Kristiana Rae Colón
Congo Square Theatre is excited to partner with Kristiana Rae Colón in the development, homan & fillmore, a work that goes beyond the traditional theatre model, into a hybrid performance model that activates the community to action through mutual aid and public/political education while providing tangible resources for healing through the arts as a lived experience.
Kristiana Rae Colón is a poet, playwright, actor, educator, producer, curator, creator of #BlackSexMatters, co-director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, the inaugural Sam Roberson Fellow at Congo Square Theater, and staff writer on season 4 of The Chi.
In 2020, Kristiana received the Samuel G. Roberson Resident Fellowship funded by the McMullen & Kime Charitable Trust and administered by the League of Chicago Theatres with Congo Square Theatre as the host theatre to support Kristiana in the development of a new stage play. After gaining feedback from community members and the initial ideation process, Kristiana's vision of the project expanded beyond a stage play to be viewed by audiences and continues to morph into a hybrid multimedia series that expands upon her recent experiences as a writer for television and film.
homan & fillmore
In Summer 2016, the #LetUsBreathe Collective launched Freedom Square, a 41-day overnight occupation, protest encampment, and block party opposing Homan Square, the CPD 'black site' where thousands of Chicagoans have been illegally detained and tortured. Initially, the Collective launched the occupation at the corner of Homan & Fillmore on Chicago's West Side in support of BYP100's civil disobedience blockade which shut down police traffic in and out of the facility on July 20th. The Collective relaunched on July 22nd in support of the #BluestLie Collaborative, a coalition of activists opposing a proposed "Blue Lives Matter" city ordinance that would expand hate crimes protections to police officers.
However, the encampment grew into a community laboratory for police abolition and divestment, providing free clothes, free books, free meals, free arts programming for the children of North Lawndale, and free sleeping tents for community members, protestors, and neighborhood residents experiencing homelessness.
Freedom Square was built on the principle that the resources necessary to keep communities safe are: restorative justice, education, employment, housing, mental health & physical wellness, addiction treatment, access to nutritional food, and art.
The impetus of this work is community development and education, where the members of the community and those who have experienced the injustice of the Homan Square facility would receive support while also working towards facilitating restorative justice models within the community.
Background & Previous Works
Kristiana’s writing, producing, and organizing work radically reimagines power structures, our complicity in them, and visions for liberation. Kristiana’s current work explores Afrofuturist media as a catalyst for social change. A foundational premise of her organizing is that artists are the vanguard of revolution, that it is the social duty of creatives to envision, imagine, rehearse, design, and embody our liberated future; we cannot achieve alternatives to the existing harmful, violent systems and institutions if we can’t first imagine them. Liberation is a curatorial act, a creative act; revolution is inherently speculative in nature. Through science fiction, Afrofuturism, and speculative media, we create opportunities to rehearse the future together.
Past works include good friday (New Manifest ATX - 2020, The Flea Theater NYC - 2019, Oracle Productions - 2016), Tilikum (world premiere Sideshow Theater, 2019 Best New Play at NonEquity Jeff Awards, 2018 Outstanding New Play at ALTA Awards), Octagon (world premiere Arcola Theatre, London, 2015; American premiere Jackalope Theatre, 2016), but i cd only whisper (world premiere Arcola Theatre, London, 2012; American premiere The Flea, New York, 2016). In 2013, she toured the UK for two months with her collection of poems, Promised Instruments, winner of the inaugural Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize and published by Northwestern University Press.
Kristiana is an alum of OpenTV’s Screenwriting fellowship where she is developing a series adaptation of her play, Suspension, which was a semi-finalist for American Theater’s Relentless Award. She is also an alum of the Goodman Theatre's Playwrights Unit where she developed her play Florissant & Canfield, which debuted at University of Illinois-Chicago in February 2018. She is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and one half of the brother/sister hip-hop duo April Fools. She appeared on the fifth season of HBO's Def Poetry Jam.