We were lucky to catch up with Angela Astle recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Angela, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Athena Project was inspired by my work in theatre and new play development in New York City. I remember reading a study by a Harvard student, Emily Sands, where among many eye opening statistics, this one stood out: In all of the plays on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in Regional Theatre, only 17% of those produced were written by women. Only 17%!!! And that was a statistic from 2009! I was shocked that we lacked such equity in storytelling, and decided to do something about this appalling situation.

Seeds were planted as my husband and I moved back home to Colorado to raise our family. And after about 6 months of “new mom fog” I started exploring what I could offer my community. Having been in Denver since my sophomore year of high school, I already had a sense of the local theatre community, the players, and an understanding of what was NOT happening. The last time there had been a festival of new plays written by women was 12 years prior to my returning to Denver in 2010 and the playwrights included in that were still around. So, I found a donated theater space and invited those writers and anyone who wished to be involved to join me in a vision/planning session. I knew I didn’t want to start a full theater company as my sense was that women were underrepresented in all artistic disciplines, not just theatre, but we also wanted to launch with the familiar.

Thus, our Plays In Progress (PIP) Series, designed to give playwrights and audiences an opportunity to interact with work as it’s being created, was born. The PIP Series was where we staged 4-6 new plays “on their feet” as a workshop for the playwrights to see their work as it was intended. Actors were on script and everyone, including directors and designers, could see the story coming to life. Audiences gave feedback on their understanding of what the playwright was intending to communicate and then voted on their favorite play to receive a full production that would anchor an annual festival. In 2013, We kicked off the Athena Project Arts Festival taking place at various venues across the Denver Metro area that paid women artists for their talents and sparked dialogue about the underrepresentation of women. It worked! Our efforts in raising awareness around both new play development and other artistic disciplines resulted in more women getting paid for their work. And from a new play development perspective especially, more opportunities were created in this area locally than ever before–not just for women, but for men, too.

Through this unique program, Athena Project spotlighted women playwrights for a decade, fostering new works by producing concert readings, workshop productions, and even full length productions of exclusively new plays. In our final year of PIP, we received over 300 submissions to reach our final 4 selected plays!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Key programs include Read & Rant: A Plays In Progress (PIP) Series, a book club that reads plays and partners with playwrights, dramaturgs, and community members to elevate women’s stories, showcasing the contributions of women playwrights at the earliest stages of new play development; Curating Art for Impact, to authentically connect brand or missions to stakeholders in a thoughtful and engaging way all while getting women artists paid for their work; Girls Create summer intensive week-long camps exploring various art forms, empowering girls to lead and effect change in themselves and others through creative learning.

Our mission is to empower women* through the arts. We envision a world with gender equity where women’s voices are valued and amplified. We value:

1. The inherent power in the artistic voices of women
2. Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion
3. Equitable access to the arts
4. Equality in opportunities, representation and pay
5. The creative process
6. The power of art to connect communities

*We recognize that the term “women” doesn’t automatically include all aspects of the gender spectrum. We continue to create a safer space for expression and growth of all women, non-binary, trans, and LGBTQIA+ individuals.

Our overarching goal is to create artist engagement opportunities with diverse community members, youth, and those at the fringes of the professional artistic world. We prioritize being able to extend payment to artists for their work, amplifying artists’ work through social media platforms, and providing a supportive network so artists may grow relationships with one another and with community-at-large. By providing space to share triumphs and challenges, we foster a brave space for women to share experiences openly, as we explore the ever-changing landscape of being a woman AND an artist.

We exist as a platform to empower women in the arts and to shine a spotlight on artistic contributions from women of color and of all abilities. Our work requires us to listen humbly, dig in and get uncomfortable, speak out against injustice, own our mistakes, amplify Black and brown voices, and share and support the creatives in our community, thus always working towards understanding and empathy. We aim to uplift nondominant identities in all programming/partnerships as well.

Athena Project is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. Our organization was founded to address systemic inequities long existing in the arts world. With humility, intention, and action we work to uplift and nurture women artists and create opportunities for them to showcase their work in our community. We are committed to action on behalf of our communities of color and will create space for all artists to empathize with each other, build relationships and share resources. We are also committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all artists, community partners, volunteers, independent contractors, audiences and vendors.

