Host TEam - 2025 Alumni Gathering

Dat Ngo

(he/him)

Dat Ngo is a seasoned arts education and community engagement leader with over 20 years of experience advancing equity, access, and creativity in the arts. A first-generation Vietnamese American and parent raising children of two cultures, Dat brings a deeply human-centered approach to his work, grounded in his belief in the transformative power of the arts to amplify voices and create pathways for opportunity. Dat served as Associate Director of Engagement and Inclusion at Shakespeare Theatre Company and as Education Director at Adventure Theatre, developing and facilitating programs serving communities across Maryland, DC, and Virginia. As Vice President at Arts Consulting Group, Dat connects emerging and seasoned leaders with arts and culture organizations while also helping those same organizations create inclusive environments to support healthy and sustainable cultures. A frequent collaborator with artEquity and a board member of PlayPenn, Dat continues to inspire change, championing justice, storytelling, and empowerment through the arts.
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Lauren Turner Hines

(she/her)

Lauren’s role is that of an advocate and facilitator for justice and change. Lauren is the founding Producing Artistic Director of No Dream Deferred NOLA, a community-anchored theatre production company that is dedicated to the development of new works originating in the South. Additionally, Lauren leads as Founder and Executive Director of the Andre Cailloux Center for Performing Arts & Cultural Justice. Her work lives where storytelling, community building, and politics intersect. Lauren speaks and facilitates with organizations and institutions across the US. She is an artEquity facilitator and founding content creator for the BIPOC Surviving PWI series and the BIPOC Leadership Circle series. Lauren is the founder of Equity and Justice for Institutional Change (EJIC), an organizational development consulting firm. Additionally, Lauren provides executive strategic and wellness coaching for BIPOC leaders working within predominantly/historically white institutions. She is a Round 4 recipient in the Leadership U: One-on-One grant program, funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by Theatre Communications Group, designed to further develop prominent emerging leaders and change agents in the American Theatre. Lauren has also served as a Mellon Fellow through Tulane University’s Community Engaged Graduate Program, mentoring Tulane University graduate students who wish to implement community-engaged practices into their work. Lauren received her Master of Fine Arts in Performance from The University of Southern Mississippi and her BA from North Carolina Central University. Lauren lives joyfully in New Orleans with her husband and their three children.

Mauricio Tafur Salgado

(he/him)

Mauricio is an Associate Arts Professor of Theatre Studies, Director of Applied Theatre, and the Interim Chair at the Department of Drama in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Mauricio is mestizo + first gen + born to proudly subversive Colombians + brown-skinned + amateur bio-regionalist + aspiring theologian + cis-hetero + married + father + artist, pursuing justice and healing through a decolonial framework. He collaborates to organize space where folx rehearse revolution, compromise, rage, tolerance, strength, trust, and vulnerability.

Mauricio co-founded Arts Ignite where he recruited, trained, and supported more than 325 teaching artists and created and implemented 23 programs for artistic youth. He is also a Core Faculty member with artEquity and is working on producing and acting in El Mentiroso, an irreverent dance theatre descent into the subconscious of a fool, that he co-created with An-lin Dauber and Chelsea Ainsworth. He has worked as a facilitator, actor, deviser, and director with communities in Peru, the Dominican Republic, South Africa, India, Belgium, Germany, Scotland, and the United States. He has taught at the Boston Conservatory, Brown University, Santa Clara University, LaGuardia Community College, and Kingsborough Community College. He co-leads a WHO Commission on Arts Practice and the Ethics of Care.
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Nissy Aya
(nissy; she/ze/we)

Nissy is a playwright, dramaturg, and educator/facilitator with many years experience building and curating artistic programming, opportunities, and play spaces for theatre practitioners. She has a vested interest in providing transformative support for emerging/early-career playwrights, directors, and dramaturgs. Nissy’s work also extends to curating and facilitating workshops, trainings, and events around crafting ecologies of care within our spaces, building individual and collective power, and harnessing radical imagination and creation as a pathway to shaping a liberated present and future.

Core facilitator with artEquity and Nicole Brewer’s Anti-Racist Theatre. Formerly with Brown Girl Recovery. Lecturer at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. Proud board member of the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice in New Orleans.

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Siobhan Juanita Brown

(he/him)

Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project as a student of the language since 2005. From 2013 to 2021, Siobhan was a language apprentice and member of the founding teaching team of Weetumuw Katnuhtôhtâkamuq, the first Wôpanâak language and culture immersion school providing academic and Indigenous education using a Montessori pedagogy for decolonization and language reclamation. She is Montessori certified for primary ages 3–6 and has a BFA in Performing Arts from Emerson College and graduate certificate in Acting from the American Repertory Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University. 

Siobhan has served as the Co-Indigenous Solidarity & Sovereignty Officer for the board of Montessori for Social Justice. She was also Co-Chair of the Representation, Equity, and Diversity team for the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for Region 1, representing the northeast. At Boston University School of Theatre, Siobhan was Guest Artist for Patterns of Wind, a devised work performed in the Booth Theatre. Students explored Indigenous storytelling and community practices rooted in the land of the Wôpanâak. As an adjunct professor at Brown University in the Brown/Trinity acting program, she taught Liberatory Strategies for Whole Artist Collaboration. Siobhan is also serving as Director for We Are The Land, a community devised play that shares historical and contemporary perspectives on the Wampanoag experience and our sacred relationship to the land.

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2025 Alumni Gathering