Kiyoko McCrae is a multidisciplinary artist and producer who directs theater and film productions that are aimed at creating social change. She has worked with Junebug Productions for over a decade and was most recently Managing Director (2012-2017). During her time at Junebug Productions she produced and co-directed the short films, Black Back (2017), A Conversation with John O'Neal (2013) and Free Southern Theater: Beginnings, and produced and directed theater productions Lockdown (2013) and produced Gomela/to return: Movement of Our Mother Tongue (2017), which was awarded a NEFA National Theater Project creation and touring grant. For five semesters, she and founding Artistic Director John O’Neal co-taught the community-based theater course, From Community to Stage through Tulane University’s Department of Dance and Theater and the African and African Diaspora Studies program (2008-2011). She has also taught and facilitated story circles with numerous organizations such as National Performance Network, Alternate ROOTS, NeighborWorks, Ashé Cultural Arts Center to name a few. She has also taught at Children in the Classics (New York, NY), TIE-Theater in Education (London, U.K.), Upward Bound (Tulane University) and served on the faculty for the Urban Bush Women Summer Leadership Institute as Music Director (2012-2015). She has also worked as an organizer with El Puente, a Latino community­-based organization in Brooklyn, NY. In 2004, while serving on the national steering committee for United for Peace and Justice, the nation's largest anti­war coalition, she visited Iraq on a fact-finding mission to examine the effects of the US war and occupation of Iraq and served as lead researcher for the World Tribunal on Iraq, a people’s tribunal featuring jury members Dennis Brutus and Eve Ensler that examined war crimes committed by the US. She received a fellowship at the Kopkind Colony, a residency program for independent journalists and community organizers for her organizing around the War on Iraq. She is currently an inaugural Intercultural Leadership Institute (ILI) Fellow and is a proud member of Alternate ROOTS and Women of Color in the Arts (WOCA). She received her BFA in Theatre Arts from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts where she studied with Jan Cohen Cruz, leading practitioner of activist and community-based performance. She and her husband, filmmaker Jason Foster have two children, Manami and Koji and are happy to call New Orleans home.

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