Mauricio Tafur Salgado

I presented a workshop at the Second Festival of Radical Discipleship at the Kirkridge Retreat Center in Pennsylvania from May 23-26. The retreat is a gathering of rooted in the radical Christian tradition. It will be a time to remember past gospel experiments, discuss current calls to witness and work; and conspire about future collaborations! Come and join the feast. 

The workshop was titled Rehearsing Ridiculous Interventions and through it, I will bring participants together to imagine and rehearse new ways of disrupting harmful behavior and systems.

artEquity offers training and consulting services to individuals and organizations on creating and sustaining a culture of equity and inclusion through the arts and culture. Training topics address structural and systemic issues of identity, power-sharing language and communication, team building, and strategies to initiate and normalize equity-based approaches in organizational and community culture.

Mauricio has been a core facilitator with artEquity since the summer of 2018. He has also been a contributor for the BIPOC Surviving Predominantly White Institutions Series. The Black, Indigenous, People of Color Surviving Predominantly White Institution Series is a multi-part webinar designed to share strategies for interfacing with white leadership; what to do when sh*t goes down; how to navigate white women and their tears; how to cultivate BIPOC solidarity; and how to know when it’s time to go.

Mauricio has also been a co-leader of artEquity’s Artist + Activist Community Fund. As a response to the pandemic and in collaboration with an angel donor, artEquity organized community-giving fund that supports the artEquity community and the communities they are supporting and organizing. Since its creation, AACF has supported 172 artEquity alums, representing all five National Facilitator cohorts, and 246 emergency funds, organizations and individuals recommended by artEquity alumni and staff, totaling over $890,000. To view the impact of the fund, check out this link: https://www.artequity.org/aacf-demographics.

Mauricio is now collaborating with Shaminda Amarakoon, Yale Faculty and Chair of the Technical Design and Production, to develop a faculty/administrator working group that encourages long term strategic planning and short term problem solving for those of us fostering belonging in academic arts programs.

For more information, check out www.artequity.org

Mauricio Salgado, Shawn Fleek, Manisha Desai, Elaine Webster, Jeremy Perelman, Jonathan Rowson, Mara Ntona, and Michelle Lobo, were awarded a grant by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the Future of Human Rights Governance (FORGE) program at New York University School of Law to begin phase one of their Experiment for Change titled: Cosmo-Local, Intergenerational Knowledge Celebrating Care-Centered Societies. This will be an intergenerational, cultural, and narrative intervention on two to three continents. Facilitated at the local scale, the experiment will achieve a groundswell of interest in a re-interpretation of human rights and environmental justice guided by our project values of de-growth, post-capitalism, care-centered societies, and nature-centered worldviews.

website: https://forge-program.com/

In the Spring of 2023, Mauricio curated the Festival of Voices for the Undergraduate Drama department at NYU.

Presented each year as part of the TISCH DRAMA STAGE season, the festival serves to highlight a diverse range of potent and underrepresented voices, aesthetics, and points of view. Its core mission is to celebrate inclusion and belonging, and bring to light unique aesthetic, critical, and socio-political elements.

The Festival featured That’s Not Supposed to be Happening by the Verbatim Performance Lab; The Poverty Archive: Box 1, a collaboration between Kirya Traber and Alicia Morales; a workshop of DonkeySaddle Projects’ Yo Te Esperaba: A Crimmigration Story; Songs in the Key of Resistance, a new piece by the Arts and Culture Branch of the Poor People’s Campaign, and Meeting People Where They’re at: The Journey of the People’s Bus, a presentation by the first People's Artist for New York City’s Civic Engagement Commission, Yazmany Arboleda.

The festival examined pressing social issues and efforts to address them, including housing insecurity, labor inequity, and the criminalization of immigrants.

LEARNING HOW TO READ BY MOONLIGHT a new play by Gaven Trinidad (Rising Leader of Color, Theatre Communications Group), directed by Mauricio Tafur Salgado . It follows an undocumented Filipino family's search for sanctuary during the presidencies of Trump and Duterte, as seen through a six-year-old boy's eyes. ​The all-Filipino cast includes SERGIO MAURITZ ANG* (FROM NUMBER TO NAME, East West Players), PATRICK ELIZALDE, KRISTIAN ESPIRITU* (Off-Broadway: HERE LIES LOVE; INTERSTATE, East West Players), VANESSA RAPPA (Off-Off-Broadway: SCRIBBLED LINES, Poetic Theater Productions), and Claro de los REYES* (Off-Broadway: NO-NO BOY and SHOGUN MACBETH, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre; Film: The Plane [Jean-François Richet, dir.]; Founder/Director, Atlantic Pacific Theatre).

