Mission

Waterwell creates theater, film, and digital media that wrestles with complex civic questions, gathering people for cultural events that provoke, inspire, and build community.

We are dedicated to telling engrossing stories that can reach people across real and perceived divides. We produce our projects using an evolving set of best practices that are influenced by the principles of community organizing and movement building. This is part of an ongoing investigation into how storytelling can have the most relevance and impact in efforts to create a more just and humane society.

Our projects manifest in more than one medium but everything we do is infused with our love of the immediacy of live performance.

  • We recognize and engage in the ongoing fight against racism and white supremacy and the ways they manifest in the theater industry, art making, and the world of arts education. We define racism as the systemic practice of white superiority over other racial groups and define white supremacy as the belief that only whiteness or the proximity to whiteness is preferred, privileged and rewarded. We cannot underestimate the depth and complexity of facing these injustices, and decolonizing our approach to theater. This will require us as a Waterwell community to pursue intentional, personal and structural shifts to dismantle these systems. We recognize that white supremacy impacts all of us, especially Black, Indigenous, Latinx, MENA, Asian, disabled, and LGBTQIA Americans, and immigrants.

    Initiatives to build the principles of anti-racism into the structure of our organization are in our budget every year, and we are committed to creating a more anti-racist organization by incorporating feedback from our community partners, audiences, and artists.


    We welcome feedback and critique by emailing info@waterwell.com or any of us directly.

  • See our annual reports here.