ANDREA AMBAM
STORYTELLER | TRUTHTELLER
about
Andrea Ambam is a politically-engaged performance artist who challenges the art's potential for movement-building and transformative justice.
Sur La Lune Photography
actress. Writer. Producer.
Andrea Ambam is a Brooklyn-based artist, actress, and playwright, whose roots sprout from Cameroon. As a politically engaged storyteller who believes in the art’s potential for movement building and transformative justice, Andrea best intersects spaces where community, performance, and truth-telling pulsate. Currently, Andrea is a 2021 Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) Artist-In-Residence. She has developed her practice as 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 where she has been awarded 10 national championships, "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 Classical Theatre of Harlem/Playbill, gal-dem, Abrons Arts Center, NYU Prison Education Program, NYU Verbatim Performance Lab, Artists’ Literacies Institute, Centre for Social Innovation, and others. Recent acting credits include: Making Gay History: Before Stonewall (Provincetown Playhouse); Re-Writing the Declaration (Free Street Theater). Her plays include R(estoration) I(n) P(rogress) (2021 NYU New Plays For Young Audiences Festival; 2021 Ashland New Plays Festival Semifinalist), Rehearsing Justice: A One-Woman Show (Broadway Advocacy Coalition’s 2021 Fellowship Hall), and Angelina Weld Grimke (Classical Theatre of Harlem/Playbill, 2021). Andrea holds a Master’s degree in Art & Public Policy from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
CURRENTLY
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Andrea is a 2021 Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) Artist-In-Residence.
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As a part of her Artivism Fellowship with Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Andrea is premiering a special work-in-progress viewing of her debut one-woman show, REHEARSING JUSTICE. Viewing is available for a limited time only here.
Formerly
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Andrea recently transitioned out of her work at Girls Write Now where she curated, produced, and (sometimes!) hosted arts education workshops and special events 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)
In her work, Andrea often uses the manipulation of time, poetic text, and ethnographic material to write and perform stories where Black identity fills, overwhelms, and disrupts the center; and where justice, that is denied to Black people by the State, can be explored and reimagined in the body.
