Khristal Curtis is a Brooklyn-based theatre artist and educator specializing in Devised Theatre.

 

She holds an MA Educational Theatre in Colleges and Communities with an Applied Focus from the New York University Steinhardt School, and a BFA in Theatre from the Actors Training Program at the University of Utah.

 

In Spring 2017, she founded the Devised Theatre Project, an organization that provides free theatre classes to young people living in family shelters and other underserved communities in New York City. The pilot program ran at CAMBA Flagstone Family Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn where programs ran year-round through Spring 2020. With the onset of COVID, in-person classes paused in March of 2020 and the program expanded to serve additional populations outdoors in community garden settings and online via Zoom. 

 

From 2014-2016, she served as Founding Deputy Director for Drama Club, a non-profit organization that provides theatre programming to incarcerated youth in NYC (yes, the USA puts children in cages and it's unconscionable).  As Deputy Director, Khristal cultivated a partnership between Drama Club and the NYU Steinhardt Educational Theatre program. Through this partnership, she developed an internship program in which selected NYU students were paired with experienced Drama Club Facilitators to gain in-class experience and guidance. In this role, she also developed and implemented curricula and evaluation protocol, which were applied across all Drama Club program sites. 

 

In 2013  she founded Strange Candy, a collective focused on fostering collaboration among performing artists of various disciplines. Through Strange Candy, Khristal hosts occasional workshops, discussion forums, creates and produces new work.

 

Khristal has extensive teaching and directing experience with a wide variety of populations. Other Applied Theatre work includes theatre-based curricula design, development, implementation and evaluation for youth-based theatre programming at the YMCA, incarcerated adults at Woodbourne and Sing Sing Correctional Facilities, formerly incarcerated adults returning to their communities through Rehabilitation Through the Arts, and young people attending Lafayette Academy Alternate Learning Center in the Bronx (a NYC suspension center).