NaTasha Thompson & Petra Floyd Freshworks Screening: Lavender Terrace

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NaTasha Thompson is a director, playwright, and North Carolina native who amplifies underrepresented voices by encouraging audiences to assess their environment with new lenses. Petra Floyd is a first-generation Liberian-American visual artist and designer raised by working-class immigrants in Philadelphia who uses drawing, sculpture, performance, and spatial design to meditate on shared cultural inheritances and use them to build new worlds again and again. The artists will continue developing Lavender Terrace, a speculative movement response to Marita Bonner’s play The Purple Flower. This iteration will create an experimental, hybrid, physical, and digital space for all people committed to Black liberation.

NaTasha Thompson is a director, playwright and North Carolina native. Much of her inspiration comes from her southern roots and witnessing the lasting effects of a society’s rejection of otherness. In response she creates work that encourages audiences to assess their environment with new lenses. As a result, underrepresented voices are amplified and education/awareness is increased. NaTasha has been creating productive collaborative environments since 2007 and holds a BA in Drama from UNC-Greensboro. She’s worked with organizations such as The North Carolina Black Repertory Company, Playmakers Repertory Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Theatre For a New Audience, Bull City Black Theatre Festival and DNAWORKS. In addition she’s self produced her own work, most recently the EDU Project, a site specific journey through southern black educational institutions.   Currently she is a John Wells Fellow, pursuing an MFA in Directing at Carnegie Mellon University. Her graduate research includes study of The Black Theatre Cannon examining the intersections of Afro-Surrealism and Afro-Futurism.

Petra Floyd is a first-generation Liberian-American visual artist and designer raised by working class immigrants in Philadelphia. She collaborates with creative communities across disciplines to conjure up new social and cultural spaces. Her visual art and design practices extend and inform each other, overlapping in her manipulations of time and space. On the stage and in her studio, she uses drawing, sculpture, performance, and spatial design to meditate on shared cultural inheritances and use them to build new worlds again and again. Petra lives between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where she is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art’s MFA program. Petra has worked with BalletX, Camden Repertory Theater, Simpatico Theatre, University of Pennsylvania’s Theatre Arts Program, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and Lighting Rod Special.