NETWeek Chicago
March 22-28, 2026
Overview
Gathering is our medium. It is how we build, how we fight, how we stay alive.
NET is spending a week in Chicago this spring. Multiple events. Multiple conversations. Real time in a city where so much of what drives this network was forged. We are bringing the full scope of what we are building nationally into Chicago rooms, with Chicago artists, and we want you there.
In partnership with artEquity, Culture Change Lab, HowlRound, League of Chicago Theatres, Theatre Communications Group, Studio Luna, (X) Collective, and more.
Registration Fee: $25
Your registration fee gets you access to ALL NETWeek public events. If you are experiencing financial hardship and need support attending this event, OR if you would like to sponsor the registration for another attendee, please email info@ensembletheaters.net.
Events
Physical Theater 101: Big Stories in Small Spaces Workshop by Alice da Cunha of Physical Theater Festival
Thursday, March 26 | 12:00–2:00 PM CT
A playful and physical workshop exploring the endless possibilities of storytelling in a constrained space. Participants will learn a signature physical theater exercise called the "platform" style. Developed by renowned French theater-maker Jacques Lecoq, the style challenges artists to create big stories in small spaces using only their bodies, voices and imagination. Participants work in small groups to create a large, epic story within a very small space and short period of time. The goal is to explore new ways of thinking about theater and storytelling by combining elements of mime, dance and music with fun and precision. Wear clothes that allow you to move freely and be ready to have fun.
The Federation Table: Collective Practice, Cooperative Power
Friday, March 27 | 10:00 AM–12:00 PM CT
Invitation Only
The way people practice being together determines what they can accomplish together. For thirty years, ensemble artists have been rehearsing collective governance, shared resource management, and mutual accountability inside their companies. The NET Federation takes that rehearsal to scale.
We are piloting a national cooperative infrastructure for cultural workers: pooled benefits, mutual aid protocols, portable healthcare, and shared purchasing, in partnership with labor organizations including the United Steelworkers. We are learning as we build. The federation is community infrastructure. What serves cultural workers serves the communities they are embedded in.
This working breakfast is where we share what we are building, where we listen to what Chicago already knows, and where we begin to imagine together what this infrastructure could look like rooted in a city with some of the deepest cooperative economics and solidarity organizing traditions in the country. Ensemble leaders, solidarity economy practitioners, cooperative organizers, and culture workers at one table. We want to hear how you want to be involved.
Ground Floor
Friday, March 27 | 2:00–4:00 PM CT
Chicago's storefront theaters and ensemble companies in direct exchange: sharing practice, sparking co-producing partnerships, and doing what ensemble makers do best: build from the room. Isolation is a weapon, Relationship Is The Resource.
On Record | Chicago: Black Women Directors, Makers + Leaders on Brilliance, Glass Ceilings + What's Next
Saturday, March 28 | 2:00 PM CT | 3:00 PM EST | 12:00 PM PST
Livestreaming on HowlRound TV
On Record is a national conversation series produced by the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) that puts critical questions about power, practice, and survival in the performing arts on the record, literally, through live public dialogue archived and accessible to the field.
This event will feature live human captioning and ASL interpretation. The archived video will include post-production captions. For additional accessibility needs, contact info@ensembletheaters.net.
Black women in Chicago direct, devise, produce, and lead at extraordinary levels. And the ecosystem doesn't match it. Directors without health insurance. Leaders building institutions with no safety net underneath them. Brilliance that the city celebrates and then fails to sustain. On Record puts that gap on the table.
These leaders have shaped Chicago theater across generations and institutions. Together they hold founding vision, ensemble practice, institutional transformation, and artistic risk as lived experience. We are asking them to speak plainly about what it actually takes to build legacy inside a city and an industry that was not designed to hold what they are building.
We are examining the real architecture: what sustains the work, what threatens it, and what comes next.