We intentionally include multidisciplinary art forms in our events to expose audiences to various genres. We facilitate connections between educators, artists, and the general public for the purpose of lively discussion, critique and debate. We serve women who are artists and women make up the majority of our audiences.

The pandemic reaffirmed these truths: Art heals. Art creates empathy. And most importantly, art is the heart and soul of our community. By creating opportunities to uplift artistic voices of women, Athena Project contributes to the cultural fabric of Denver, building a strong and diverse artistic community, which in turn values the voices of women at all stages in their artistic development.

Athena Project believes that depth of impact outweighs the sheer volume of quantity, and while we are happy to serve as many artists as possible, our most meaningful experiences come from interaction with individual artists rather than the “collective.” Our proudest moments/milestones include:

-As Athena Project’s Executive Producer, I was recognized as the WCACO Wonderful Woman in the Arts by Women’s Arts Caucus of Colorado and the 2023 Colorado Women’s Day for her contributions to the landscape of women artists
-Curating Art for Impact brings the right artist to the right organization at the right time + get her paid for her work. We curated entertainment for Women’s Bean Project for its grand opening of a new facility in summer 2022, leading to a project to curate muralists to showcase its mission

-#ArtFindsUs-This partnership with K Contemporary Gallery/Holly Porterfield was born and executed in 2020, resulting in a free mobile art project to fill the pandemic-fueled arts void in collaboration with compensated artists, arts organizations, local businesses/neighborhood associations. Through pop-up performances, we created events to bring local musicians in pedicabs, billboard trucks with visual artwork, and a mobile stage featuring dance, comedy, and spoken word art to diverse communities. In 2021, the program evolved into artBURSTS and continues breaking down transportation and access barriers, pays and uplifts women artists, and shares the joy a burst of art can bring. We also prioritize hiring women artists from nondominant identities for these events to better reflect the communities we serve.

-Artful Reflections – launched in 2022 as a monthly forum with local galleries. Participants are invited to reflect about featured artwork of a woman artist, with an opportunity to let the art in to increase understanding of themselves and others. Through participants’ experience of the art and moderated conversations that follow, connection and community are strengthened.

-In 2020, we created #WomenCrushWednesday, a digital campaign featuring past and present women of color artists, to uplift, honor and amplify diverse voices as part of our Accountability In Action Statement. This campaign continues to get our highest engagement.

-Curated entertainment for Womxn’s March Denver (2017-2020), resulting in the largest platform of amplification in our history for 40+ women artists. We ensured artistic voices were present in spotlighting issues relevant to women + sourced speakers.

-Most recently, we partnered with Cherry Creek North to provide musicians for their Live & Local June celebration. These were pop-up performances by musicians throughout the neighborhood in 6 different locations simultaneously on Saturdays in June. For this project we hired and PAID over 100 artists–85% of them women.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Since 2012, we’ve expanded partnerships and created meaningful ways to engage with the community. We represent that women’s voices matter. Our presence and reputation call attention to entities that aren’t uplifting women…and those that are. When many uplift women through collective work, women and the arts rise.

Word of mouth and strategic collaborations have helped build Athena Project’s reputation in Colorado. We created a space where artists and organizations could come to us with ideas and we could figure out a way to make them happen. We also positioned ourselves in alignment with the other already established key arts players in our community.

When you look at our roster of people and organizations we have worked with, you’ll see some of the more familiar arts organizations: Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Arts Student League of Denver, Colorado Ballet, Museo de las Americas, and Swallow Hill Music Association. We also created collaborations with high profile organizations and institutions such as TEDxMileHigh, University of Colorado at Denver, DU’s Trauma Disaster & Recovery Clinic (TDRC), MSU’s Center for Visual Arts, and Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, Bonfils Stanton Foundation, the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, and History Colorado.

Most recent collaborators include: Center for Women’s History CO, Dairy Block/Denver Milk Market, Women’s Bean Project, Molly Brown House Museum, Black American West Museum, Focus Points Family Resource Center, Huerta Urbana Farmers’ Market, Comal, and arts districts such as RiNo, Aurora Cultural Arts District, 40 West Arts District and the Arts District on Santa Fe.

