Community Engaged Creative:

Chelsea has worked on community-engaged artistic projects as an actor, dancer, choreographer, movement director, writer, and facilitator of transformative social practice. As a community-engaged creative, her artistic work has long been interwoven with her social change work. After two decades of integrating artistic and community organizing practice, she has come to understand that arts and cultural work are essential to making change. As Anna Deavere Smith says, "culture is how humans learn to survive, and as artists we create and preserve culture." Artistic work can raise consciousness and awareness, and it can also "move" us, creating experiences that engage us all as "protagonists in the necessary transformations of society." (Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed.) 

Training and collaborating with artists like Urban Bush Women, Cornerstone Theater Company, Asé Dance Theater Collective, Working Theater, and Movement for the Urban Village has taught Chelsea that performance can be a communal ritual for healing, transformation, grief, celebration, affirming identity, consciousness raising, or whatever else is called for. The intention is to create space for all participants to be transformed by the ritual and/or narrative they are immersed in. In both artistic process and through performance we can engage with each other in a ways that expand possibilities beyond what would have been accessible otherwise. These artists also taught Chelsea that craft need not be sacrificed for community-engagement, so a central aspect of her work is to bring a strong sense of both craft and aesthetic equity to any collaboration she is part of.

Chelsea began to work as a community-engaged artist in 2002 with an organization called Make the Road New York, developing a youth arts-based organizing program in Brooklyn, New York. As Director of The Youth Power Project, she worked collaboratively to develop arts-based campaigns addressing issues such as youth incarceration and the lack of green space in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She was also part of many participatory research and planning processes during that time, leading a process with Girls for Gender Equity that addressed sexual harassment in schools, supporting the participatory planning of Bushwick School for Social Justice, and facilitating arts-based participatory research with Voices Unbroken. In the years that followed she worked on community-engaged arts projects with organizations such as Queens Theater in the Park, Girls for Gender Equity, Caribbean Cultural Center, and Bristol Riverside Theatre where she directed a devised theater piece that honored the legacy of Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad in that community. She then began to support more schools and youth organizations in the design of theater and dance programming, leadership development, restorative justice and restorative practices, and community engagement. This has lead to over a decade of professional development facilitation, consulting work, and coaching across a range of sectors to support organizational capacity for equity, cultural responsiveness, effective communication, and conflict navigation. 

Work in Dance & Theater:

In the early 2000s, Chelsea was a company member of Shalewa Mackall's Movement for the Urban Village and Ned Williams Dunham Dance Company. She was then brought on to tour as an actor, choreographer, and facilitator for "We Got Issues!" a participatory research process and inter-disciplinary performance project that sought to engage young women in political process. Initially co-produced by Eve Ensler and Jane Fonda, then by Rha Goddess and Jlove Calderon/ Next Wave of Women...  

...the project began by interviewing women between the ages of 18 and 35 to see what issues were most important to them and how they felt about engaging in political process. Based on those interviews, they developed an interdisciplinary performance piece that was shared with a diverse range of communities alongside a series of workshops co-facilitated with members of each community. The ensemble was in residence for a full month in each place, building capacity for the work to continue if community members wanted to sustain it after the touring ensemble left.

In 2006 she joined Urban Bush Women's Summer Leadership Institute, training with them and collaborating as a writer/ performer on a piece called Place Matters that explored the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the related dynamics of systemic racism and displacement. She then used tools from participatory research and community-engaged theater to develop The 6 Project with director Tamilla Woodard, a documentary theater piece about the Jena 6 Case, in which 6 young black men were unjustly charged after a series of hate crimes perpetrated by their white classmates. The play toured to 12 cities across the US, engaging over 3000 people in dialogue on racial healing through workshops, performances, and community gatherings. During that three year stretch she returned to her studies of acting at HB Studio and trained with Cornerstone Theater Company, assisting Laurie Woolery as a choreographer and acting in an adaptation of Jason in Eureka. In 2013 she received her M.F.A. in Theater and Contemporary Performance, through Steve Wangh's experimental theater program based on the Grotowski Approach to Physical Theater, somatic technique and body-mind centering, improvisational composition, and extensive training in devised theater with Tectonic Theater Company. 

From 2014-2015 she toured as a member of the professional ensemble for Cornerstone Theater Company's California: The Tempest, performing the role of Ariel in an adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest that addressed topics such as food equity, the prison industry, colonization, and immigration. While on break from that tour, she directed a street theater initiative for Berkeley vs. Big Soda, helping to bring about the first successful soda tax measure in the US. She then worked as a choreographer on two site-specific plays addressing gentrification in New York City - Working Theater's Bamboo in Brooklyn and PopUP Theatrics' Broken City: Harlem. 

In 2015 she was a facilitator, writer, and actor for Oregon Shakespeare and One Minute Play Festival's Every 28 Hours, a community-engaged theater project addressing the impact of police violence on Ferguson, MO. As a member of the Community Accountability Team for Every 28 Hours, she co-created a set of guidelines to ensure that the project was accountable to those most impacted by these issues. In 2016 she worked with playwright Andrea Thome on the collaborative development of the play Necklace of the Dove for Mabou Mines, and devised The Refuge Project with Poetic Theater Productions at The Wild Project.

​In 2019 she joined Urban Bush Women as a collaborator on Hair and Other Stories, while also co-designing community engagement and teaching physical theater and community-engaged practice at the New School of Drama. She then joined Urban Bush Women for the New York City premiere as a facilitator of audience engagement. In the spring of 2022, she worked as movement director for Shotgun Players' production of Eliana Pipes' DreamHou$e, followed by another movement director role on SF Shakes' production of Much Ado About Nothing that summer. In 2024, she worked as movement director for Marisela Treviño Orta's River Bride and became a founding member of the Belonging Resident Company.

She currently teaches in various programs at UC Berkeley, collaborates with the Belonging Resident Company, and is wrapping up an arts-based participatory research process with the Othering & Belonging Institute through her role as their Resident Cultural Strategist.