Jo Reed: Welcome to Quick Study. I'm Josephine Reed. This is the monthly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, where we'll share stats and stories to help us better understand the value of art in everyday life. Sunil Iyengar is the pilot of Quick Study and he's the director of research and Analysis here at the Arts Endowment. Good morning, Sunil.

Sunil Iyengar: Hi, Jo.

Jo Reed: Okay, what have you got to start off this new year

Sunil Iyengar: You may have noticed from our years of running a podcast together that whenever we talk about measuring the benefits of the arts for individuals in communities, that is studies and evaluations showing the potential impact of the arts or creative arts therapies. We often talk about the arts in terms of health arts, helping to treat physical or psychological conditions, or another way we talk about the value of the arts a lot of times is we share studies about how the arts contribute to economic growth and innovation measured in terms like GDP.

Jo Reed: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Sunil Iyengar: But last month, Jo, there was a report that came out from the UK from its government department for a culture, media and sport that to my mind fuses these two ways of thinking about how we quantify the arts relationship to larger societal outcomes. The report is called Culture and Heritage Capital, monetizing the impact of Culture and Heritage on Health and Wellbeing, and it was produced in consultation with the firm Frontier Economics.

Jo Reed: Okay, back up a second. Did you say monetizing?

Sunil Iyengar: Yes. That's what's so distinctive about the study in general. When we talk about the arts potential effects on health and quality of life, or even when we talk about the role of the arts in helping to mitigate conditions such as pain or mental or neurological disorders, we tend to lack rigorous data on cost savings or cost effectiveness associated with these programs or treatments. Just to be brief, we have plenty of small studies showing how positive relationships between arts participation or creative arts therapies and health and wellbeing works in various population groups, but we don't know about how those potential benefits translate to healthcare cost savings in terms of fewer hospital visits, less reliance on medication or adherence to healthy regimens or lifestyles.

Jo Reed: Well, that makes sense that a country with a national health program would be interested in that. So how does this report go about tying the economic benefits to the health benefits of the arts?

Sunil Iyengar: Yes. Well, the UK report does a couple of things. First, it trawls through the research literature reviewing over 3,500 paper abstracts and settling on a full review of roughly 160 papers in their entirety. The researchers were on the lookout for studies that met their standards for showing causal evidence of the arts on health and wellbeing. In reviewing these studies, the researchers broke out such information as the type of arts and cultural engagement, the specific health related outcomes associated with that engagement, the age group of the people who benefited from the engagement and how frequent that arts engagement was.

Jo Reed: Okay. You know the question that's coming, how are we defining arts and cultural engagements?

Sunil Iyengar: That's a good question. The researchers derived their definition of arts participation from existing surveys they found in the literature based on studies of the arts and health. So they boil it down to three categories. One is what they call general cultural and heritage activities. By that they mean engaging with all kinds of different types of arts and cultural activities, whether to attend or create art. Another is called creative or artistic works. That category means engaging with specific art forms, theater, drama, opera, cinema, singing, dancing, and music. Again, either attending or doing those activities. And a third category they deal with is called cultural venues and production facilities, which means visiting museums, galleries, heritage sites, theaters, cinemas, and concerts.

Jo Reed: So that's what you mean by the arts and health study. How did the researchers get at the money aspect of this?

Sunil Iyengar: Yes. Well, to arrive at a way of talking about the health benefits of these arts activities in terms of monetary units, the researchers first used a standardized measure to capture all the different positive outcomes shown by the studies they identified. This measure is known as quality or QALY standing for quality adjusted life years. The researchers then took the QALYs and converted them to monetary amounts. The report also looked at monetary amounts associated with higher productivity resulting from improved quality of life, for example, increased wages for workers. Now importantly, the researchers focus on two aspects of health economics related to the arts. One is the estimated benefit per person, and the other is the so-called societal benefit. That is how that cost benefit is distributed across the entire population. So a key research tool that allowed them to make this distinction is a longstanding UK survey of arts participation that gives researchers a sense of how much people in Great Britain engage with the arts over time.

Jo Reed: Drum roll, please. What did the study find?

