Collaborating with theater artists, filmmakers/photographers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, writers and visual artists exploring the environment, social justice and the future of all life.
“You cannot have climate justice without racial justice. It isn’t justice if it doesn’t include everyone.”
– Vanessa Nakate, Climate Activist
We collaborate with actors, playwrights, directors, photographers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, writers and visual artists. Planet Earth Arts supports them by commissioning, presenting and showcasing their powerful transformative work – confronting and illuminating climate change, mass extinctions, threats to oceans, habitat loss, sea rise and the struggles for environmental justice.
Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival
“Climate Change is the greatest danger the human race has ever faced.”
—Tony Kushner
Pulitzer Prize & Tony Award winning American Playwright & Screenwriter
In 2014 we launched the Festival, in collaboration with PlayGround, inspiring playwrights to create bold new works for the stage exploring planetary sustainability and environmental justice.
We have worked with playwrights from PlayGround’s Writer Pools in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Also, Washington, D.C. playwrights with Theater Alliance.
Together, we have commissioned 15 playwrights to develop full-length or one-act plays for the Festival – several of which have had World Premieres in San Francisco.
Illustration: Black Boy by Goulwen Reboux. Prairie Fringed Orchid by Ananda Heller. Polar Bear by Candy Witcher. Arrangement by Vincent Terrell Durham
Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids
Planet Earth Arts, in collaboration with PlayGround, commissioned Los Angeles playwright Vincent Terrell Durham, to develop a play about the explosive encounter between white environmentalists and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Black boys need to be put on the endangered species list.”
This incendiary provocation, spoken by the white lover of a Black Lives Matter activist at a Harlem cocktail party, encapsulates the issues of race, class, sexual identity, biological extinction and police violence against Black bodies that are explored so powerfully in the play.
“The reason I wrote the play. Is that I wanted audiences to spend an evening getting to really know the full, rich, complicated inner life of a Black man – not just what
we see on TV news.”
– Vincent Terrell Durham, Playwright
A Reading & Conversation with Greg Sarris & Sterling HolyWhiteMountain
In Spring 2024, Greg Sarris, tribal leader, university professor, playwright, producer, and award-winning author, published The Forgetters, an astonishing new collection of stories weaving together elements of Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok creation stories with the contemporary world.
“So much of this book, and all of my work, is an attempt to re-story the landscape so that we can know our place in it and our responsibility to it.”
– Greg Sarris on The Forgetters
Planet Earth Arts sponsored Greg as a Guest Artist at Stanford University, in a public reading and conversation with fellow writer, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain. This astonishing new collection of stories weave together elements of Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok creation stories with the contemporary world.
Planet Earth Artists
Our sublime but vulnerable world seen through the eyes of photographer Camille Seaman
Poet, artist and naturalist, Obi Kaufman maps the ecography of California
In The Sacrifice of Giants choreographer Camille Hanson cries out against the slaughter and captivity of whales and dolphins
Photographer Binh Danh celebrates America’s National Parks with his large-camera daguerreotypes
In his film, The Human Element, photographer, James Balog, explores the fraught relationship between humans and nature
With the brutal murders of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Maggie Long, Pak Ho and Sonya Massey, among too many others, we confront a continuum of unbearably cruel and tragic moments in the 400 + year déjà vu nightmare that continues to haunt an America plagued by the deadly cancer of racism – enforced through White Supremacy and enabled by our White Privilege.
Planet Earth Arts cknowledges that we are on the ancestral and unceded land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. This land was and continues to b e of great importance to the Ohlone people. As uninvited guests on these lands, we are the beneficiaries of the ongoing displacement of the Ohlone people. We pay our respects to the Native peoples, past and present.
We encourage support for the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust with an annual financial contribution. The Trust is an urban Indigenous women-led land trust based in the San Francisco Bay Area that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people.
We acknowledge the suffering and resilience of all people whose lives and livelihoods were stolen by those with power, including but not limited to the millions of enslaved African American people. The devastating effects of these injustices continue to be felt today. We acknowledge everyone who has a lived experience of oppression, be it racism or sexism, classism or ableism, transphobia or homophobia, or any other form of oppression. To ignore oppression is to assent to oppression.
PLANET EARTH ARTS
The Earth is a work of art.
Protecting her is the work of artists.
Planet Earth Arts is sponsored by Earth Island Institute, a (501)(c)(3) non-profit organization. Planet Earth Arts acknowledges the generous support of Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival is a collaboration with PlayGround, the National Center for New Plays and the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.
