Holden & Arts Associates

About: Artist & Community Connection

Theresa Holden directs Artist & Community Connection (ACC), a not-for-profit consultancy service organization. She provides a variety of services for clients from across the US including: university and community presenters; performing arts companies; artists; youth, housing, immigrant, and health organizations; public schools; and university academic departments, among others. 

For the past eighteen years Theresa has offered assistance to organizations as they develop and strengthen their programs and staff and has aimed to create a connection and exchange between artists and the communities they visit. 

ACC's organizing and producing work seeks to equalize all partners' voices in the development and presentation of the project's work. The goals of projects are as diverse as the organizations and communities served. 

Theresa has facilitated board and staff retreats, student orientations, faculty meetings, planned and produced festivals and community events, facilitated organizational multi-year planning processes, organized and supervised organizational evaluations, directed organizational self-studies and ethnographies, helped build coalitions in communities, and facilitated communities seeking and collecting their own stories.

​​Theresa customizes the services for each project and, when called for, brings her colleagues into the project. These long time collaborators are artists, educators and organizers who offer years of experience, wisdom, talent and diverse working methods. Each project has its own particular needs and ACC creates the right team to undertake the work.

In every project Theresa seeks to open communication, deepen and broaden dialogue, and aim for equality in planning and executing the projects. In order to do so, ACC acknowledges that each of us will be challenged to meet the goal of equity, respect, and mutual sharing of time and resources. From this platform, and through deep listening and dialogue, projects succeed.

​Past Projects

Following is a list of some of the organizations and academic institutions for which ACC has provided various services, including meeting facilitation, story circle facilitation, orientations, coalition building, project planning, artist workshops, organizational development, and faculty and staff retreats.
Association of Performing Arts Presenters, DC

• NYU, Research Center for Leadership in Action
• University of Akron, Theater Department
• Project Home, Philadelphia, PA
• Arizona State University, Theater Department
• Tohono O'odham Community Action, Sells, AZ
• University of Maryland
• Regional Aides Interfaith Network, Charlotte, NC
• Cornell University
• Ford Foundation, Leadership for a Changing World
  

About: Holden & Arts Associates

The challenges facing the performing arts community have never been greater.  Audiences need honest work that brings a fresh vision to the crucial issues of our communities, and that humanizes the problems we face in our individual lives, regardless of the economic condition of our audience. Artists and those who support their work should hold themselves to nothing less than this standard: does this work help our audience achieve the strength and knowledge they need at this time and in this place?    Michael & Theresa Holden, 2018

From the late 1980's to the beginning of the 21st Century, Holden and Arts Associates partnered with Roadside Theater to create in-depth, long-term community cultural development residencies and performances across the U.S.  Holden & Arts Associates is a booking and management company serving performing artists and performing arts presenters across North America. Founded in 1983 by Michael and Theresa Holden, their artistic partners are both national and international companies and are leaders in their genres. Their North American presenting partners are among the leaders and risk takers in their communities; from large cities to small towns, they value high quality performances and professionalism in all the artistic work they present on their stages. 

Bio: Theresa Holden

Theresa Holden, founder/director of the Artist and Community Connection and co-founder of Holden & Arts Associates, was a primary collaborator in the Roadside--Junebug and Roadside--Pregones collaborations. For 28 years, she worked with the two companies to create and produce community cultural development residencies, new plays, and national tours, as well as served as workshop leader and manager of many national residencies. Theresa taught the Emerging Leaders Institute at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters for eight years, served as project producer for many community based projects across the USA, taught in universities and community organizations, and facilitated collaborative learning sessions with diverse organizations. She holds a Master of Arts in Theater and is a fellow at New York Universities' Research Center for Leadership in Action. Theresa and John O'Neal together won the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World Award.

Highlights: Roadside--Holden Arts & Associates Collaborations

Collaborations Include:

• Promise of a Love Song (a collaboration with Junebug Productions & Pregones Theater)
• Roadside North Dakota Tour - A Prototype
• Tamejavi Cultural Festival & Cultural Organizing 
• Grassroots Theater Project, Williamsburg, VA
• Montana American Festival Project, Choteau, MT
• Popular Theater & Playwriting, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
• American Festival Project, Louisville, KY
• Untold Stories/Celebrating Campus & Community, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 
• Encuentro/Coming Together, San Antonio, TX
• Urban Cultures Festival, Philadelphia, PA 
• Dartmouth American Festival Project, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
•  Junebug/Jack Tour of Mississippi (a collaboration with Junebug Productions)

Binding Beauty to Justice -- A Tribute to Michael & Theresa

From the late 1980's until the beginning of the 21st Century, Roadside Theater worked with Michael and Theresa Holden of Western and Southern Arts Associates (now Holden Arts and Associates) to create ground-breaking national Roadside tours and in-depth community cultural residencies, and to found the American Festival Project. Michael and Theresa were vital to the success of the work. Following is a remembrance written in honor of Michael and Theresa as they transition to new roles at Holden Arts and Associates after 35 years of ground-breaking toil.

Donna met Michael in the 1980’s at a Southern Arts Federation “Booking Conference.” At the time, one of her jobs at Roadside Theater was booking the ensemble’s national tours.  At that SAF conference, John O’Neal, friend and collaborator of Roadside’s  and artistic director of Junebug Productions, told Donna that he was going to sign on with Western and Southern Arts Associates, Michael and Theresa’s new booking and management company. “They seem honestly interested in what I’m trying to accomplish with my work.” Now as a kid, Donna had not joined the Girl Scouts because she didn’t like the prospect of selling cookies, so when she returned from the conference, she told Roadside about WASAA. 

The close friendship we subsequently formed with Michael and Theresa quickly went far beyond tour booking: Roadside, John O'Neal/Junebug, and WASAA formed what could be characterized as a national ensemble dedicated to producing new work binding beauty to social justice. 

By 1990, after 14 years of steady national touring, our team was increasingly dismayed at the lack of audience diversity in the US – audiences for theater were overwhelmingly white, college educated, and well-heeled. Dudley started reciting W.H. Auden’s On the Circuit: “Though warm my welcome everywhere/ I shift so frequently, so fast/ I cannot say where I was/The evening before last.” 

This narrow audience presented a particularly disturbing problem for us: We were making plenty of money to meet our modest needs, but we weren’t reaching our people. We knew how to develop diverse audiences through long-term community residencies, and we also knew that arts presenters weren’t in the habit of paying for such residencies -- and there was no indication that those arts presenters were dissatisfied with the elite audience they already had in their pocket. The economic risk of changing our touring model and insisting contractually on audience diversity was very high – kindly like betting the ranch. Theresa just took a deep breath and said, “Well, we have to do it.” 

Thank you Michael and Theresa for taking the risk, for keeping the faith, for making change.  As Roadside’s Ron Short once put it, “If Theresa and Michael Holden told me we have to invade Lubbock, I’d pack my ruck sack and get behind them.”

Love,

Donna, Dudley, and Ron