About Dr. Cristal Chanelle Truscott
Cristal Chanelle Truscott, PhD
Creator of SoulWork, Founder of SoulWork Studio
Cristal Chanelle Truscott, PhD is an artist, culture worker, playwright, director, educator, scholar, founder of the touring ensemble Progress Theatre, and creator of SoulWork – a generative method for making performance, training artists, engaging communities, and framing analytical research that is rooted in generations-old African American cultural practices, theories and performance traditions. She is a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award – given to those “influential in shaping powerful creative movements in contemporary arts,” – the 2023 United States Artist Award, Creative Capital Award, MAP Fund, NPN Creation Fund and NEFA National Theatre Project grants.
Dr. Truscott has held positions at HBCU’s Spelman College and Prairie View A&M University and is currently Associate Professor of Theatre, Graduate Acting and Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Dr. Truscott is passionate about offering continuity of access to arts education that centers both ancestral knowledge and contemporary consciousness by nurturing artists, community organizers and culture workers in a culturally-responsive studio practice that expands their creative power.
Bio
"Truscott's performance and writing are astonishingly vivid."
-NYC Show Business Weekly
Scholar + Educator
As a performance studies scholar, Dr. Truscott researches and writes about cultural performance as an object and a method of analysis tracing the arts’ essential role in movements for liberation using the theory she developed called the “Cultural Conservatory.”
Her academic writing includes: “SoulWork” in Black Acting Methods (Routledge) and “Cultural Conservatory: Living the Arts” in Are the Arts Essential? (NYU Press), and “The 3rd Gift of The Negro: Dubois’ Star of Ethiopia,” featured in The Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance. She has previously served as Assistant Editor of the performance journal, TDR: The Drama Review; Associate Editor for Azizah Magazine; and on the editorial teams of the publications Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Black Masks Magazine.
As an educator, Truscott has been teaching and training artists using SoulWork, in master classes, workshops and courses in university, professional, arts-based and international settings for over nearly 20 years; offering a timely and socially-conscious method for artists and ensembles creating their own work and for those seeking to dynamically, creatively engage and mount the work of fellow artists.
Dr. Truscott was Theatre Program Director and Department Head of Music and Theatre at Prairie View A&M University — her grandparents’ alma mater. She has been a professor, lecturer and speaker at various universities and arts programs including Spelman College, University of North Carolina, Indiana University, San Francisco State University, University of Houston, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia University, Wits University in South Africa, and Albeda College, DOX Theater Group and Theatre RAST in The Netherlands.She is currently Associate Professor of Theatre, Performance Studies and Graduate Acting at Northwestern University.
Artist + Culture Worker
As an artist and culture worker, Dr. Truscott has led Progress Theatre, a touring ensemble using art as anti-racism to connect communities via a broad, deeply-linked grassroots network fostered nationally and internationally for over 2 decades. She writes a’capella musicals called “NeoSpirituals,” that span and straddle time between histories and the present to explore identities, inheritances/legacies and cultural movements to encourage connection, consciousness and healing. These include PEACHES (in Theatre Communications Group’s collection Plays from the Boombox Galaxy), ‘MEMBUH, and The Burnin’.
Plantation Remix, her current work-in-progress, is a site-responsive NeoSpiritual to radically reimagine the separatistic genre of heritage tourism by rehearsing a contemporary, multi-cultural, future-building “afterlife” for historic sites related to slavery in the U.S. Her plays blend pop culture and academic conversations, fusing genre from Negro Spirituals and Folklore to Blues, R&B, and Hip Hop to produce performances that engage communities across race, class, gender and spiritual identity.
She is a member of Alternate ROOTS, the Intercultural Leadership Institute and has served on the Board of Directors for the Network of Ensemble Theaters, where she helped develop and facilitate programing to advance ensemble theatre practice and participate in positive social change through the transformative power of collaborative theatre. She has served as a consultant and advisor to various universities and organizations including IMAN, The Boniuk Institute at Rice University, The Doris Duke Foundation’s Building Bridges Program, Guild of Future Architects, Pillars Fund and has been an invited artist participant in groundbreaking national and international conferences such as “Future Aesthetics: Hip Hop and Contemporary Performance” funded by the Ford Foundation and “Diversity Dialogues,” lead by the US Embassy to the Netherlands and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund.
Selected Archived Interviews + Blogs
“Living in the Call & Response” — Progress Theatre Ensemble Blog
“Community-Artist Partnerships” — interview for Alternate ROOTS with Linda Paris Bailey and Joe Tolbert of Carpetbag Theater
“Good Theatre Got Soul: Exploring the SoulWork Method” — interview for CONTINUUM: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance
