We were lucky to catch up with Brooke Shilling recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Brooke, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I have been very lucky to be a One Year Lease Theater Company member for the past five years. As a part of their extended family, I have traveled the world with wonderful theatre artists, co-wrote a play with a mentor and friend of mine, and have performed side-by-side with artists who were many years ago my teachers. Every summer, One Year Lease (OYL) embarks on their annual residency and educational program abroad. We live and work together for the summer working to create, rehearse and perform a Greek play for Greek audiences. The work then continues into the fall and the rest of the year as the company returns home to New York City, producing work Off-Broadway. Working with OYL has been the most meaningful collection of projects I have ever been a part of.
More about OYL here: www.oneyearlease.org

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

​I started making plays when I was five-years-old in my mom’s afterschool acting class and have been doing so ever since. I am a theatre artist, theatre educator, and clown. I have worked with groups such as One Year Lease Theater Company, Theater Unspeakable, inFLUX Theatre Collective, Theatre Ariel, and more. As an educator, I facilitate workshops and have taught as a visiting artist at the University of the Arts, Theatre Horizon, Philadelphia Young Playwrights, One Year Lease Theater Company’s International Program in Greece, Japan and India, performing arts high schools, and more, working with both theatre makers and non-theatre makers, the elderly, autistic youth and young adults, incarcerated young people, medical and business students, and others.

As a theatre artist, I devise physical, childlike, and provocative theatrical performances that invite my audiences to dream, to hope, to grieve, and to rile up the bonafide goofballs inside us all. ​I am also a playwright. I am a member of the 2024-2025 PlayPenn Playwright’s Cohort and was a 2024 Terrance McNally Award Semi-finalist. I am a three-time Illuminate the Arts Individual Artist Grant recipient, awarded by the City of Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy.

I offer my audiences, students and collaborators spaces to play, free from judgement or standard.

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How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Subsidize the arts. Period. Capitalist, consumer-focused models of theatre production hurt the development of new works and usually do not encourage cheap or free arts education. Artists of all kinds need time and space to create and resources to make their work accessible for everyone, and I mean everyone. I do not want to live in a world where every theater is producing the same plays and musicals of the last fifty years, where a theatre ticket can cost the same as someone’s rent, and where my students in public schools have never seen a play.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

As an artist and as an educator, I am always meeting someone where they are that day. My work or my lesson is an offering and that other person is going to engage with it in relation to what is going in their life. I have had audience members come see my play about grief after just losing a loved one or students come to class after a really tough day at home. There is a real gift in liveness that, I think, lets us celebrate humanity and how we are all uniquely different but also a part of a larger community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.brooke-shilling.com/
• Instagram: @brooke.shilling
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brooke-shilling-68a507131/