About

Our work focuses on living history. In partnership with students and community members we create documentary performances and museum exhibitions to foster difficult conversations about lived inequities. Our goal is to expand the possibilities for social change through collaborative art making.

We work with partners over a period of years, on distinct yet related projects. Our collaborators include high school students as well as community elders, public health groups and other community nonprofits. In our classes, our students take on different roles—as playwrights, actors, archivists, researchers, oral historians, documentary makers, community advocates, and facilitators. 

While  exhibitions and dramas are our bread and butter, we are always looking for new approaches to artistic collaboration.  For example, one year we produced a  docudrama performance about gentrification. The show was performed at  Armstrong, a historically black high school. In the wake of the performance students, faculty, and alums expressed a strong desire to memorialize their storied school, which produced the nation’s first black governor, Douglas Wilder, as well as Richmond’s first black mayor, Roy West, among many other notables. 

The following semester we collaborated with their current students, as well as alumni from the class of ’66.  We created both a docudrama about the school’s history and current challenges, and a pop-up museum to accompany the opening of a time capsule from the 1950s. We then created commemorative hand-made books incorporating student poetry, excerpts from alumni oral history interviews, and performance stills from the previous semester’s documentary drama performance. 

The book-making process inspired us. The following semester, we worked with a group of HIV-positive women to create “cascading books”—paper quilt panels about the impact of HIV on their lives, which echoed the AIDS quilt. These became the focal point of a museum exhibition.  

We look forward to deepening our partnerships as well as welcoming new collaborators, and experimenting with new ways to tell the story of our city.

Instructors

Laura and Patricia met at the University of RIchmond in 2010 and quickly realized they were destined to collaborate. Patricia had co-founded the intergenerational theater company Rubí Theater in New York. Her strong interest in using the arts as a vehicle for social justice inspired her book Nuyorican Feminist Performance: From the Café to Hip Hop Theater (Michigan University Press, 2020).  

Laura was a playwright who had created the docudrama Sheep Hill Memories, Carver Dreams, about a changing Richmond neighborhood; her interest in oral history led to her exhibition and book When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans (2010).

Together, they seek to bridge the gap between public histories and personal memories, to create civil rights-focused art for community audiences. Their collaboration has led to three exhibitions at The Valentine Museum—Made in Church Hill (2015), Nuestras Historias: Latinos in Richmond (2017) and Voices from Richmond’s Hidden Epidemic (2019-2020) and a series of seven docudramas about gentrification, educational disparities, HIV/AIDS, segregation, a historic Black high school, and court-ordered busing. 

Laura Browder (left) & Patricia Herrera (right) conducting an oral history interview with University of Richmond students at Sacred Heart Center.