ecosystems
Announcing 2027 Resident Artist: Aidaa Peerzada
Aidaa Peerzada is the 2027 Ecosystems Resident Artist. She will receive interview and research training from the Forum Collective early in the year, and then develop a new theatrical piece exploring environmental justice, to be showcased in Fall 2027.
Aidaa Peerzada (she/her) is a Black and Pakistani American multidisciplinary theatre maker. Her writing reclaims cultural knowledge erased by colonialism, slavery, and systemic racism. With a decade-long career in regional theatre and teaching artistry that has taken her across the US, she is driven to write experiential plays that inspire curiosity and wonder in the audience. Her plays bring mythological, futuristic, or historical worlds to life through verse, music, and movement to break open reality as we know it on stage. Her works include Children of the Wise (46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Prop Thtr Chicago), Lenora II (Crowded Fire Theater R&D Lab), SHINING (New Roots Theater Festival) and Aliyah and The Princess Jasmine Doll (PCSF, Catalyst: C3T, Meet Cute LA). Aidaa is a graduate of The Baltimore School for the Arts and the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. She is part of the artistic staff at the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Company.
project history & updates
about the program
ecosystems is a series that provides training on interviewing and researching for fine artists.
After receiving training in basic interviewing and researching skills, artists are tasked to interview a community member, fellow artist, or activist of their choosing. Then, the artists create new works inspired by or translating the original interview. Informed by Deepa Iyer’s Mapping Our Roles in Social Change Ecosystems, the entire process provides a developmental process as well as valuable, transferrable skills to artists. These new voices become the storytellers, documenters and journalists of their own communities.
If you would like to inquire about contributing or participating in ecosystems, contact us.
about Deepa Iyer
Deepa Iyer is a South Asian American writer, strategist, lawyer, and racial justice advocate.
Currently, Iyer is a Strategic Advisor at Building Movement Project and Director of Solidarity Is, a project that provides trainings, narratives, and resources on building deep and lasting multiracial solidarity. Iyer hosts a podcast called Solidarity Is This, available on iTunes, and provides trainings on racial equity and solidarity to non-profits, government agencies, public and private stakeholders, educators, and institutions of higher learning.
Iyer has been recognized for her work with the 2017 Justice in Action Award from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), the 2014 Pioneer Award from the South Asian Bar Association of North America, and the 2013 Dorothy Height Coalition Building Award from the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF).
In 2020, Iyer developed and produced the open-source resource, Mapping our Roles in a Social Change Ecoysystem, with Building Movement Project. The guide is a contextual took for newcomers to social change effort, and the framework “can help individuals, networks, and organizations align and get in right relationship with social change values, individual roles, and the broader ecosystem.”
For more information, follow her on Twitter @dviyer or visit her website at deepaiyer.com.