Sunil Iyengar: So it depends on the type of study, the arts activity or the health outcomes that they focused on in terms of the report, which covered a lot of ground. But in general, the researchers estimated benefits of 68 pounds per year stemming from research about music's effects on self-esteem in children to 1,310 pounds per year for art space museum activities among older people. The study found that, in general, higher frequencies of engagement in arts and culture were associated with the greatest benefits per person. Now, that's for individual level benefits. For society as a whole, the researchers compute 18.5 million per year worth of benefits linked with older adults doing arts-based museum activities. That translates to about or converts to about $22.7 million all the way up to 8 billion pounds per year associated with general arts and cultural engagement by adults say between 30 and 50 years of age. So in terms of US dollars, that's close to 10 billion per year. Overall, the researchers find “the largest society-wide benefits are for models that use broad measures of engagement, such as ‘participation in mental health in adults’ and ‘general engagement and general health in adults’. Since the general measures capture the highest engagement levels.”  They basically mean that the broader the activity, the more people it engaged, generally the better off economically things were.

Jo Reed: Well, that sounds really kind of impressive to me. I take it that what we're discussing are health and wellbeing for people attending arts event or creating art in large numbers. But we've also discussed creative art therapies like visual art therapy, dance therapy, music therapy, and so on. Was there any exploration of the health economics of these activities?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, I'm actually really glad you asked. The researchers perform a limited analysis of the benefits of these therapies. Specifically, they find based on the literature and by applying a “what if” scenario to the number of UK people eligible to receive visual art therapy specifically for cancer treatment, they estimate 730 pounds per year benefit for people diagnosed with breast cancer undergoing art therapy and 450 pounds per year for those diagnosed with other cancers. So the total monetized benefit for visual art therapy alone being used for cancer treatment, they go on to estimate is 4.5 million pounds per year or what would be $5.5 million according to current exchange rates. Now, to us at the NEA, we are running the Creative Forces Initiative. As you know, Jo, we've talked about it a few times with the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. That little nugget could be of particular interest as we're currently on our own looking to understand how best to study the health economic outcomes from our integration of creative arts therapies in military health treatment facilities or veteran hospitals. So we've just begun that work with researchers from Johns Hopkins University, and I look forward to reporting. I hope, some promising strategies that we may unearth with them,

Jo Reed: And I look forward to hearing them. Sunil, thank you. 

Sunil Iyengar: Thank you, Jo.

Jo Reed: That was Sunil Iyengar. He's the Director of Research and Analysis here at the National Endowment for the Arts. You've been listening to Quick Study. The music is We Are One from Scott Holmes Music. It's licensed through Creative Commons. Until next month, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. 

Music Credits: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed. Today, a conversation with Hana S. Sharif, the new artistic director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.. Founded in 1950, Arena has had only four artistic directors with Hana taking over the helm in August 2024. With a career marked by firsts—she was the first African-American woman to lead a major regional theater and now the first African-American artistic director at Arena Stage—Hana is a visionary voice in American theater. In her inaugural season, she has curated a lineup that features ten plays, eight of which are new works, and she, herself, is making her directorial debut at Arena with Ken Ludwig’s Death on the Nile. Hana discusses her journey from running a grassroots theater company to leading one of the country’s most significant regional theaters. Hana and I spoke in late December. And, of course, my first question was asking her to sum up her first year as artistic director of Arena Stage

Hana S. Sharif: It was exciting and thrilling. I was so fortunate that I inherited a really incredible season to produce, so I joined the Arena Stage family officially in August of 2023. And Molly Smith, my predecessor, had really given me a dream of a first season to, again, produce. We had seven shows, two musicals including Swept Away, which is currently playing on Broadway. And it was just a really wonderful opportunity to join such a vibrant theatrical community. D.C. is truly one of the best cities that I've ever had the pleasure of living in, and it was an incredibly warm welcome. My first year was filled with lunches and breakfasts and dinners, meeting colleagues and leaders across the city, and it was really a gift of a year. I wouldn't wish for anything different than what it was.

Jo Reed: Now, we're in the season, the 2024/25 season, and it's your inaugural season as the producing artistic director. So, tell me about the decisions that went into choosing the plays that you were going to present.