J. Nicole Brooks | Panelist
J. Nicole Brooks (she/they) is an actor, playwright, director, and Creative Producer at Lookingglass Theatre Company, where she has been an Ensemble Member since 2007. She also serves as Associate Artistic Director at Collaboraction Theatre and holds a Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence position at Lookingglass, where she is developing a series on Chicago mayors. Her original plays include Her Honor Jane Byrne, HeLa, Black Diamond: The Years the Locusts Have Eaten, and 1919. Brooks has received the Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, a TCG Fox Foundation Award, a 3Arts Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her television credits include recurring roles on South Side (HBO Max), The Chi (Showtime), Chicago Fire (NBC), and Fargo (FX). Brooks works at the intersection of ensemble practice, Black women's storytelling, and the city's unfinished reckonings.
Lili-Anne Brown | Panelist
Lili-Anne Brown is a director, actor, and educator whose work across Chicago's theaters has earned her five Jeff Awards, two Helen Hayes Awards, two BTA Awards, and an African American Arts Alliance Award for excellence in directing. A South Side native and Northwestern University graduate, Brown co-founded Bailiwick Chicago and has directed world premieres at Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf, and theaters across the country. She is an inaugural recipient of the Walder Foundation's Platform Award and a 2021 3Arts Award recipient. Her recent work includes directing The Color Purple at Drury Lane Theatre, bringing what the Sun-Times called "a who's who of Black creatives" to the stage. Brown's career is a study in what intentional Black curation looks like inside institutional spaces.
Miranda Gonzalez | Panelist
Miranda Gonzalez is a writer, director, producer, and facilitator, and the Producing Artistic Director of UrbanTheater Company in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood. Born and raised in Chicago, she was a founding ensemble member of Teatro Luna and has been devising and developing original work since 2000. Gonzalez has spent two decades building theater that centers Latina and Black communities through interdisciplinary projects blending theater, music, dance, and oral history. She is a two-time 3Arts nominee, a recipient of the International Centre for Women Playwrights 50/50 Award, and was selected for Disney's Live Entertainment 2024 Creative Intensive. In 2020 she recorded a TEDx talk, "The Fear of Decolonization." Her play Mascogos, which traces the history of the Underground Railroad to Mexico, premiered with the Los Angeles Latino Theater Company's Imaginistas program. Her most recent work, Back In The Day: an 80's House Music Dancesical, world premiered at UTC as part of the Destinos Festival.
Jackie Taylor | Panelist
Jackie Taylor is the founder and CEO of Black Ensemble Theater, which she started in 1976 on Chicago's South Side. Born and raised in Cabrini-Green, Taylor built BET out of refusal: frustrated by the stereotypical roles offered to Black actors, she created a company dedicated to telling the truth about Black life and culture through original musicals. Under her leadership, Black Ensemble has produced over 100 original works centering Black entertainers and has opened a permanent home in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. Taylor has received the League of Chicago Theatres Lifetime Achievement Award, Actors' Equity's Rosetta LeNoire Award, and was named one of the top 10 in the Arts among the Chicago Sun-Times' 100 Most Powerful Women. As the theater approaches its 50th year, she continues to shape what's possible for the next generation of Black artists and audiences in Chicago.
Ericka Ratcliff | Panelist
Ericka Ratcliff was the Artistic Director of Congo Square Theatre Company and the first woman to hold that position in the company's 22-year history. Originally from Baltimore, she first performed with Congo Square in 2006 in the world premiere of Lydia Diamond's Stickfly and became an Ensemble member the same year. Before stepping into the top role, she served as Community Engagement and Education Associate, Literary Manager, Casting Director, and Associate Artistic Director. She also serves as Literary Manager at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Coordinating Producer for 100 Free Acts of Theater at Goodman Theatre. With her appointment alongside Executive Director Charlique C. Rolle, Congo Square became a space where women hold both top leadership positions for the first time in the company's history.