By partnering with these established organizations, we bring a lens of focus and diversity to their work by highlighting women. Our very first collaboration was with Aurora Fox Arts Center and the Artistic Director at the time knew that we would bring a lens of diversity into his season lineup, allowing him to show up as a more inclusive space in our community. We continue to seek to work with many diverse artists in both background and discipline and yet we stay true to our mission of empowering women through the arts.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Yes–two times come immediately to mind. We had been running our annual festival for 5 years and in Year 5, we invested $10,000 in advertising (more money than ever before). Yet, despite that huge amount (to us at the time that was about 15% of our budget!) we did NOT see an increase in ticket sales. We also observed that the artists we were working with were getting other opportunities so instead of their supporters having limited opportunities to see them perform, there were now many options to choose from. While that was great for the artists, it meant that our audience pool was further diluted. The festival was already not making any money and so we knew we needed to pivot to a more sustainable model. That meant leaning into other programs that allowed us to still pay artists for opportunities but not necessarily having the expenses of those productions solely on our own.

I had been attending quite a few networking events and it was clear to me that there were many organizations putting on galas but without resources to find artists to perform at those galas. A lot of them were calling in favors from someone’s cousin or uncle, for example, to perform at these events at the last minute. Curating Art for Impact was born as I saw the need to offer a service where not only can we provide artists that we simply book for an event, but for those entities who wanted to try something different, we would curate the ideal entertainment for the event. We created a short play for The Blue Bench (formerly Colorado Rape Awareness and Assistance Program) which supported their name change and helped them raise over $30,000 at a fundraising breakfast when the play was performed. We also curated a flash mob in collaboration with The Women’s Foundation for a speaking event headlined by Michelle Obama. The flash mob dance was choreographed by Bella Diva Dance and performed to a song written by the FemPowered band that was part of Youth on Record. And a most recent example is we supported Women’s Bean Project in creating murals for the outside of their new building that speak to their mission and the people that work there. In all of these events, we get paid for curating and organizing and the artists get paid for their talents. And at the same time, we uplift the missions of both organizations which is empowering for us all.

The second pivot came in a similar way in that we were looking at how we utilize our resources to impact people more deeply and increase our reach as much as possible. After 10 years of producing our Plays In Progress Series, it was time for a shift that combined the opportunity to share theatrical work and new play development.

To serve more playwrights efficiently, in 2022, we merged our PIP Series into an ongoing monthly event with a new name, Read & Rant: A Plays in Progress Series. As a virtual book club, Read & Rant attracts playwrights and dramaturgs nationally and connects them to local and national audience members. Our goals are to foster collaboration opportunities between women writers and dramaturgs, while highlighting the underrepresentation of women in these positions. In its latest evolution we partner with playwrights, freelance dramaturgs based locally/nationally, and community members to elevate these stories from the earliest stages of new play development.

Each month, we feature two new and unproduced scripts selected via lottery from a nationwide call for submissions. Guided by a dramaturg, we invite attendees to share constructive comments, thoughts, and affirmations in order to aid in the development process of the pieces. As a result, we are now uplifting 20-24 playwrights EACH YEAR versus 4-6 previously showcased in our PIP Series.

Playwrights who participated in the new program were supportive of the change, as shown in these testimonials:

“Athena Project’s Read and Rant series is fun, casual, and informative. The artistic team has carefully taken the time to pair plays with invited guests, who can give different insights into the text. For my play, “It’s Too Cold For You Here”, Athena Project invited several mental health professionals to discuss the depression and stages of grief within the play. These professionals add more texture to the conversation because they bring in a different set of knowledge, expertise, and experience into the room.”

“This was one of the most organized, most in-depth, most thoughtful and focused discussions about a play that I have ever participated in… and I’ve been writing for forty years. Athena takes the nurturing of women playwrights seriously, and I encourage playwrights to submit work and also to drop in and give a listen. It was a privilege to be part of it. As a woman on the spectrum, I actually felt welcome at the table.”

“Working with Athena Project was a really valuable experience. I gained thoughtful, pointed feedback about my play. In addition, the conversation around the social issue that the play deals with was evocative and heart-warming. A program like this is valuable for developing the future work of women in the theater industry.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://athenaprojectarts.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/athenaprojectarts/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AthenaProjectArts
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/athena-project/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@athenaproject9037/featured

Image Credits
Diana Odem Charlotte Bassin