Hana S. Sharif: Yeah, it can feel like a daunting task, I think, but it's actually my favorite part of my job, which is being able to curate a diverse spectrum of plays that really speak to the full spectrum of the American spirit. We start that work a year in advance, and for my inaugural season, I'm so excited to be able to deliver a season with 10 plays, eight of them new works, which is really quite rare in our industry. For us, it was the first time since 2019, since the pandemic, that we had a full, robust 10 play season. To get to those 10 plays, my artistic team, we probably read 120 to 150 plays and argue and debate and really look at the matrix of who are we trying to serve? What are our values as an organization? And then also who are the most dynamic voices in the American theater that we want to amplify and offer our platform to?

And how do we create a season that's in dialogue? I don't just think, “oh, this is my favorite play.” I think about, who is this play speaking to? And then also, how does the story and the conversations and the discourse that are born through the first play interweave with the second play and the third play and the fourth play, because I really think about curating a season as curating a year-long conversation with an intersection of disparate communities within our region. I think that one of the great joys of being part of the regional theater movement is that theater is fundamentally both local and national and then fundamentally human, right? And so I think about all of those things, including who's going to be in the audience? Whose voices have not been heard on our stages before? And whose artistic voice am I finding to be the most urgent and compelling speaking to what's in the zeitgeist? And we are really fortunate to think about the dynamism that we have in terms of the storytelling on our stage. For me, it's also really important that we're thinking about genre and play type. I love great dramas, but I also love family plays. I love comedies. There are some great farces, and I think in this moment, we have to really be able to reflect, again, that full spectrum of our humanity and indeed the American spirit through our stories.

Jo Reed: Well, you also have your directorial debut this season at Arena Stage, and you chose “Death on the Nile,” adapted by Ken Ludwig. Why this play? Tell me what went into your choice, because this is the way you’re introducing yourself to the D.C. theater community.

Hana S. Sharif: Yes, it's such an interesting question, and I think that there's some level of kismet energy that comes. There's an alchemy to season planning, and here's some of the kind of elements that went into the decision to have “Death on the Nile” be the first show that I direct for this community. The first thing I will say is that Ken Ludwig is one of the great statesmen of American comedies and one of, I think, the most profound adapter voices in our field.

And he's also one of the first artists, local artists that welcomed me to D.C. in my first season. As I joined this community, there were many, many people who opened up their homes and rolled out the red carpet and invited me to dinner and introduced me to a number of their colleagues and constituents. And at my second dinner, I had the pleasure of spending time with Ken Ludwig, who I'd been a huge fan of his work and we had a really wonderful conversation and then proceeded to keep meeting for lunches and dreaming about plays that we might work on together. We had a number of projects that we were discussing and dreaming about. He's a prolific writer, so he's always working on something.

The other thing is that my final show that I directed during my tenure as artistic director at the Repertory Theater of St. Louis was another Ken Ludwig play. It was Agatha Christie's “Murder on the Orient Express”, adapted by Ken Ludwig. And it was such an extraordinary journey that bookended my time at the Rep. And so as we were dreaming about projects, Ken had mentioned that he was working on another adaptation of an Agatha Christie play and that he was working on “Death on the Nile”. And he called me and he said, "I'm just about finished with “Death on the Nile”. What do you think about it going into next season?" And I was really close to finalizing the season, and I had another couple plays that I had been thinking about as potentially being my inaugural debut. And I said to Ken, "I would love to be able to support the birth of this world premiere."

And somehow the alchemy felt right, something clicked in place. The idea that I would've ended one tenure with one of his adaptations of a great Agatha Christie mystery and begin my tenure in my new artistic home with another great adaptation of an Agatha Christie play that's beloved. And so I said, "Yes, I'd love to do this play." And I asked him, "What do you need? How do we support you?" A world premiere has developmental time that goes into it, and Ken is so clear about his craft and about understanding who his audience is. And so, we had a lot of fun really doing workshops leading up to the rehearsal process for “Death on the Nile”. And it is such an epic journey. He doesn't shy away from really bold spectacle in theater and he does such a beautiful job of threading the line of the mystery and the darkness of Agatha Christie's work and the humor and the contemporary sentiment that certainly American audiences have. And so, I have to say that it felt like the right moment and the right play.
One of the things I'm so passionate about is supporting American playwrights and using the resources of the institution to continue to amplify and build out the American theatrical canon. This is something that Molly Smith, my predecessor, was also passionate about, and it is part of the legacy of who Arena Stage is. And so it felt right to me that my first play would be a new play. It also felt right to me that my first play would be a new play that was breathing life into a classic story-- one that meets us in a moment that can feel very tense and polarizing in this country with a mystery that everyone can escape into. And it felt right to be on the journey with Ken Ludwig and his incredible talent. And so, I love many types of plays. I think as we move through the years, folks will have an opportunity to see my directing aesthetic with other types of realistic dramas, but for the first time out, all of the universe, I think, conspired for this moment to be.

