BRAD ROTHBART

is currently working as a freelance dramaturg and theatre theorist. They graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989. From 1992-1997 they performed and toured with The Living Theatre. In 1994, Brad became one of the original members of the RAT Conference, a loose association of alternative theatres across the United States. 1995 brought an opportunity to perform and present at the ThisAbility Conference in Ann Arbor, a conference that spawned the seminal disability arts film, Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back.

During the 1999-2000 theatre season, Brad created and curated a reading series called Underground Voices: From the Marginalized to the Transgressive at Theatre Double in Philadelphia. The series presented underheard American playwrights who are dedicated to stretching the boundaries of the theatrical experience. The playwrights read included: Aishah Rahman, Alice Tuan, Caridad Svich, Lisa D’Amour, Luis Alfaro, Naomi Iizuka, and Ruth Margraff. In 2001 they worked as Resident Dramaturg for INTAR’s New Works Lab, providing a sounding board for playwrights including Daniel Jacquéz and Jorge Ignacio Cortinas. Later that year, TheatreForum published their academic essay Ahistoricity, Multiplicity and Velocity: Radical Discontinuity and its Effects on the Dramaturgical Process in TF 21 (Summer/Fall 2001). Brad graduated from Stanford University in 2007 with an MA in Drama. While at Stanford, Brad traveled to Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, working with Dah Teatar in Belgrade and beginning their research into performances of memory and future in post-genocidal societies.

Since 2014, Brad has served as a script reader for a number of organizations including the NEA, Playwrights Center, Great Plains Theatre Conference, and PlayPenn. Their essay, Once More Unto The Breach: An Anatomized Philippic Regarding the Relationship of Disability to the Contemporary American Theatre was published by American Theatre in October 2015. Due in great part to the publication of that essay, Brad was honored with an invitation to the White House Convening on Americans with Disabilities in the Arts on November 18th, 2015, where a quote from the essay opened the proceedings.

In 2016, Brad served as both Process and Production Dramaturg for Libby Emmons’ I am Not an Allegory (These are People I Know) in NYC, as well as performing the same functions for Noa Gardner’s NAN, presented as part of the New Play Development Workshop at ATHE in Chicago. They was also thrilled to be named to the Executive Board of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) as VP of Grants and Awards. . Brad is a member of the 2016 ArtEquity Cohort, and is taking a deep dive into their own white privilege, while simultaneously attempting to become a better activist in the fight for a more diverse, inclusive, and healthier theatrical ecology. Brad’s preferred personal pronouns are They/Them/Their.