about
Andrea Ambam is a politically-engaged storyteller whose work interrogates the art's potential for movement-building and transformative justice.
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Andrea Ambam is a performance artist and writer whose roots sprout from Cameroon. As a politically engaged artist who believes in the art’s potential for movement building and transformative justice, Andrea pulsates at the intersection of storytelling and truth-telling via the creation of embodied theatrical experiences.
Currently, Andrea is a Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow, a Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) Artist-In-Residence, and the Programming Manager and Host at Level Forward. She has developed her multi-hyphenated practice as an Artistic Fellow with Signature Theatre, a Writing As Activism with PEN America, a freelance dramaturg, an Inaugural Artivism Fellow with Broadway Advocacy Coalition, an Artist-in-Residence for Anna Deavere Smith, an EmergeNYC Fellow at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, and as a competitive public speaker/performer where she has been awarded 10 national championships including "Top Speaker in the Nation'' three times, and gone on to debate conservative pundits on live TV.
As a performer, writer, and facilitator, she’s worked with Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Level Forward, Classical Theatre of Harlem, gal-dem, Abrons Arts Center, NYU Prison Education Program, NYU Verbatim Performance Lab, and others. Her plays include: Rehearsing Justice: A One-Woman Show (Presentations at Brooklyn Arts Exchange & Broadway Advocacy Coalition’s Fellowship Hall), R(estoration) I(n) P(rogress) (Ashland New Plays Festival Semifinalist 2021, NYU New Plays for Young Audiences Development Series 2021), Angelina Weld Grimke (Classical Theatre of Harlem/Playbill, Broadway Podcast Network) and Fragile State (Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship 2022-23).
Andrea lives in Brooklyn where the rent is too damn high and holds a Master’s degree in Art & Public Policy from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
CURRENTLY
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NYU Educational Theatre commissions R(estoration) I(n) P(rogress) as their Spring mainstage - opening at Provincetown Playhouse in February 2023.
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Andrea is a Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow and a Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) Artist-In-Residence.
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Listen to "More To Talk About" - a new podcast giving you creative, current, & critical conversations with the culture-makers and creators of boundary-pushing theatrical and cinematic work. Featuring conversations with Robert O'Hara, Vanessa Williams, Gloria Steinem, and more!
"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)
From an afro-futurist solo show following a time-traveling Ida B. Wells to a debate with Tucker Carlson on reparations, here are some examples of how I attempt to stir storytelling with social change at every turn.
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