Jo Reed: It is a knockout production, first of all.

Hana S. Sharif: Thank you.

Jo Reed: Here's a question that I have for you, which is, how do you balance the responsibilities of artistic leadership for Arena Stage with the personal creativity as director? And you're also a playwright.

Hana S. Sharif: Yes.

Jo Reed: Let's put that on the table as well, but in this case, directing. How do you balance that?

Hana S. Sharif: Very carefully with a lot of support and love.

Jo Reed:And honestly, I don't mean it rhetorically, it's a sincere question…

Hana S. Sharif: No, it's a meaningful one. Part of it is that I understand my first job is the artistic direction of this company. I've been entrusted, I'm the fourth artistic director of this 75-year-old company. I've been entrusted to be able to continue to build upon the great legacy of its origin with Zelda Fichandler and its catalytic years under the great Molly Smith. And so, I hold my job as artistic director as paramount.

When I'm programming a season, I'm programming a season to serve the audiences. We are a public good. And so I think about who we are serving and that is really at the backbone of the decisions that we make around the spectrum of art that we put on stage. And so then when I have the privilege of being able, as the lead artist of the institution, to then step inside a process and to be able to deliver to this audience that I have been dreaming about and losing sleep trying to build the most perfect seasons for, to then be able to step into that process as a director, it is all in service of that initial impulse, which is to bring the most compelling art forward to my community, along the values of the institution that I run.

So, I would say that the artistic director's job in serving community is sacrosanct, and that when I step into my job as director in my home institution in particular, I'm carrying that with me as one of my highest goals in delivering this great art is knowing who I'm delivering it for and why, and the role that that play is meant to perform within the spectrum of that season long discourse and conversation we're having with the community.

On the other hand, I love being in the rehearsal room. Now, one really practical way that we manage it is that directors get to decide which hours they're going to have rehearsal. And so for me, when I am directing in my home institution, I make sure that I don't start rehearsals before noon so that my morning, from 8:00 to noon can be spent taking meetings as artistic director,doing all of the work that I have to do alongside my partner, Edgar Dobie, who's our executive producer, we have a lot of shared responsibilities. And so I make sure that I carved out time each morning to be able to show up in the capacity of artistic director so that all of the decisions that I need to weigh in on that affect the work of the other 140 people within the organization still happens.

And then at noon, I try to turn my phone off and go into the rehearsal room and really give myself over to the art and to the questions that the playwright and the actors in the process of directing a play really demand. I have a phenomenal executive assistant who, during my 10-minute breaks, will pop up with emails for me to check off or papers for me to review or contracts for me to sign so that, again, things keep moving. And then after rehearsal, I do a few more hours of work as artistic director and then I roll on home to kiss my babies and start the day over again. But that's really what the picture of my day is like during the two months of a directing process.

Jo Reed: And for people outside of Washington D.C. who might not know, Arena Stage has three theaters under one roof

Hana S. Sharif: We do.

Jo Reed: So, those conversations that you're talking about wanting to generate among people are often happening within that massive lobby among three different audiences, which is really kind of cool when that happens, I have to say, having been there.

Hana S. Sharif: It's pretty incredible. This weekend was the first weekend since 2019 that we've had all three of the theaters activated with Arena Stage Productions at the same time. It's the first time post pandemic, and it's actually part of why that building was built and who Arena Stage is. We had 14 performances over three days and served almost 5,000 patrons in a three-day period with productions of “Data” in our smallest space, the Kogod Cradle, “Death on the Nile” in the Kreeger, and Step Afrika!'s “Magical Musical Holiday Step Show” in the Fichandler, which is our largest theater in the round, the 680 seat house. It's also the original theater that was built 75 years ago.

