data theatre pilot grants

We are excited to invite applications for the Data Theatre Collaborative at Northeastern University’s pilot grant program, offered in partnership with ATHE with support from the Mellon Foundation.

What Is Data Theatre?

Data theatre is, essentially, applied theatre that uses quantitative or mixed methods data as source material. Like other applied theatre practices, it draws on participatory and community-based performance techniques to engage people in collective meaning-making, and it relies on the lived experiences of its participants. What is distinctive about data theatre is that quantitative data — alongside qualitative and/or archival material — is central to what gets interpreted and performed.

In data theatre, community members work with theatre artists to interpret, respond to, and generate new knowledge about data that matters to their lives. The practice can take many forms — a series of deliberative workshops, a devised performance, a community event, or some combination — but at its core it is always about rehumanizing data: situating numbers in lived experience and opening them up to collective interpretation.

Data theatre can be applied across a wide range of contexts: a classroom engaging students in community-based research, a civic organization supporting residents in local planning, a public health initiative making epidemiological data accessible, a museum or library creating space for community conversation. What these applications share is a commitment to broadening who gets to participate in data-driven conversations — and how.

The Data Theatre Collaborative at Northeastern University has developed and piloted this practice through a civic engagement application: Civic Data Theatre, which uses data theatre methods to support community participation in municipal policy processes. Our first project, The Numbers, engaged hundreds of Boston residents in real-time data collection and deliberation about climate action priorities, in partnership with the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of the Environment, Hyde Square Task Force, and La Colaborativa. Civic Data Theatre is one application of data theatre — and the proof-of-concept that grounds this grant program — but it is not the only one we hope to see grow.

About the Pilot Replication Grants Program

The Data Theatre Collaborative is offering five $5,000 pilot grants to support faculty, community-based researchers, artists, and civic practitioners in developing their own data theatre projects. Our goal is to seed new data theatre work across diverse disciplinary and community contexts and to build a network of practitioners exploring how embodied, rehumanized data can inform teaching, learning, and civic life.

Pilot grants may support:

• Devised data theatre performances or public events developed in partnership with community organizations or other collaborator

• Participatory data theatre workshops integrated into existing community-partnered courses or research projects

• Planning grants to seed a new community partnership and develop future data theatre curricula or projects

All grant recipients will receive coaching from a member of the Data Theatre Collaborative team — including support with data curation and/or collection, which is built into the program — and will document and conduct a self-assessment of their project. We will synthesize findings across the cohort to understand the broader impacts of the pilot program and contribute to an emerging field of practice.

Grant recipients will be expected to conduct their data theatre work between January 2027 and July 2027, present on their projects at the ATHE 2027 Annual Conference (virtual), and submit a 2-3 page grant report by August 15, 2027.

What Makes a Strong Proposal?

We’re looking for projects that take data theatre seriously as a method for community engagement and meaning-making — not just as a novel format, but as an intentional approach to broadening who gets to participate in data-driven conversations, whether those conversations happen in classrooms, research settings, civic contexts, or elsewhere. Strong proposals will:

• Be grounded in community partnership.
  Strong proposals will articulate a clear community context and a genuine intention to engage community members as collaborators. Existing relationships are great, but this grant can also be a way to seed a new one.

• Demonstrate artistic intentionality.
  Projects should involve artists with experience in devised or community-based performance, or have a clear plan for bringing that expertise into the project.

• Have a clear sense of the data.
  Proposals don’t need to have specific datasets in hand — identifying and curating data is something the Data Theatre Collaborative team can support. Strong proposals will have a clear sense of what kind of data they want to engage with and why it matters to the community involved.

• Reach people who have historically been excluded from the rooms where data gets interpreted and used.

• Be realistic in scope.
  A $5,000 grant can support a meaningful pilot — a workshop series, a community event, a developmental workshop of a new performance piece, a process that builds a new collaborative partnership. Proposals should be honest about what’s achievable with the available resources.

• Include a thoughtful documentation and assessment plan.
  Strong proposals will describe how grantees plan to document their work and assess how their work meets their project’s goals in context-appropriate way.

We welcome proposals from a wide range of disciplinary and institutional contexts — theatre, education, public health, urban planning, community organizing, and beyond. Coaching from our team is built in, including support with data and the integration of that data into drama activities.