Mission
Our mission is to activate imagination and illuminate community stories to create a more inclusive world.
We are a multicultural, multidisciplinary ensemble of professional artists that collaborates directly with diverse local communities – those who are essential to society but whose stories are often ignored or misunderstood – to forge new ways of seeing our common experiences by creating new art that transforms the past into a better future.
Our method is to listen, wonder, create, and repeat.
Wonderlust Productions illuminates a community’s story through performance, mixing community members from across generations, ethnicities, and perspectives, alongside an ensemble of professional actors, designers, writers, and directors. Together, we create new art based on high-quality dramatic storytelling and skill; inspired by community experience; embracing the inherent conflict of opposing perspectives within a community; epic enough to encompass diversity and inspire transformative experience.
Vision
Wonderlust’s people-centered approach to art empowers communities to tell their stories in their own voices—strengthening social cohesion, mental health, and imagination among participants and audiences. Our epic creations dramatize the complexity and diversity within any community; the historic and systemic inequities that divide us; and the shared aspirations for a better world that unite us. We create opportunities for communities to see themselves represented justly as individuals and together; to instigate open discussion about the balance of cultural power; and to experience the ability of artistry to create more beauty in the world.
Values
COLLABORATION
Respect, Trust, Compassion, Tenacity, Health, “Meeting People Where They Are”
EQUITY
Access, Transparency, Diversity, Inclusion, Safe Spaces
WONDER
Imagination, Curiosity, Risk-taking, Humility, Good Listening
EXCELLENCE
Theatricality, Quality, Professionalism, Good Art, High Expectations