LEIA SQUILLACE

Leia is the Co-Director of Programming of the Tony award-winning non-profit, Broadway Advocacy Coalition. She is a co-designer of BAC's signature methodology, The Theater of Change,  and she designs and manages programs that integrate artistic strategies in to advocacy work. Leia developed BAC's Reimagining Equitable Productions (REP) program, which assists theater companies - both Broadway and beyond - to address racial equity within rehearsal rooms, working spaces, and productions.

As a facilitator with the Prison Creative Arts Project, Leia led improvisation and devised theatre workshops in men's and women's prisons in Michigan. She is honored to have worked with and learned from the program's longest running theater troupe, The Sisters Within. 

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Learn more about her work with PCAP, including how it brought her the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

While volunteering for the University of Michigan’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center (SAPAC), Leia taught peer facilitation skills through the use of theatrical techniques. These skills were employed in Relationship Remix, a peer-led workshop that educates undergraduate students about healthy sexual relationships. Leia's Peer Facilitation and Performance Skills guide was presented at the 2017 NASPA Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Conference.  

Leia served as a staff critic for All About Solo, and her dramaturgical and educational writing can be read in Roundabout Theatre Company's Upstage Playgoer's Guide. Through her writing, she strives to practice and encourage reflection and offer information and perspectives that invite new ways of understanding theatre and arts education work. 

In her work with the University of Michigan's Educational Theatre Company, Leia co-developed Change It Up!, an interactive bystander intervention workshop which utilizes forum theatre to teach effective intervention strategies to university-aged students. Additionally, she devised a performance to support and inform students transferring into the university.

Leia served as the Director of Strategic Arts Engagements for The Confined Arts at Columbia University's Center for Justice. Founded by Pastor Isaac Scott, TCA illustrates and showcases the talents and creative voices of artists directly impacted by mass incarceration and intersecting social justice issues.Through artistry and representation, TCA seeks to abolish dehumanizing language, reductive narratives, and socially degrading stigmas that are used to describe the past experiences and limit the futures of individuals impacted by incarceration. 

Co-founded with Larissa Marten, Herd was a female-led, sustainability-focused community of theatre makers. The collective developed new works and created live entertainment that promoted a re-connection with and respect for nature through production practices and creative content. Herd emphasized the importance of community-specific and local theatre to discourage unnecessary and wasteful travel. Learn more about Herd's sustainability guidelines and efforts here.

In conjunction with the 2018 tour of I Killed the Cow, Leia designed a post-show interactive workshop to develop sexual misconduct prevention and response skills. At each city on the tour, the show partnered with a local sexual health organization to connect audiences to options for support or further discussion after the show. Learn more about I Killed the Cow's partnerships and opportunities for collaboration.

Leia founded and coordinates Sandbar, a collective dedicated to evaluating the landscape of contemporary plays that depict femininity with an awareness of intersectionality. This group of theater professionals from various disciplines meets bi-monthly to discuss and review both recently produced and yet-to-be-produced plays that depict female-identifying, trans, and gender-non-conforming characters.