(JERSEY CITY, NJ) -- Jersey City Theater Center presents the latest installment of Black Space, hosted by Ashley Nicole Baptiste, a free web series that celebrates Black artists, educators and culture.  The latest episode will feature an interview with natyna bean, a multidisciplinary artist and educator who celebrates Black queer folks navigating and interrogating the presence and impact of American carceral systems. The show will premiere live on Sunday, February 19 at 2:30pm EST and can be accessed via Zoom.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85023371884?pwd=clc4L1I5M3BYTXEvQnErOVBtRFI0UT09

Webinar ID: 850 2337 1884

Passcode: 001100

You can make a reservation to participate for free at  www.JCTCenter.org. 

Combining their/her upbringing in Philadelphia, multiethnic background, and experience as a community worker & theatre artist, natyna bean confronts internalized behaviors of harm through storytelling, curricula, and song, exploring the possibility of self-sovereignty and asserting hope in hardship. natyna’s work has been produced, published, and/or developed with Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, The Great Plains Theatre Conference, The Playground Experiment, The Fire This Time Festival, Moving Arts Theatre, 24 Hour Plays Nationals, Theatre L’Acadie, University of Nebraska Omaha, and more. Natyna was awarded the 2020 Lorraine Hansberry Lilly Award and the KCACTF National Undergraduate Playwriting Award. A finalist for the NYSAF Founders’ Award and a creative resident of SPACE on Ryder Farm, Natyna is an NYU Tisch alum and holds an MFA in Playwriting from the New School for Drama. In addition to their/her dramatic work, Natyna is a lead teacher for the Octavia Project, a co-host of the podcast to whom this may affirm, and is a producer for the NPR syndicated show and podcast, Our Body Politic, a media platform that centers the impact and experience of women of color in politics and the news.

Ashley Nicole Baptiste is an actor and teaching artist working and living in New York/Jersey City, and is the Associate Artistic Director of Jersey City Theater Center.

As an actor she has had the opportunity to use her artistic talents in theater, television and film. She started working on using her creative talents in new directions to help produce, and create space for stories that are under-represented. It was during her work on the production of HANDS UP in Portland, Oregon (during the summer of 2015) that helped inspire her to expand her voice as an artist and activist. Having the opportunity to work on two August Wilson plays, Jitney & Seven Guitars, helped influence her inspiration to mix arts with activism and later led to the immeasurable opportunity to work with Anna Deavere Smith on her HBO special, Notes From The Field. 

She is a proud graduate from Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts M.F.A Acting program (2020), and spent six months training/performing at Shakespeare's Globe in London. She has had the opportunity to work in diverse communities as a Teaching Artist with, NJCU, Spotlight (The Spot JC), Arts Horizon, MAST High School,  RSAC and Greenville Stories with JCTC. She’s excited for the opportunity to do meaningful work and continue to lay a foundation for social justice through the arts.  

Jersey City Theater Center (JCTC) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) arts organization committed to inspiring conversations about important issues of our times through the arts. Co-founded by Executive Producer Olga Levina, an immigrant from Belarus, Jersey City Theater Center (JCTC) produces and presents universal yet locally relevant works, emphasizing social justice and human rights.  Since 2006, JCTC has provided a platform for all artistic voices to be heard in Jersey City, with the aim of sparking meaningful cross-cultural dialogue that helps build a greater understanding, mutual respect and better communities in New Jersey.