An update from the Outgoing Executive Director and the Incoming Executive Director

June 30, 2025

On June 22 of 2020, the leadership team of the School of Drama published our Anti-Racist Action Plan. The full school leadership created the plan, which stated: 

The school’s goal, as stated in our recently revised statement of mission, vision, values, and commitments, is to support and nurture the artistry and scholarship of every student, honoring their identities, perspectives, and traditions. But it is glaringly apparent that our school is not always an open and welcoming space for BIPOC students, faculty, and staff. We are failing to live out our stated values, and the work of pointing that out to us has once again fallen primarily on our Black students, faculty, staff, and alumni. This is unacceptable. We must do better.

We must … individually, collectively, and institutionally, turn toward our own biases, our own blind spots, our own racism, and actively work to dismantle them.

Committing ourselves to anti-racist practices is integral to accomplishing our mission of training artists and scholars poised to be the creative leaders of tomorrow. This work must be embedded in everything we do …. Meaningful, substantive change will require us—faculty, staff, and students—to interrogate our priorities and be willing to shift and reorganize around our stated values in ways that may feel deeply uncomfortable to those of us who are accustomed to having our needs, preferences, sensibilities, and stories centered. 

This type of transformation takes resources, and it takes time. But our students, faculty, and staff should not be asked to wait any longer for change that they can see and feel. We must do everything that we can do right away. Simultaneously, we must lay the foundation for the systemic change required to produce a future in which our school can be a place where every student is actually free to embody the artistic and scholarly life they envision for themselves.

We have identified seven action areas where we will begin immediate work as a school. This list is neither comprehensive nor complete—these action items will continue to evolve and gain specificity, including specific budgetary commitments. But we recognize that our community needs to hear from us now about how we plan to begin.

The seven steps of the plan included:

1. Acknowledging the racism in our school’s history
2. Fortifying transparency and accountability
3. Addressing structural racism in hiring
4. Supporting students, faculty and staff
5. Decentering whiteness in curriculum and production
6. Deepening our understanding and practice of anti-racism
7. Combatting erasure in our history

Today, the leadership of the school is committed to these principles more than ever. We’ve made meaningful progress in the seven action areas over the past five years and believe there is much more to do. Below we have posted an executive summary of the original Anti-Racist Action Plan and its previous updates.

In 2020, towards the end of the plan the authors predicted that it would need to be revised and updated when they wrote:

…this list is not comprehensive, and it is not frozen. It will necessarily continue to evolve and grow. But we offer it today as a starting place and invitation.

Today, we are embarking on developing the next stage of this critical work. As in 2020, we are on the eve of a leadership transition and, like then, the outgoing and incoming Executive Directors and other leaders in the School of Drama will be collaborating to create an updated plan with new goals and strategies for continuing our Anti-Racist and Belonging efforts. In Autumn quarter 2025 we will begin holding a series of conversations with the larger School of Drama community. These conversations will inform an updated plan, and our hope is to share it in winter of 2026 and publish it here.

Geoff Korf, Outgoing Executive Director

Scott Magelssen, Incoming Executive Director

UW School of Drama’s 2020 Anti-Racist Action Plan Executive Summary

June 30, 2025

The School of Drama published its first Anti-Racist Action Plan on June 22, 2020. This plan was created in collaboration with the full school leadership, including Interim Executive Director Lynn M. Thomas, Interim Associate Director Geoff Korf, Head of Acting Jeffrey Fracé, Head of Directing Valerie Curtis-Newton, Head of Design Deborah Trout, Head of Theatre History, Theory and Criticism Odai Johnson, co-Heads of Undergraduate Studies L. Zane Jones and Scott Magelssen, Director of Engagement Holly Arsenault, Production Manager Ryan Gastelum, and School Administrator Tina Swenson. The 2020 plan was put in place as a “starting place and invitation.” Work on an updated plan was commissioned in June of 2025. The updated plan is expected to be published in winter 2025.

The following is a summary of the 2020 plan’s history, goals, and progress made toward those goals.

The 2020 Anti-Racist Action Plan

The 2020 Anti-Racist Action plan acknowledged that racism persists today in our culture and in our institutions, including the institution of the UW School of Drama. Racism is not news, especially to the many Black, Indigenous, and Person of Color students, faculty, and staff who have attempted, over the course of decades, to bring about change by bravely sharing their experiences. The events of spring 2020, including but not limited to the death of George Floyd and the worldwide demonstrations against racism and racialized violence, allowed many in our school to see with fresh eyes how complacency and prioritization of our own comfort has caused harm.

The plan included the following language:

The school’s goal, as stated in our recently revised statement of mission, vision, values, and commitments, is to support and nurture the artistry and scholarship of every student, honoring their identities, perspectives, and traditions. But it is glaringly apparent that our school is not always an open and welcoming space for BIPOC students, faculty, and staff. We are failing to live out our stated values, and the work of pointing that out to us has once again fallen primarily on our Black students, faculty, staff, and alumni. This is unacceptable. We must do better.