And so, what you're describing of that collision of multiple audiences who are eager to continue the conversation and discourse about intersecting plays, it is absolutely my favorite thing about the theater. And having just been there yesterday, we had Santa in the lower lobby greeting all of the kids and families who were seeing the “Magical Musical Holiday Step Show”, and we had folks who were coming out of the final performance of “Data”, which is a AI thriller, and then people coming out of the murder mystery, “Death on the Nile”, and just the collision of those audiences and the conversation and the buzz in the room. I mean I could have levitated. It was just that thrilling of an experience and one that we were all so proud to be back to. The last few years have really taken a toll on cultural institutions trying to go back and to be able to serve that many patrons and to have great art on three different stages under one roof is really a dream come true for us.

Jo Reed: It sounds like Arena, I don't want to say has recovered because the industry is just hurting so badly still. I mean, what is it, two to three theaters close every month?

Hana S. Sharif: Yes, that's true.

Jo Reed: It's horrible. But Arena Stage has been successful certainly because of where it's located, but also because of the programming that you and the team create there.

Hana S. Sharif: It's true. It's why we have such robust programming and really thinking about plays that will serve and speak to everyone, but will have different access points and entry points. “The Magical Musical Holiday Step Show” is a great show for families, but also it's a great show for anyone who wants joy in their life. And it's important that we have that on stage at the same time that we have “Death on the Nile”, which might be a little dark for the babies as a murder mystery. And that we have these cutting-edge plays.

The other thing I would say is both “Data” and “Death on the Nile” were world premiere productions. This AI thriller, coming from a young vibrant playwright who I think is going to be one of the most important voices in the American theater of his generation, it was exciting to see younger audiences coming in. It was exciting to see, we had patrons who shared with me, they came to see the show, they're middle-aged patrons who came to see the show, loved it, came back with their 20-year-old children to see the show again, and then talked about the wonderful discourse and conversation and debate they had about “Data” with their kids and how that show really sparked a light and energy in their children who do not attend the theater as regularly as their parents do.

And so, it's also opportunities to bridge generations and to bring folks together and engage in meaningful conversation and community is important. And I do think that some part of it is that DC has been slightly more resilient than other parts of the country in terms of the bounce back of our audiences. But I also just want to say that our marketing teams are really working hard to find and meet new audiences and our core audience is doing a really wonderful job of welcoming new people into the fold. And that combination, I think, is part of why we've been able to get back to producing at the scale that we're producing this season, which is really a gift and not one to be taken for granted in the climate that we're in.

Jo Reed: Yes, certainly. Okay. When did you and theater find each other?

Hana S. Sharif: This is a great question. I honestly do not remember a time where theater was not part of my life. My mother, if you ask her, will tell you I was a dramatic child. I don't know if that is entirely true, but some of my earliest memories are of seeing plays. I grew up in Houston, Texas, and there is a place called the Miller's Outdoor Theater, and it's an outdoor theater where you can go and they have kind of seats at the front, but then it's on this huge hill, and people would come. And our family's one of those families that would come with picnic blankets and picnic baskets on the weekend, and we'd sit on the hill and listen to operas or see touring shows and see ballets on those outdoor stages. And one of my earliest memories is seeing “Porgy and Bess” at the Miller's Outdoor theater.

So, what I know is that as a very young person, the way I was able to make sense of myself in the world was through art, was through writing and performing. I started writing poetry and plays. There were times where I felt like I was writing myself into existence, that I wasn't seeing on the stages or even on television or in film the answers to the questions that I had about my life. And so the way I was able to get to the root of those questions was to start to write. And the form that that writing most often took was plays. I also found myself really invested in understanding the complexity of humanity by embodying characters through theater productions. And then I went to college and I didn't think theater was a thing that you did to make money and have a real career. I thought you go to college, you go to grad school, and you decide what you want to be in the world, what's the grownup thing you want to be in the world? And I went to undergrad at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, which was a really wonderful experience for me. And I took theater classes for fun and for my heart because it made me happy. And my sophomore year, I started a small scrappy theater company with some friends in school. And again, it was a pet project. It was something that gave us a lot of agency as we thought about the stories we wanted to tell and the stories that were not being written for us. And we thought, "We'll write our own stories. We'll produce our own work."

