Drawing on her many years of practical experience in the arts and facilitation fields, Tanisha Christie’s work is focused on health/mental health, individual, families and couples; arts-based interventions; addiction recovery; critical consciousness; and liberation-based healing practices.
As a facilitator, Ms. Christie has created curricula and processes for staff and young people in the arts, supported teachers and principals on classroom management strategies, and helped burgeoning not-for-profits create new systems and tackle difficult organizational situations. Clients included: Children’s Trust Neighborhood Initiative, Federation of East Village Artists, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Newark Public Schools, and others. Most recently, she developed a creative workshop program for men in addiction recovery and young girls in transitional housing for Turning Point in Brooklyn.
As a theater artist Tanisha has produced, directed and performed for many regional theaters across the country including Arena Stage; Commonweal Theatre; PCPA Theatrefest, Target Margin Theatre and with Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter and many others.
She has directed children’s theater, as well as, produced shows at Performance Space 122, Baltimore Theater Project and others. She directed Taja Lindley’s The Bag Lady Manifesta that has toured nationally and finished the first draft of Iona Flies Away, a musical, storytelling project with singer-songwriter Kelly Erin Sloan, musician Chris Vega and singer/songwriter Christine Joseph at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. In the summer of 2018, she created the fourth iteration of bathtub, a multimedia performance installation event of radical intimacy at Second Ward Foundation in Hudson, NY. She directed playwright/performer/scholar Nina Angela Mercer’s new performance, A Compulsion for Breathing for Changing Perceptions Theater.
Tanisha began working with film/video while creating and performing in an original interdisciplinary media-theater-dance piece Memory is a Body of Water (with Lisa Biggs, PhD and Kristin Horton, Dir.) for The National Black Theater Festival.
Her experimental shorts flag/body has been screened at international conferences in Australia and Denmark; GroundWater was screened as a part of an intercontinental artist exchange in Panama co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Panama.
Documentaries: She’s worked for several production companies including one off documentaries for Bravo & the Discovery Channel, PBS’ Citizen King. Credits include: Producer/Director for Walk With Me ( with Ellie Walton; distributed by GoDigital); Awards: Outstanding Documentary Award -Our City Film Festival. Producer: Brave Girls distributed by Virgil Entertainment- Awards: Outstanding Documentary/SOMA Film Festival; Feature selection: DOC NYC; American Institute Film Series. She is a producing consultant on a film about house music in New Jersey, Black House, Black Joy written and directed by Jamara Wakefield.
Tanisha holds a BFA Theatre performance with a concentration in Holistic Drama from Arizona State University, an MA in Media Studies from The New School and is an LCSW - Clinical Practice focus from Hunter College. A member of Actor’s Equity Association, her work has been recognized through an Artist’s Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Puffin Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Humanities Council of DC. She was a 2015 TMT Institute Fellow and 2019 Artist in Residence at Target Margin Theater, 2016-2018 Artist in Residence at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), 2018 resident artist at the Second Ward Foundation in Hudson, NY, a 2017 MAP Fund grantee and was 2018/2019 Resident Artist at Spaceworks NYC. She is working with viBe Theatrical Experience creating a wellness program for staff and participants and is currently Lecturer at Yale School of Drama, Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. She also works as a psychotherapist licensed in New York.
Detailed CV available upon request.
Photos on site by JD Urban