Title: Artist Talk with Playwright-in-Residence Drew Woodson
The Arts Research Center and Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies with Alternative Theater Ensemble are proud to welcome Playwright and Berkeley Alum Drew Woodson for a residency at UC Berkeley, April 14 - 18, 2025. At 2pm on Thursday, April 17th, Woodson will give an Artist Talk in conversation with TDPS Lecturer Patrick Russell.
During his residency, Woodson will spend the week developing a new play (From Above) in workshops with local Indigenous actors. Script development workshops will be open to UC Berkeley student observation on Tuesday April 15th & Wednesday April 16th. In addition to giving an Artist Talk, Drew will present a public reading of From Above at 6pm on April 17th. More information at arts.berkeley.edu.
Drew Woodson is a Western Shoshone playwright based in New York City. He has had his work read in multiple theaters across New York, including Rattlestick Theater where he was asked to open the first annual Northeastern Native Arts Festival with his play Your Friend, Jay Silverheels. For this same work, Drew was named Yale’s Young Indigenous Playwright of 2021. More recently, Drew completed a two month artists residency on Governors Island for AICH, and completed a workshop of a new work From Above under the direction of Madeline Sayet. As a writer, Drew seeks to tell stories where Native people are allowed to take up space, be complicated, and ultimately be more than a storytelling device. Drew is an MFA Graduate from the Dramatic Writing department at NYU, and an alumni of UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies.
Patrick Russell is a professional actor and director whose work has been seen in theaters across the Bay Area, and is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies. As an educator, Patrick also teaches in American Conservatory Theater’s Summer Training Congress and San Francisco Semester, and has taught workshops at universities across the country as a recruiter and representative for ACT’s training programs. Patrick has also taught for California Shakespeare Theater, Academy of Art University, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and most recently, served as the head of movement for Southern Oregon University’s B.F.A. in acting program. He is also the co-founder of The Actors Space SF, a part-time professional actor training and performance center located in San Francisco. Patrick is a member of Actors’ Equity and SAG-AFTRA. He holds a B.F.A. in acting from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is a graduate of American Conservatory Theater’s Master of Fine Arts in acting program.
These programs ware featured in collaboration with Alternative Theater Ensemble’s Indigenous Performing Arts Residency, a collaborative initiative piloted by Berkeley’s Arts Research Center and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. AlterTheater’s residency extends from 2024-2026, offering the opportunity to produce new work by an Indigenous performance-based artist each spring of the residency’s duration.