Faculty Fellow
John P. Keller
Narrating Democracy: Stories of place, work, and community.
Fellowship Area: Dialogue Across Difference
Department: Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers–New Brunswick
Biography
John P. Keller is a theater maker and socially engaged artist with 20 years of experience in arts education and production. He is committed to creating projects that use the arts as a process of transformation across a range of advocacy areas including environmental sustainability, violence prevention, socio-economic justice and equitable community development. As a co-producer and Director of Education for coLAB Arts John has facilitated joint project design and curriculum development for programming including interview based theater world premieres such as Trueselves, Truelove, Life, Death, Life Again, and Banished as well as full scale performance immersives such as Behind the Moon, Beyond the Rain, and Watershed Moment.
He has coordinated and developed community response methods used in issue and place-based mural creation with communities. This work has culminated in original works on immigration, environmental impact, and cross-cultural identity by national and international artists. Additional program development and administration include community based storytelling workshops and slams, oral history collection and archive for arts based research, original musical creation, choreography residencies, bi-lingual (English/Spanish) theater education and production, short and long-term in-school theater education residencies which integrate social justice and arts curriculums to allow young people opportunities to use art as a way to respond to complex social issues and activate their ideas through their art. Read more here.
Fellowship Project
Narrating Democracy: Stories of place, work, and community explores the ongoing questions and conversations around democracy and community engagement post “America250.” New Brunswick based socially engaged arts organization coLAB Arts will provide the engagement infrastructure, technical expertise, and production coordination for an original devised theater piece that will be based on narratives collected by Rutgers University students and performed by a collaborative of student artists, professional theater alumni, and community storytellers.
Students will be trained on strategies including deep listening, oral history, and the ethics of civic art practice. In addition to these trainings, students will form the core engagement team working in the field under the guidance of both faculty and community based professionals. coLAB Arts has been working in socially engaged arts for nearly 20 years with a proven track record of provoking quality civic dialogue and providing meaningful creative opportunities for diverse communities.