Americans for the Arts's video: NAMPC 2019: Laurie Woolery

Laurie Woolery is a director and citizen artist. A first-generation Latinx, she works with theaters and communities to build sustainable art practices. Woolery has developed and directed new works with populations ranging from incarcerated women to residents of a small Kansas town devastated by a tornado. Woolery creates site-specific theater in locations such as a working sawmill, parking lots, prisons and the banks of the Los Angeles River. She has worked at The Public Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory, Trinity Repertory, Cornerstone Theater Company, and Los Angeles Philharmonic among others. Woolery has directed world premieres of plays by Tanya Saracho, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Charise Castro Smith, Marisela Trevino Orta, Aditi Kapil, and more. Woolery is the Director of Public Works, an initiative at The Public Theater that seeks to engage the people of New York by making them creators and not just spectators. Working with partner organizations in all five boroughs, Public Works invites communities to join in the creation of ambitious works of participatory theater. Woolery created a new musical adaptation of As You Like It featuring 200 New Yorkers that received the New York Times’ “Best Theater in 2017.” Woolery is a founding member of The Sol Project.