And I fell in love with the entire process. Actually by the time I was early in my college years, I was less ecstatic about being on stage and much more invested in writing and directing and then ultimately, producing. And I thought I was going to be a civil rights attorney. That was going to be my grownup job. And while I was running the small scrappy company, it hit me at the end of my junior year of college that I really felt like I was supposed to be pursuing a life in the arts.

I kept in the back of my mind, I'm smart. I love school. I can always go back to school. I can go get a PhD. I can go to law school. If ever this art thing stops feeling like my purpose, there are other things that I can do, but I knew that I didn't want to regret not trying. I knew that there was something that had been placed on my spirit about my work as an artist that I would regret if I didn't pursue it.

And I also just believe that if the universe felt that this is where I belonged, that it would continue to open windows and doors for me. And I have been incredibly fortunate over the last 26 years that no matter what challenge or evolution the country, the field, or I was personally going through, there was always a window or a door opening and pointing me in the direction of this work. And I feel profound gratitude for the life I've been able to live as an artist.

Jo Reed: Well, after starting your company, you transitioned into regional theater. What inspired that move?

Hana S. Sharif: That's such a great question. I loved working for Nasir Productions, and I remember about five years in waking up and thinking, I could do this for another 20 years, right? We started this company when we were 19 and 20 year olds, and all of us were performing artists who built a company on love and passion and took on all of the roles; marketing, development, directing. I was the janitor, whatever needed to be done. But we hadn't trained to run the business of theater. We were running a business, we hadn't gone to school to learn the business of theater.

And so I remember having this thought, waking up five years in and going, "There has to be something that these multi-million dollar theaters know that we don't know. There have to be best practices that the industry understands that I want to know so that we can be more nimble, stronger, more efficient." And so I thought, well, the thing to do was to go work for one of these big regional theaters. And I lovingly say I went into the regional theater to steal the master's tools and ultimately ended up re-engineering them. So, I made the decision when I was finishing grad school, I was very lucky, I was in a program that required you to work for a professional theater for a semester, and I ended up going to spend a year at Hartford Stage. And that was truly a revelatory decision and year of my life.

Michael Wilson was the artistic director of Hartford Stage at the time. And when I joined the company, he made me the artistic liaison to every single department. And what that meant was that I was in every development meeting, every finance meeting, every production meeting, every marketing meeting. And my job as the artistic liaison was to be able to articulate artistic vision, his vision for the company in the language that each one of those departments spoke, and to be able to listen inherently to the tensions and the concerns that his expanded vision was bringing up for each of the departments, to hear the things that they wouldn't say to him because he was the artistic director and kind of the big boss. But my job was to hear those tensions and to bring those back to him so that we could build a process for the organization of meeting and mitigating risk for each one of those departments.

And I have to say, when I look back at my career, it is the greatest gift that anyone has given me; that opportunity to have a seat in every single room and the task of being able to learn how to speak to the intentions and the priorities and the hearts of every single department that works in this kind of interconnected way to support the curation of great art. And I went to Hartford thinking I'd be there for a year, maybe two, and I stayed for nine and a half. And I often will say that I grew up in Hartford Stage and I grew up in the business at that theater, first under the leadership of Michael Wilson, and then in my last year at Hartford under the leadership of Darko Tresnjak, who was the new artistic director.

And so I went in thinking I would stay for a year, I'd learn some things, and I'd leave, and every time I started to leave, I would get more opportunity or responsibility. I always teasingly say that Michael knows that I am deeply motivated by the opportunity to grow and to stretch. And so every time I got antsy about being in that institution for too long and ready to go back to my small scrappy theater, there'd be a new opportunity with real challenges that would help me grow.

And I also understood during my time there, there were very, very few people across the country in the position that I was in that were my age, my gender, my race, and that intersectionality and the questions that I was bringing to the forefront for that institution that helped expand the arts and the audiences, I felt a very real sense of responsibility in having that opportunity and being able to amplify voices that were not part of the mainstream at that time. And seeing the difference that it made, not just to the artists that I was able to bring into the fold at Hartford Stage, but over the years as I became the director of new play development and the associate artistic director, the number of people who would pick up the phone for me that I could then introduce to these artists and the ways that the handful of us who had this kind of unique intersectionality within our own bodies were able to do on behalf of the field.