We must… individually, collectively, and institutionally, turn toward our own biases, our own blind spots, our own racism, and actively work to dismantle them.

Committing ourselves to anti-racist practices is integral to accomplishing our mission of training artists and scholars poised to be the creative leaders of tomorrow. This work must be embedded in everything we do…. Meaningful, substantive change will require us—faculty, staff, and students—to interrogate our priorities and be willing to shift and reorganize around our stated values in ways that may feel deeply uncomfortable to those of us who are accustomed to having our needs, preferences, sensibilities, and stories centered. 

This type of transformation takes resources, and it takes time. But our students, faculty, and staff should not be asked to wait any longer for change that they can see and feel. We must do everything that we can do right away. Simultaneously, we must lay the foundation for the systemic change required to produce a future in which our school can be a place where every student is actually free to embody the artistic and scholarly life they envision for themselves.

We have identified seven action areas where we will begin immediate work as a school. This list is neither comprehensive nor complete—these action items will continue to evolve and gain specificity, including specific budgetary commitments. But we recognize that our community needs to hear from us now about how we plan to begin.

The seven steps of the plan included:

1. Acknowledging the racism in our school’s history
2. Fortifying transparency and accountability
3. Addressing structural racism in hiring
4. Supporting students, faculty and staff
5. Decentering whiteness in curriculum and production
6. Deepening our understanding and practice of anti-racism
7. Combatting erasure in our history

Details of the Original Action Steps

1. Acknowledge and accept the racism in our school’s history and present

The Anti-Racist action plan recognized that you cannot fix what you will not see, and that before the School of Drama could repair itself, it needed to reckon with its eighty-year history in the classroom and on its stages. This work had already begun, thanks to the emotional labor of Black staff, students, and alumni who spoke out and shared their experiences of racism in our school. These were messages of heartbreak, anguish, and grief. We acknowledge the bravery and generosity of these communications, and we honor that bravery by refusing to look away from the hard truths contained in these messages.

But the burden of showing us who we are could and should not be placed on our BIPOC/Global Majority students, staff, and alumni. The action plan acknowledged that if we are truly committed to change, those of us who are white should be willing to step into this work deliberately and unflinchingly. We must pledge ourselves to the necessary work of reckoning, work that we hope will ensure that future members of the community do not have to endure these same types of painful experiences.

2. Fortify transparency and accountability

The Anti-Racist Action Plan recognized that we needed a more comprehensive structure for students, staff, and faculty of all identities to voice complaints, solicit support, seek clarification, and bring concerns to effective resolution.

Following the example of our colleagues in the UW Department of Dance, and in consultation with UW’s Professional and Organizational Development team, we created a comprehensive guide for how to voice a concern, file a complaint or report, make suggestions, and offer solutions. We instituted protocols for responding to these concerns, ensuring that every student, faculty, and staff member knows where to turn for assistance in addressing concerns, including regarding harms having to do with race and identity. The plan included a clear process for escalation of concerns when it is necessary. The Process for Voicing Concerns was put in place in the Fall of 2020.

In the fall of 2021, all faculty, staff, and students in positions of responsibility (such as student employees, stage managers, and deputies) completed a training covering topics such as: the climate and culture that the School of Drama strives to create, how to identify and address different types of concerns, the appropriate channels for communicating and elevating concerns based on the receiver’s role within the school, resources and support structures that are in place both within the School of Drama and within the university for those reporting and those receiving concerns, and where to turn when a concern reveals a need that you have for additional training, conversation, or support. Those who reviewed the training reported that they felt more confident in their ability to effectively address concerns.

3. Address structural racism in hiring

At the time the 2020 Anti-Racist Action Plan was published, the School of Drama, in spite of years of conversation and stated commitments around diversity in hiring and retention, was not attracting a broadly diverse pool of candidates in faculty searches. The multiple strategies we put in place since 2020 to address the systemic barriers, structural racism, and systems of oppression that underlie our lack of faculty and staff diversity have increased the diversity of our candidate pools. These strategies include requiring unconscious-bias training for every member of hiring committees, adopting best practices statistically proven to reduce the impact of bias in hiring processes, requiring broad representation on faculty hiring committees, examining our recruiting and hiring processes, and acknowledging the racial demographics of our city and university and proactively connecting Global Majority candidates and new hires with resources they can use to build and maintain their own professional communities outside of the school.

During the 2020-2021 academic year, we conducted two faculty searches. The percentage of applicants self-identifying as Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color increased from 15% during our 2019-2020 faculty searches to 35% during our 2020-2021 faculty searches.

4. Support students, faculty, and staff now

The action plan acknowledged that the problems of racism faced by students, faculty, and staff are exacerbated by the overwhelming whiteness of the School of Drama’s faculty and staff. Efforts were put in place to serve the needs of our students in ways that reflected the many intersecting identities that exist in the School of Drama—needs that could not always be met in-house. These include a program started in 2020 that matches graduate students with mentors in the artistic and scholarly community that can help them navigate the school and the wider profession. They also included listening sessions hosted for undergraduate students facilitated by School of Drama leadership and hosted by Seattle-based theatre artist Sara Porkalob in 2021-2022. In 2023 we reinstated the undergraduate Majors Seminar with a commitment to hosting a diverse group of guest speakers in the class.

5. Decenter whiteness in curriculum and production

The action plan outlined strategies to decenter whiteness in our teaching. These strategies included interrogating the history of our disciplines, how we have taught them, and considering the multiple perspectives from which they could be taught. The plan called for implementing systems that decenter European, White history and practice in our curricula and the plays and playwrights discussed in our classrooms, instead centering global practice. The action plan made it clear that when we say we value tradition, we mean that we value the long tradition of theatrical storytelling from all cultures, and that we do not value the traditions of exclusion, marginalization, and colonialism. The plan commits us to fostering an environment that values the voices, scholarship, and artistry of our diverse student body. This includes the material with which our students work in the classroom and the selection of productions in our season.

These decentering efforts were conducted across all areas. Theatre History and Performance Studies (formerly History, Theory, and Criticism) incorporated more diverse voices into its theatre history sequence and updated its catalog descriptions to reflect a more global scope. The Introduction to Theatre syllabus was updated so that more than half of the assigned plays were authored by BIPOC/Global Majority playwrights. Directing and playwriting faculty worked to improve library resources, including articles and books on global majority subjects and contributors to support directing students in their assignments. Acting faculty voluntarily participated in external trainings about anti-racism and met regularly to share resources and develop strategies for decentering whiteness in their curriculum. Design began integrating classroom exercises that dismantle white supremacist mores of the “body beautiful” in design research and expression. Design also adopted two guiding principles when critiquing and evaluating student work: 1) To assume a global audience for each project, (unless the student explicitly states otherwise); and 2) To promote a design process that recognizes and values the ways in which the race/identity of the performer impacts character, environment, and story.

6. Deepen our understanding and practice of anti-racism

The School of Drama committed to ongoing anti-racist education and other efforts among our faculty, staff, and students, including our graduate instructors. This commitment included minimizing the emotional burden placed on non-white-identifying faculty, staff, and students.

On December 17, 2020, the School of Drama participated in an Anti-Racist Theatre training session led by Nicole Brewer. The voluntary training focused on developing an anti-racist theatre ethos, both as individuals and for the school. 100% of our full-time faculty and staff attended the training, as well as 60% of our part-time faculty and staff. 68% of our graduate students attended, and 10% of our undergraduate majors and minors attended.

Every year, the school sets aside funds to provide anti-racist training for area heads and senior administrative staff members to meet and deepen their level of cultural competency and fluency with anti-racist best practices.

Members of the Drama community participated in year-long peacemaking circles led by Huayruro. This work began with faculty and staff in positions of responsibility and extended to circles for all faculty and staff who wished to join. This process was designed to develop fluency, trust, and understanding in discussions of race and racism to increase our capacity for anti-racist action as individuals and as an institution.

In partnership with Seattle University and Cornish College of the Arts, we produced an online symposium called Relational Art Making: Cultivating a Beloved Seattle Theatre Community on Saturday February 13, 2021. The symposium was moderated by Seattle theatre director, educator, and activist Jay O’Leary Woods. The panel included theatre professionals Jéhan Òsanyìn, Kathy Hsieh, Braden Abraham, Brandon Jones Mooney, and Shermona Mitchell, and student representatives Andrew Coopman and Talia Rossi. Their wide-ranging discussion touched on topics such as finding an artistic community after graduation, building belonging and how it feels when you are truly welcome in a space, racism and anti-racism in Seattle theatre institutions, and managing (or living with) fear and anxiety around the pandemic and the profession.

7. Combat erasure in our history

The School of Drama’s Anti-Racist Action Plan pledged to undertake a project to revise its recorded history to combat erasure and acknowledge when our school’s actions have created obstacles to equity and justice, and to better highlight the contributions and experiences of Global Majority members of our school community, which have for too long gone overlooked and unrecorded in the story of our school. This work is ongoing and, to be sure, will include the creation of the 2020 Anti-Racist Action Plan and the updated plans that follow.

Moving Forward

As stated above, the 2020 Anti-Racist Action Plan was intended to be a “starting point and an invitation” to the deep and difficult work of reckoning with racism, reducing harm, broadening our curricula and seasons to better accommodate the diverse intersecting identities of our community, and improving a culture of cultural competency. While we are proud of our accomplishments in the past five years, there is still tremendous and ongoing work that needs to be done. And as the 2020 plan acknowledged, the list of goals was not comprehensive, nor was it frozen. It will necessarily continue to evolve and grow.

The outgoing and incoming Executive Directors and other leaders in the School of Drama will be collaborating to create an updated plan with new goals and strategies for continuing our Anti-Racist efforts. In Autumn quarter 2025 we will begin holding a series of conversations with the larger School of Drama community. These conversations will inform an updated plan, and our hope is to share it on our website in winter of 2026.