CHELSEA GREGORY
  • Home
  • Bio
  • Consulting Practice
    • Testimonials
  • Community-Engaged Arts
    • Choreography
  • Social Practice
  • Contact

Chelsea Gregory (she/her) is an organizational consultant, coach, educator, narrative & cultural strategist and community-engaged creative who has worked for over two decades with arts organizations, educational institutions, corporations, and community-based organizations. Some of the methodologies she holds expertise in are popular education, design for belonging, participatory research, intercultural & leadership communication, public speaking, cultural and narrative strategy, applied theater, restorative justice, mindfulness, and somatics. She is the Resident Cultural Strategist for the Othering & Belonging Institute, and works as a consultant and coach with Culture Shift Agency. 
Picture

As a consultant, Chelsea has worked with teams and individuals at Lionsgate Studios, Earthjustice, the Othering & Belonging Institute, Climate Nexus, Lincoln Center Education, Ensemble Studio Theater, Facebook/ Meta, Roots Community Health Center, The Brooklyn Library, The Brooklyn DA's Office, Rutgers University's Humanities Action Lab, CUNY Creative Arts Team, Urban Bush Women, NYC Arts in Education Roundtable, and CORE Dance. From 2015 to 2018, she served as the Director of Community Engagement for Working Theater, and from 2017 to 2019 she was part of the leadership team for the NYC Department of Education's first Restorative Justice Initiative.
​
Chelsea spent the first two decades of her career as an educator and then as a facilitator of professional development for NYC public schools, specializing in arts for social change, leadership development, intercultural communication, culturally responsive teaching, and restorative justice. Since then she has been a guest artist or guest lecturer at The New School, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, Brown University, UMASS Amherst, and Kennesaw State. In 2020, she joined the teaching faculty of UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies - also serving as equity consultant facilitating professional development workshops for faculty, and winning the 2025 UC Berkeley TDPS Social Justice Award. In 2023 she joined the professional faculty for Haas School of Business through The Berkeley Changemaker, building student capacity for socially responsible leadership, intercultural communication, high impact teaming, and conflict navigation. 
In addition to being the Othering & Belonging Institute's Resident Cultural Strategist, Chelsea is also a founding member of the OBI affiliate the Belonging Resident Company. 

In 2019, Chelsea was part of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute in Brooklyn, NY with adrienne maree brown, and the principles articulated through emergent strategy continue to shape every aspect of her practice. She has also trained with the Academy for Coaching Excellence, the Empowerment Institute, and in social presencing with Arawana Hiyashi through the Presencing Institute. She received her B.A. in Community Building and Creative Culture from New York University's Gallatin School, and her M.F.A. in Theater and Contemporary Performance from the interdisciplinary program founded by Steve Wangh, Barbara Dilley, and Wendell Beavers at Naropa University. In 2011 she was a presenter at the Hemispheric Institute's Graduate Convergence, and in 2016 she was selected to be part of the Hemispheric Institute's EMERGENYC cohort. Her writing has been published in Occupying Privilege: Conversations on Love, Race and Liberation, Steve Cannon’s A Gathering of the Tribes, The Charis Review and We Got Issues! A Young Woman’s Guide to a Bold, Courageous and Empowered Life.


She began her artistic career by dancing for choreographers such as Adia Whitaker, Shalewa Mackall, Marlies Yearby, Ned Williams, and D. Patton White, and performing spoken word poetry, winning slams at Nuyorican Poet's Cafe and Bowery Poetry Club. In the mid-2000s she began to train as an actor and theater maker, eventually performing the role of Ariel in Cornerstone Theater Company's adaptation of The Tempest, lead roles in Cristal Chanelle Truscott's The Burnin, Kelly Zen Yie-Tsai's Murder the Machine, Kristoffer Diaz's Air, Paul Notice's Shoshanna's Coin. She was a performer and member of the creative team for Cornerstone Theater Company's  Jason in Eureka and other community-engaged productions such as We Got Issues! and Every 28 Hours. Her original work has been produced by venues such as Culture Project, LaMama ETC, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Los Angeles Women's Theater Festival, La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley CA, and 7 Stages in Atlanta GA. Recent artistic projects have been collaborations with Cali&Co Dance, Shotgun Players, Urban Bush Women, Cornerstone Theater Company, Working Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and SF Shakes. For more information about her work as an artist, please visit the Community-Engaged Arts page.
  • Home
  • Bio
  • Consulting Practice
    • Testimonials
  • Community-Engaged Arts
    • Choreography
  • Social Practice
  • Contact