LOBA Lab
A theatre and ritual-based performance lab
Providence, RI
About
LOBA Lab is a uniquely structured theater and performance incubator that has, over the last seven months, been supporting a cohort of 9 BIPOC artists in Rhode Island. Cultivating a common space of practice, artists were given time and resources to ideate each of their individual pieces, devise new performances together, and learn from each other as well as from guest artists. They now prepare to share this creative process during our inaugural showcase in early May 2025. Come witness each artist's unique approach to the craft of live performance.
The Curriculum
We have centered our creative incubator towards deepening the creative practice of each artist. The result is a combination of personal narratives and distinctive uses of performance tools, spread across a two-day showcase.
Creating a space of collective development is a key feature of LOBA Lab. Over the course of seven months, we held several gatherings, creative retreats, rehearsals and directorial sessions to build individual pieces – as a group.
Our creative work benefits from a multiplicity of perspectives, it acknowledges the complex circumstances that we live through, and it emerges as a raw work-in-progress that local theaters and producers can choose to scale as original and ground-breaking performances.
Our goal is to revitalize the live-arts sector by fully supporting the incredible talent that exists in our city, and connecting it with new audiences. Join us in this journey.
Meet the Artists
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Sussy Santana is a poet, arts facilitator, and culture artisan who leads creative experiences and writing workshops, guiding participants through exploration, visualization, and goal-setting. She has published four poetry works and creates 'llamados'—calls for action engage community in collective public performances. As an Arts & Health practitioner, Sussy collaborated with the Rhode Island Public Health Institute to bring artistic interventions to local health centers. Her public art interventions, including ‘Pregonera,’ have taken place in barbershops and bodegas in Providence and Mexico. Sussy is the first Latina to receive the MacColl Johnson Fellowship in writing. She is a Creative Community Health Worker Fellowship recipient from the City of Providence, and a 2025 Global Arts in Medicine Fellow.
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Born and raised in Georgia, Becci Davis now calls Providence, Rhode Island home. Her research-based practice creates personal geography through accumulations of images, text and occupying space with her body. Becci has been the recipient of the RI Humanities’ Public Humanities Scholar Award, the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Visual Art, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship in New Genres, and the RISD Museum Artist Fellowship. She teaches Foundations in Brown University’s Department of Visual Art and serves on the board of Emergent Forest, a non-profit centering green burial and collective mourning. Becci is also a member of the WARP Collective, housed in Olneyville’s historic Atlantic Mills.
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Nan Joubá is an Argentinean-born performer, director and producer. He was trained in theater in Buenos Aires and filmmaking at Tokyo. Over the last decade he has accomplished projects for the stage, film & television and in public spaces. Some projects include the sailing performance series Quikuchá (supported by the Rhode Island Council on the Humanities and the Community Libraries of Providence); the queer Latinx podcast Thank you for listening (hosted at the RISD Museum); and the short play La Despedida (presented at the Mixed Magic Theater). He’s a recipient of the MacColl Johnson Fellowship for Creative Writing; and a National Arts Strategies Fellow. He’s a past grantee of the New England Foundation for the Arts; a writer in residency at Studios at Mass MoCA and at Cité Internationale Des Arts (France); among other honors. He’s also the founder of the Ministry of Future Access, a cultural programming platform for collective relearning.
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Gina Rodríguez-Drix is a writer whose art focuses on ancestry and the resilience found in families separated by sea, sanction, and ideology. The daughter of a refugee, Gina is currently working on a novel about the 1980 Mariel boatlift and its echoes. Gina is a recent recipient of the MacColl Johnson Fellowship for Creative Writing and a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop founded by author Sandra Cisneros. She has received artist funding from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Gina’s work as an arts administrator spans the nonprofit cultural sector, public service, and higher education. In 2020 Americans for the Arts awarded her an Emerging Arts Leader. She is the former Deputy Director of the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, where she facilitated creative placemaking projects, managed the City’s public art program, and developed cultural policy. Gina now supports new generations of theatre makers at Brown University’s Department of Africana Studies /Rites and Reason Theatre. Daughter, mother, partner, tía, sister, and birth worker, her most important work is with family, in community, and for our collective extended relations.
Photo credit: Cat Laine
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Deidra Montgomery loves music. Inspired by a diversity of sonic influences, Deidra creates music that reflects their multifaceted queerness, fatness, Blackness, beauty, creativity, and boundless love for humanity. Deidra began playing trombone at age eleven and has hardly put it down since. They joined Undertow Brass Band in 2019 and have become a frequent performer with the Providence-based Chinese psychedelic pop band DakouDakou and cellist, composer, and interdisciplinary performer EDT. A renowned Sacred Harp singer, Deidra has taught Sacred Harp singing schools in the Mid-Atlantic, New England, and Pacific Northwest regions of the United States and was an instructor at Camp Fasola in Anniston, AL, in 2012 and 2013. In addition to their artistic practices, Deidra is a co-owner and consultant with Congruence Cultural Strategies, and a certified life, leadership, and executive coach. Deidra graduated from Goucher College with an M.A. in Arts Administration and from Amherst College with a B.A. in Music, during which time they studied trombone with Norman Bolter and Neal Melley.