And so I would say that those opportunities and those responsibilities kept me in regional theater, and that was the beginning of what has become a really beautiful, exciting adventure.

Jo Reed: Well, you are the first Black artistic director at Arena Stage. As you said, you're the fourth director, three of whom have been women. Hooray. But you are the first Black artistic director, and I think it's particularly meaningful in Washington D.C., which is a majority African-American city.

Hana S. Sharif:Absolutely. I mean I have to say, I've shared the story before. I was 19 when I became artistic director of Nasir Productions. Another thing that happened at 19 is that I discovered the writings of a woman named Zelda Fichandler and I was really taken with this kind of revolutionary spirit. I thought that Zelda's writing felt urgent and essential and immediate and felt like it had been written yesterday instead of 40 years earlier. And I was really inspired by her writing. And I remember saying to people at 19, "Well, if I ever run a theater that's not my own, it would have to be Arena Stage." So, in some ways it's the power of manifestation that all those many years later I would be able to follow in Zelda's footsteps and to helm the theater that was the first integrated theater in this country. The other thing is that in 2018 when I was named artistic director of the Repertory Theater of St. Louis, I became the first African-American woman in the country to run a major regional theater. And that's certainly a bittersweet thing because there are many, many women of color who I believe should have been able to break through that glass ceiling. And I'm really clear that I happen to be the last body being thrown against a ceiling that had been fractured many, many times before. And so, I carry the real gratitude and understanding of what it means to have been able to be the first to walk through those doors and I'm incredibly honored to now be at Arena Stage and also to no longer be the only, to have a number of colleagues across the country, even in D.C., we have Folgers Theater, which who also has an African-American woman as artistic director, Karen Ann Daniels. And there's Patricia McGregor at New York Theater Workshop. Shortly after I became artistic director at the Rep, Nataki Garrett became artistic director at OSF. So, sorry, Tinashe Bolden at the Alliance Theater. Over the last five to six years, we've started to see more and more incredibly talented women stepping into executive leadership. And it is, I think, part of the power of the talent and embrace of our industry that we're starting to see those opportunities helmed by women who have been hard at work for decades, making great art being able to step fully into their leadership potential as executive leaders.

Jo Reed: Well, I wonder what you think what role theater can play in both reflecting and shaping societal conversations?

Hana S. Sharif: I think it's our most important duty. I don't believe that it has to be didactic, but I think that great art speaks to the urgent questions of our humanity. At our best, every single story, whether it's a drama or a comedy, it is amplifying the sense of the fullness of our humanity. It is introducing us to our humanity and also introducing us to the humanity of others, of people who are different from us. It's an opportunity to find a piece of yourself in someone's life that is wholly on the surface different from you. And I think that there's real power in art that ask fundamental questions rather than attempting to give you didactic answers.

So, I think that when we are in spaces and times where it feels like we're polarized, art has this phenomenal opportunity and responsibility to build bridges, to help us hear and see ourselves and see ourselves in each other, and to create space for rigorous conversation and debate, respectful conversation and debate. I think that art has a responsibility to reflect back the truth of who we are and where we are as a people. And that complexity can be difficult, it can be joyful, it can show up as escapism. But even in those great sweeping romances or great mysteries, at its core, there is something that speaks to what it means to be human, to the inclinations and the desires and the needs we have to be seen, to be recognized, to be valued, to be honored. It shows up even in those pieces. And so I think that when we are in spaces of real challenge, it is when art and artists have the greatest responsibility to step up and step forward.

Jo Reed: Hana, I think that is a good place to leave it. Thank you so much for giving me your time and your thoughts and for everything you're bringing to Washington D.C.

Hana S. Sharif: Thank you so much for the invitation. It's been joyful to be here with you.

Jo Reed: That was the Artistic director of Arena Stage in Washington DC Hana S. Sharif. You can keep up with their wonderful season at Arenastage.org. We’ll have a link in our show notes.You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. If you like us, leave us a rating and follow us on the platform of your choice. I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.