, Rarámuri, and Nahua Tenochca people and a traditional Tlahualil dancer. They are an actor, playwright, producer, and award-winning director. As a co-founder and core leader of the Arts and Advocacy Organization IN THE MARGIN, Réal oversees an ensemble of intersectional and interdisciplinary QT, BIPOC artists.

R. Réal Vargas Alanis is a visionary force in the intersectional realm of social justice artistry. Their community engagement and artistic intersectionality garnered recognition as an “Artist Disruptor” awardee by the Center for Cultural Power and the California Arts Council in 2023. Réal's performance, "A Little Bit of Gay: A Standup Piece by a Homo," also earned them acclaim as one of "the best Latinx comedic talents in the Nation” by the Latinx Theater Commons’ Comedy Carnaval 2022. As a member of the inaugural producing cohort of the National New Play Network's Bridge Program, Réal served as an Executive Producer for The New American Theatre Festival 2021, contributing to the development of 10 intersectional new works. Réal is also part of the Latinx Theatre Commons and Bay Area Native Theatre Artists. 

Réal's plays, including "La Demanda: A Call to Action" and "Golly Good Day!," have become integral to modern playwright curricula. In addition to their artistic endeavors, Réal serves as a Casting Director with Bay Area Casting Collective, co-runs their family business Sexii Tacos, and represented California's Central Valley on the California Arts Council's Creative Corps Community Development Panel, shaping grant guidelines for a $60 million one-time General Funds initiative. 

https://www.realvalanis.com/

PRODUCERS
Leah Sanginiti

Leah Sanginiti (she/her) is an international performer and director of theatre for young audiences whose work has reached over one million children across the globe. Her recent projects include an original musical produced at the Gateway Theatre in Singapore, an artist residency at the world-renowned Papermoon Puppet Theatre, and a partnership with Berkeley Repertory Theatre to design innovative arts education programming for Bay Area youth. She received a BFA in Theatre Performance from Southern Oregon University and has worked with regional theatres and touring companies in five countries and forty-four states. She currently partners with YouTube star and literacy advocate Bri Reads to produce immersive theatrical experiences for creatives of all ages. leahsanginiti.com @chleah

Zoë Aiko Sonnenberg

Zoë Aiko Sonnenberg (she/her) is a writer, dramaturg, and educator. Born in Chicago into a family of psychologists, she channels her secondhand analytic training into character and story. Her writing frequently engages with themes of time, medicine, and new media. As a dramaturg, Zoë is dedicated to supporting writers for stage and screen through the process of developing new work and finding their unique voice. Zoë earned her B.A. in English with a minor in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University and her M.Litt. in Playwriting and Dramaturgy from the University of Glasgow. Now based in the Bay Area, she has worked with numerous major production companies and performing arts organizations in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and the Bay Area. She is currently the writer's assistant to writer/actor/director B.J. Novak and is pursuing her M.S.W. at San Jose State University. An accomplished singer, Zoë has toured with choral ensembles in New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Hawai'i, South Africa, and Italy. zoeaiko.com 

Three headshots, director of play and two producers

ACTORS

tba

Topics

Performance topic page, Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer topic page, AIR topic page