deidramontgomery.com
@deidrainpublicPhoto credit: Jeffrey Filiault
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Justice Ameer is a poet, facilitator, and political educator in Providence, RI. Xe is a co-founding member of blackearth collective + lab. Xe is a two-time Providence Grand Slam champion and a member of the inaugural co-champion team of the Feminine Empowerment Movement Slam. Xe is a Pink Door Fellow and Faculty member, and xe was an Artist-in-Residence at Williams College in Spring 2020. Ameer co-created the theatrical production ANTHEM with Chrysanthemum at American Repertory Theater’s OBERON. Xe has travelled around the United States performing and hosting writing and spoken word workshops. Xyr work can be found in Split This Rock, the Academy of American Poets, POETRY magazine, The Nation, and anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic and Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems among many others.
justiceameerpoetry.com
@thejusticeameerPhoto credit: Jimmy Gaines
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Charlotte Abotsi is a poet and writer raised in Providence, Rhode Island. As a spoken word poet, she has competed in several international poetry slams. Her work has been written about in HuffPost and Mic.com, and her poems can be read in Wax Nine journal and The Chicago Reader. She has received fellowships from the Pink Door Writing Retreat, the Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, Tin House, DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, AIR Serenbe, Define American, and Undocupoets. She co-curated season two of the poetry-based web series Ours Poetica for The Poetry Foundation.
Photo credit: Em Jiang
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Vatic Astahili Tayari Kuumba [V.A.T.K] is an artist, writer, educator, and father of three children. Vatic is Co- Executive Director of One Square World, a racial and climate justice organization, where he applies creativity as an essential tool for policy design, civic engagement, and popular education. Vatic is the Artist in residence for Chad Brown and the Lead artist for Casa Futura part of One Nation One Project’s Arts for Everybody Initiative. Vatic is co-director and lead writer for MoralDocs (2021), an abolitionist transmedia project and virtual reality film. He was a collaborator on the creation of the City of Providence’s Climate Justice Plan and the Environmental Racism Resolution passed by Providence City Council in 2020, as part of the Racial and Environmental Justice Committee (REJC) in Providence. Vatic was Artist-in-Residence for the State Association of Arts Agencies in 2019. His first theatrical production, A Furtive Movement (2017) premiered at AS220 in Providence, RI, as a culmination of his AS220 Live Arts Residency. Vatic is also the recipient of the RI State Council for the Arts (RISCA) 2018 Fellowship for Theater and 2017 Playwright Merit Fellowship.
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Shey 'Rí Acu' Rivera Ríos is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker who uses storytelling across mediums to create immersive worlds of magic and liberation. Rivera has 14 years of experience in the nonprofit arts sector intersecting creative practice with urban planning and racial equity. Rivera was the former Artistic/Co-Director of AS220, a renowned arts organization and creative incubator in Providence, RI, and successor to AS220 founder Umberto Crenca. After 8 years at AS220, Rivera took on the role of Director of Inclusive Regional Development at MIT CoLab, in the Dept of Urban Studies and Planning of MIT, where they co-designed and implemented workshops on collective leadership and community innovation in Colombia. Today, Rivera is an independent artist and consultant specializing in the creative development of artist communities, the intersection of culture and urban planning, and arts management grounded on gender and racial justice. Rivera currently also serves as Co-Executive Director of One Square World, a New England-based environmental justice nonprofit. Rivera is the founder of Studio Loba in Providence, a storytelling lab that designs and produces art and culture projects that support social change. Notable projects include: Lead curator for El Corazón de Holyoke public art project, Mi Gente Public Art project in Providence, the transmedia and research-based art works MoralDocs and FANTASY ISLAND, the Luna Loba performance series, and the theatrical productions Antigonx (2022) and Fire Flowers and a Time Machine (2020). Rivera was born and raised in Borikén/Puerto Rico and is based in Providence, RI -land of Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples.
Photo credit: Cat Laine
The 2025 Showcase
A collection of 9 performances that combine the artists’ personal narratives and perspectives with distinctive and experimental use of performance tools.
Meet the team
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Shey Rivera Ríos (they/them) is an artist, writer and cultural worker who creates digital and physical altars that interrupt colonial memory and liberate queer Boricua futurity. Their work is transmedial, with narratives interwoven across multiple platforms and formats. They use digital art, performance, and installation to create a mejunje (mix) where magical realism and science fiction become doors to decolonial futures. Learn more at www.sheyrivera.com
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Nan Joubá (he/his) is an Argentinean-born performer, director and producer. He was trained in theater in Buenos Aires and filmmaking at Tokyo. Over the last decade he has accomplished projects for the stage, film & television and in public spaces. Learn more at www.nanjouba.com
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Ruchika Nambiar (she/her) is a miniaturist, book artist and writer who produces experimental, interactive, multimedia stories. Her work ranges from artist books and graphic memoirs to dioramas and interactive social-media narratives, weaving together image-making, object-making and writing. She also currently teaches at RISD. Know more at www.ruchikanambiar.com
Partners
