Raja Feather Kelly, choreographer, director, and movement director, and Seret Scott, actor, director and playwright, are in residence this fall, leading creative development workshops with The Actors Center’s Resident Company focusing on the nuances of human behavior and writing personal narratives.
Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory (TF3T), a Brooklyn-based dance-theatre-media company that he founded in 2009. Over the past decade, he has created 18 evening-length works with the feath3r theory to critical acclaim.
His most recent choreography includes Teeth at the New World Stages (2024), book and music by Anna K. Jacobs, book and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson and Directed by Sarah Benson (performances recently started October 18, 2024), and The Fires at Soho Rep (2024), written and directed by Raja Feather Kelly. He choreographed the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon) and Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep, TFANA), both winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He was hailed by The New York Times as the choreographer who “can make your play move” for his extensive work Off-Broadway.
Other theater credits include White Girl in Danger at the Second Stage Kiser Theater, written by Michael R. Jackson and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, Lempicka (Broadway and La Jolla Playhouse), Bunny Bunny (UC San Diego), We’re Gonna Die (Second Stage Theater—his directorial debut), SUFFS (The Public Theater), The Good Swimmer (BAM), The Listeners (Oslo Opera), Macbeth In Stride (ACT, STC, PTC), and Teeth (Playwrights Horizons).
He has received dozens of awards, fellowships and honors including a Princeton Arts Fellowship (2023-2025), a Mellon Foundation grant (2021), an Obie Award and Outer Critics Circle Award honor for choreography for A Strange Loop (2020), an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019-2021), a Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts (2019– 2020), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019–2021), a New York Dance Performance Bessie Award (2009), a Creative Capital Award (2019), three Princess Grace Awards (2017-2019), a National Dance Project Production Grant (2019), a Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (2018), Dance Magazine’s inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018), a Creator-in-Residence at Kickstarter (2018), and a Choreography Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU (2017), a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard (2017), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography (2016), an ImPulsTanz Festival DanceWEB Scholarship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship (2016).
Seret Scott is a theatre director, playwright, and actress who starred in Kathleen Collins seminal film, Losing Ground. Her Broadway acting credits include For Colored Girls and My Sister, My Sister, for which she won a Drama Desk Award. She has directed off-Broadway and at regional theatres across the country. In 2020 she was honored with the Gordon Davidson Directing Award for Lifetime Achievement in Regional Theatre.
Off-Broadway directing credits include PanAsian Rep, The Acting Co, National Black Theatre, Second Stage, New Victory. Regional directing credits include The Old Globe, Court Theatre, Yale Rep, Westport Country Playhouse, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth, Ford Theatre, Atlas/DC, Oregon Shakespeare, South Coast Rep, ACT, Long Wharf, Hartford Stage, Baltimore Center Stage, Studio Theatre, Denver Center, Crossroads, Two River, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Indiana Rep, Alliance Theatre, and PlayMakers Rep, among others. She is a former Director in Residence at New Dramatists. She has additionally directed at Howard, Juilliard, NYU Tisch, Fordham, and University of Maryland.
In 1969, Seret was a member of the Free Southern Theater, a civil rights organization that performed throughout rural Louisiana and Mississippi. She is invited to forums and universities to read from her extensive journals.
