ANDREA AMBAM
STORYTELLER | TRUTHTELLER
about
Andrea Ambam is a politically-engaged theatre artist who challenges the art's potential for movement-building and transformative justice.
Sur La Lune Photography
performer. Writer. Educator.
Andrea is an actress and playwright based in New York City but whose roots sprout from Cameroon, Africa. Holding a master's degree in Art and Public Policy from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Andrea best intersects spaces where community, performance, and critical discussion pulsate. Currently, she is an inaugural Artivism Fellow with Broadway Advocacy Coalition. In 2020, she served as an Artist-in-Residence for Anna Deavere Smith’s studio class “One Person Shows: A Way to Begin,” and developed her practice as an EmergeNYC fellow at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Andrea is a 10-time national champion in public speaking and dramatic performance, where she has been awarded "Top Speaker in the Nation" three times and gone on to debate conservative pundits on live TV. She has performed at, written for, and/or been commissioned as an educator/speaker by Classical Theatre of Harlem, Abrons Arts Center, Provincetown Playhouse, NYU Prison Education Program, NYU Verbatim Performance Lab, Artists’ Literacies Institute, Free Street Theater, and Centre for Social Innovation.
CURRENTLY
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Andrea is beginning her 6 month BAC Artivism Fellowship with an incredible cohort of 10 Black Womxn. She will be developing her debut one-woman show — REHEARSING JUSTICE.
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Andrea works at Girls Write Now as a Community Coordinator, where she curates, produces, and hosts arts education programming with a focus on social justice.
Sur La Lune Photography
"This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."
- Toni Morrison
art(work)
I write, perform and amplify stories that center Black personhood, especially in discussions of state-sanctioned violence, most often through the manipulation of time, poetic text and ethnographic material. My practice resists notions of “moving on” and reclaims time stolen from Black lives via artistic creations where identity fills, overwhelms, and disrupts the center. I use art to process and reimagine JUSTICE, GRIEF, JOY, AND LIBERATION.