Co-Creative Producers: Mauricio Tafur Salgado, Carlos Sirah, Ashley Teague, Arielle Julia Brown and Yazmany Arboleda

Partnering Organizations: Delta Cultural Center, Waves of Prayer Ministries, Boys, Girls, and Adults Community and Development Center. 

Remember2019 is an effort to make space for the congregation of the Black communities and Black cultural workers of Phillips County, AR. Our work is to support and facilitate local practices of self-determination, memory, and reflection, that are directly related to the mass lynching of 1919, the lasting effects of racial terror, and the current and future health of these communities.

Past projects include:

callin’ down the road: A Residency

callin’ down the road: A Mixtape

callin’ down the road: A Storybank

Black ’n da Blues: Stories and Songs from the Arkansas Delta. 1919-2019

The Phillips County Storysharing Institute

A Stage Reading of Scapegoat by Christina Ham

The Delta Visual and Performing Arts youth Mural Project at BGACDC

Helena West-Helena Heroes Arts Camp

Elaine Heroes Arts Camp

In the summer of 2021, The Remember 2019 Collective partnered with the Elaine Legacy Center, the Boys, Girls, and Adults Community and Development Center, and community leaders: Veora Williams, Brenda Hughes-Smith, Carol Birth, and DeraShaun McGhee, to publish the book, Black Cypress: A Phillips County Survival Guide. We are now supporting a listening tour of the book that will happen throughout the fall of 2022 and Spring of 2023.

The Remember2019 collective is funded by the MAP Fund,  Network of Ensemble Theatres, AlternateRoots, We Shall Overcome Fund, JKW Foundation, and The US Department of Arts and Culture. The Remember2019 collective is fiscally sponsored through Notch Theater Company.

For more details on our programming, check out this site: https://notchtheatre.weebly.com/remember2019.html

Between January 2020 and January 2023, Mauricio served as the Representation, Equity and Diversity (RED) Chair for the Region 1 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. As the RED Chair for Region 1, Mauricio worked with RED Chair’s from the other 7 regions around the country to develop policies and practices that aimed to make the festival more equitable and accessible to all of its potential participants. Within Region 1 (northeast), Mauricio collaborated with Siobhan Brown (Mashpee Wompanoag), Jenna Lourenco and Francesca McKenzie to evaluate the regions communications, recruitment practices, and programming; present workshops, recruit presenters, and build partnerships with other community organizations.

The CRAFT Institute is a non-profit organization, dedicated to curating culturally inclusive ecosystems throughout the world of arts and entertainment by transforming formal training and industry practices while promoting equitable access. Through curriculum, pedagogy, creative content development, and production networking opportunities and events, CRAFT’S consultation, coaching, workshops and clearinghouse of resources amplify the work of people of the global majority and culturally specific institutions.

CRAFT Courses examine what’s happening in our pressing social, cultural, historic realities as it intersects with performance and performance training. These are talks that are meant to innovate, educate and expand our practice. These courses are meant to reach all factions of society at diverse economic levels (i.e. from the transit worker to the student within the academy). These workshops are meant for everyone that identifies with or expresses curiosity about the Diaspora and its history.

For more information, check out: https://www.thecraftinstitute.org/craft-courses

In 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others called for a “revolution of values” in America. They sought to build a broad, fusion movement that could unite poor and impacted communities across the country. Their name was a direct cry from the underside of history: The Poor People’s Campaign.

Today, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has picked up this unfinished work. From Alaska to Arkansas, the Bronx to the border, people are coming together to confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism. We understand that as a nation we are at a critical juncture — that we need a movement that will shift the moral narrative, impact policies and elections at every level of government, and build lasting power for poor and impacted people.

Mauricio first got involved with the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) in 2014 through the Kairos Center. Most recently he has been involved with organizing groups of artists to discuss the Moral Budget and imagining performances that communicate the story of the budget.

