Sideeq Heard Joins the JAG Team As Its Newest Member
JAG Productions, a Vermont and New York City-based theatre company centering Black and Black queer storytelling, is happy to announce the hiring of Sideeq Heard as JAG’s new associate artistic director.
Heard, an emerging multi-hyphenate theatre artist with national and international experience, will bring his keen aesthetic sensibilities to the creative team at JAG. With a BFA from Howard University and an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Sideeq first worked with the JAG team directing Next to Normal at 2021’s Theatre on the Hill at King Arthur Baking Company. JAG producing artistic director Jarvis Green was so impressed with Heard’s work that he invited Heard to join the JAG team.
“I have known and admired Sideeq since meeting him last year for Theatre on the Hill. He is a wonderful and magnetic leader, with superb taste, deep values, and terrific management skills. He is a man of the people, who brings artistic vision, commitment to community, and an enormous generosity of spirit to JAG,” says Green.
Hiring Heard is part of a strategic growth plan currently underway at JAG Productions. His efforts will increase overall capacity for the company, allowing it to expand its programming and offer additional opportunities for Black storytellers to develop their work. Based out of New York City, Heard will also assist in expanding JAG’s influence there and in the broader theatre world.
“I am honored and humbled to join JAG Productions as the inaugural Associate Artistic Director during this special time of growth and expansion. I’m in awe of how JAG continues to champion Black, Brown, and Queer storytellers alike. With my innovation and rich artistic background, I hope to continue uplifting JAG’s mission as we broaden our impact in both the Upper Valley and New York City theatre community,” says Heard.
ABOUT JAG PRODUCTIONS
At the confluence of the White and Connecticut Rivers, which separate Abenaki land into the states of Vermont and New Hampshire, JAG has nurtured and sustained a multi-generational and multi-racial theatre company with Black artists and community organizers at its center. JAG’s mission is to bring more compassion, empathy, and love into the world by telling stories that challenge hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality. These stories are written and produced by and for Black, Brown, Queer, and Trans folx and the people that love them. JAG strives to tell these crucial stories and provide an artistic sanctuary for creatives seeking rejuvenation, time for reflection, and a space in nature to develop art that will change the world. Since its founding, JAG has curated, produced, and directed contemporary and classical Black theatre to engage and sustain individual and collective transformations that unsettle hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality. JAG’s primary programming includes: JAGfest, an annual new playwrights’ festival; Theatre on the Hill, five weekends of workshops, concerts, burlesque, and staged readings hosted on the gorgeously picturesque lawn at King Arthur Baking Company in Norwich, VT; and the JAG Musical Theatre Lab, a multi-year lab that offers audiences a new vision of American musical theater storytelling. JAG is committed to expanding its artistic development and presence in New York City as part of its strategic vision to establish greater ties with New York-based theatres and the artist community. Today, JAG Productions offers productions five months out of the year, bringing in nearly 5,000 people each season to experience dynamic artists and education programming just five minutes from Dartmouth College.
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