Roxanna Conner | Panelist
Roxanna Conner (she/her) is the Director of the School of Theatre and Dance at Northern Illinois University. She has served as a leader of education and community initiatives for several organizations, including Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Victory Gardens Theater, Congo Square Theatre, and Krannert Center for the Performing Arts where she developed programs for students and lifelong learners. Roxanna was Acting Managing Director of Victory Gardens Theatre from 2020-2022, through tumultuous leadership transitions, board upheaval, and the closure/reopening due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Her creative practice credits include directing and producing. Directing credits include for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Prowess (NIU), Voices of Tomorrow (Victory Gardens Theater), Empathy (CLIMB Theatre), and as Assistant Director for How I Learned What I Learned and The Nativity Tribute (Congo Square Theatre), CPS Shakespeare: Macbeth and CPS Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre). She produced the all Victory Gardens virtual and live engagements from 2020-2022 including cullud wattah, In Every Generation, Voices of Tomorrow, and the Regional Emmy-nominated Where Did We Sit on the Bus? and the development workshops of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner Primary Trust by Eboni Booth and live-looping hop-hop musical Mexodus by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson as part of the Ignite Chicago Festival of New Plays. In her role at NIU, she produces eight plays and two dance concerts each academic year, while managing fiscal, personnel, and enrollment matters of the unit.
Carmen Morgan | Facilitator
Carmen Morgan is a national activist leading conversations at the forefront of the field on equity, diversity, and inclusion issues. She is the founder and director of artEquity, a national organization that provides tools, resources, and training to support the intersections of art and activism. She has provided leadership development, organizational planning and coaching for staff, executives, and boards for over 100 non-profit organizations. She is on faculty of Yale School of Drama where she addresses issues of identity, equity, and inclusion in the arts.
About NET
The Network of Ensemble Theaters is a national solidarity network of ensembles, collectives, practitioners, and cultural workers distributed across urban, rural, and tribal communities. For three decades we have been the connective tissue for a field that the world keeps trying to scatter. After thirty years we are shifting from convening to building.
The NET Federation pilots cooperative infrastructure for cultural workers: pooled benefits, mutual aid, and shared governance built in partnership with labor and solidarity economy organizations.
The Ensemble Practice Story and Legacy Project is building a living archive of ensemble practitioners and their methodologies, centering historically marginalized communities whose collaborative traditions have been systematically excluded from the American art canon. Ensemble practice is civic technology. We are making the root system visible.
Create + Activate invests directly in BIPOC ensemble artists through 18-month leadership arcs that pair financial resource with deep peer exchange.
Relationship is the resource. Isolation is the weapon. Proximity is the practice.
Stay Connected
Want to be in the loop as details come together? Have a question about the week? Want to explore partnership or participation?
Email: info@ensembletheaters.net
Chicago. March 22-28. We gather because that is how we stay alive. Creatively and literally.
In the practice of us,
Team NET
More Programming Taking Shape
We're developing additional activations during the week, including a group outing to see work already on Chicago's stages. The week is still growing. Details dropping soon.
Why Chicago.
NET has been in conversation with Chicago for thirty years. Our gatherings, our national convenings, our deepest organizational relationships were built in this city. Chicago member theaters shaped what NET became. The lessons that humbled us and made us sharper were learned here. In Chicago rooms. With Chicago artists. With Chicago heat.
Chicago is one of a handful of cities where NET is now building long-term, on-the-ground presence with and for ensemble artists and collectives. This week is the beginning of a multi-year commitment to grow what already exists here and to build what we all deserve. Isolation is the weapon. Proximity is the practice. We are choosing proximity.
#DropTheLink
You know your city better than we ever will. Before we arrive, help us build a living map of who and what matters in Chicago.
We've created an open, interactive board where you can add the people and places that make Chicago's creative ecosystem run. Add names, links, and love for:
Artists and ensembles doing the work
BIPOC-owned restaurants and gathering spaces
Performance venues
Community organizations rooted in solidarity economy and mutual aid
Honor them. Name them. Drop the link.
Add yours to the board here.