AATE 2025 National Conference

In this session, participants will engage in a workshop inspired by an intervention designed for the NYC Health Equity Project. The project gathered stories of discrimination in health care delivery, focusing on intersections of race, social class, gender, gender identity, ability, and age. Artist-researchers used these stories to create a verbatim performance intervention, a method that uses the exact speech and gestures of the interviewee for investigation. Ethnoactors used a scored transcript, the original interview recording, and field notes to prepare a performance portrait of an interview participant. Intervention participants then use textual data related to the interviews and the resulting verbatim portraits to explore bias and discrimination in healthcare delivery. The artist-researchers piloted the intervention with healthcare workers in New York City in Spring 2025, and the presenter will share preliminary results of the pilot as part of the session. Participants in this session will engage with a version of the intervention and learn how artist-researchers used ethnodrama and verbatim performance techniques to create it. The NYC Health Equity Project is a collaboration between NYU Steinhardt’s Theatre and Health Lab and Verbatim Performance Lab, supported by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The project sits within a more extensive international collaboration, including Brock University and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab. The project is funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund, Special Call for COVID-19 Response Research (Canada), which focuses on high-risk, high-reward, and transdisciplinary projects.