Nabra Nelson

I am so honored and excited to receive the New England Foundation for the Arts’ (NEFA) National Theater Project Creation & Touring Grant for my upcoming project HERitage emBODYment! Only 11 ensembles across the nation received this prestigious award in its last year. The honor of receiving funding for the arts right now, and the deep responsibility that comes with that is heavy on my mind. Through this piece we will be exploring displacement, indigeneity, colonization, identity, and repatriation, among other topics we will discover within our research and community engagement process.

The performance will be a multi-media, multi-modal, multi-lingual (English, Arabic, Fadjiki) piece that tours as a site-responsive performance installation and theatrical procession at Egyptian wings of US museums and theatres. The grant is for the research, devising, and touring process, so we start building the performance in July. The national tour will take place in Summer 2026.

The project is co-created with Dr. Sarah Fahmy, an Egyptian multi-disciplinary theatre artist and Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at Florida State University – and a good friend. We devised the idea together and will be developing the touring performance throughout the next 12 months.

For a sample of Sarah and my collaboration, check out this brief virtual performance we devised and performed together: