Amy Brooks is the former Program Director and Dramaturg for Roadside Theater, the theater wing of Appalachian grassroots arts and humanities center Appalshop. She coordinated the ensemble's core programmatic areas of New Play Creation, Community Cultural Development, Teaching in Colleges and Communities, and Advocacy; she also oversaw special publishing, performance, and arts- and culture-based economic development projects and helped build, sharpen, and disseminate Roadside’s 40-year body of literature, keeping its “living library” at the fore of public discourse on arts and cultural equity.

A 5th-generation West Virginian who returned to Appalachia just before the 2016 election cycle, Amy's work in community-based theater for social change explores the confluence of dramatic narrative (“What is the story we choose to tell onstage?”) and public narrative (“What is the story we are called upon to tell about ourselves, our community, and our future?”) in intercultural rural-urban performance.

Amy holds a BFA in acting from West Virginia University and an MFA in dramaturgy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she co-founded and produced the first two seasons of the UMass New Play Lab. She is the former Humanities Director of the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, and co-creator of @RuralArtsWeekly, a Twitter forum for policy and practice in rural creative placemaking which has provided official social media coverage of national convenings for organizations including Imagining America, Next Generation Rural Creative Placemaking, and ArtPlace America. Amy received LMDA’s 2016 Residency Program Grant and 2017 Bly Creative Capacity Grant for her work with Roadside Theater. In 2018, she became the first Regional VP of LMDA's Central Appalachia group and the executive VP for Conferences.

Appalachian dramaturgy, freelance dramaturgy, community-based and grassroots arts, intercultural play development, rural arts advocacy

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