In 2020, he collaborated with his beloved Cynthia to co-produce a series of short videos titled Dancers for the Poor Peoples Campaign (#dancers4theppc) where dancers responded to the testimony of PPC advocates. Check out those videos here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2zydqjdCDA&list=PLYXGAO69mUQxTGEEEK0l_Bc_JOnZjLSzh

Mauricio is now working to produce two short documentary theater pieces in the Drama Department that respond to the work of the Poor Peoples Campaign

October 2019

Sorry

Created by Shook Ones

Directed by Mauricio Tafur Salgado

Choreographed by Cindy Salgado and Yvon “Crazy Smooth” Soglo

Written by Alejandro Rodriguez

Multimedia Design by Yazmany Arboleda and Francis-Olivier Metras

Performed by Yvon “Crazy Smooth” Soglo, Cindy Salgado, Julio Trinidad, James Dean Palmer, Kyle Vincent Terry, Ryan Broussard

Sound Design by Will Stone

Set and Lighting Design by Paul Hudson

Stage Managed by Emlyn VanBruinswaardt

In October of 2019, Sorry will be remounted for the 4th time! This time in Montreal at CCOV (Centre de Creation O Vertigo). The show will happen on October 16th and 17th.

Sorry is a multimedia theatrical experience that utilizes dance, spoken word and projection to tell a story about cultures colliding that’s never been more relevant or necessary than today. Sorry is an immersive exploration of contemporary interracial partnerships, narrated and annotated by the secret Poet Laureate of the A train.

For more information, check out this link: https://ccov.org/en/sorry-crazy-smooth/

Winner of the Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Award

December 8th and 9th, 2017

Devised at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee

Directed by Mauricio Salgado

Costume Design by An-lin Dauber

Dramaturgy: James Montano

Composer: Anais Azul

Choreographer: Alli Ross

Stage Manager: Erin Kearney

Performers: Luis Mendoza, Shamarke Yusuf, Suzanne McDonald, Atlee Jensen, Victor Ventricelli, Galiya Zhangbyrshy

The performers were sophomore's of the  Contemporary Theatre Program.

In 2009, Jawid Masumi, and Jawad AliZadeh collaborated with Abby Gerdts to write a play about their migration from Afghanistan to Turkey in search of refuge. At the time, Abby was volunteering at the UNHCR Refugee camp in Kadikoy, Turkey, where Jawid and Jawad were residing.

Their hope was to write a play that would bring awareness about the reasons that Afghani’s seek refuge and the courage required on the journey. The play was called Qurban. For the last 6 years, Abby and Mauricio have been organizing opportunities to share the play. As the immigration crisis continues to unfold, we believe it is important to draw attention to the stories of the individual seeking refuge and not just the politics surrounding the crisis.

During the fall of 2018, the creative team crafted a response to the play with the sophomores in the Contemporary Theatre program at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Their goal was to create space for Jawid’s story and wrestle with the differences between those that are seeking refuge and the privilege of those that are not.

2003-2014

Arts Ignite (formerly Artists Striving To End Poverty)

Co Founder and Program Director

In 2006, alongside Cynthia Welik-Salgado, Beth Konopka, Abby Gerdts, James Seol, Luke Rinderknecht, Sarah Fox, John Egan, Will Pailen, Drew Sandbulte, Emily Oldak, Gerald Barrett and Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Mauricio co-founded Artists Striving To End Poverty, an organization whose mission it is to connect performing and visual artists with youth from under-resourced communities in the U.S. and around the world in order to imagine, think critically, and conceive a world without poverty together. As ASTEP's Program Director, Mauricio taught and devised with artists of all ages across the United States, parts of Peru, South Africa and India. He led multi-year partnerships with:

enFamilia Inc in Homestead, Florida

Ubuntu Education Fund in Port Elizabeth, South Africa

Refilwe Community Project in Johannesburg, South Africa

The International Rescue Committee in New York, NY

The Incarnation Children’s Center in Washington Heights, NY

The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival

In its first decade, ASTEP served 10,664 children, placed 771 volunteer teaching artists, partnered with organizations in 8 countries and 6 continents, produced 172 performances and completed 8 murals.

In 2022, ASTEP became Arts Ignite. Feel free to learn more here: www.artsignite.org

As Program Director for ASTEP and alongside collaborators Alejandro Rodriguez, Yazmany Arboleda, and Dylan Moore, Mauricio co-founded The Artist as Citizen Conference, which ran from 2014-2019. It was an immersive educational program hosted annually at Juilliard that developed young leaders by combining arts classes with career skills workshops, keynote speakers & panels on the subjects of citizenship, service & social justice. The conference last 5 days and each cohort was comprised of 40-60 participants from across the globe between 18-30 years of age.

The conference is now the Artist as Catalyst Conference, which is run by the Peace Studio. Mauricio continues to serve as an advisor and panelist. Learn more about it here: https://thepeacestudio.org/what-we-do/leadership-development/artist-as-catalyst/