Much of Angela Washko’s work begins with a simple question: What if we took the media we consume every day — the video games, the reality shows, the online chatrooms — as seriously as we take traditional art spaces? What if we examined them not just as distractions or products but as public arenas where identity, power and belonging are actively negotiated?

With a practice that spans performance, social engagement, video games and film, Angela has spent more than a decade doing just that. Her work doesn’t just critique digital culture from the outside; it embeds itself within it, creating space for dialogue in places not usually known for nuance. Whether she’s convening feminist councils in the fantasy worlds of online gaming or crafting interactive experiences from the textures of real life, her projects ask how we behave when no one — or everyone — is watching.

In 2012 she launched The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an in-game social practice project that sparked multi-hour dialogues between initially hostile players. Later she created The Game: The Game, an RPG in which a player could try to negotiate a bar packed full of male pickup artists following the same seduction playbook. And just last year, fascinated by the allure and promises of reality television, she directed her first documentary, “Workhorse Queen,” about a few members of the tightknit drag community in Rochester, NY and their complicated relationship with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the commerce of 21st century drag celebrity.

In this interview, Angela, now a full professor and the MFA Program Director at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, reflects on how she found her voice as an artist inside a male-dominated gaming culture, why she continues to work in and not against the media she critiques and how becoming a mother during a global crisis reshaped her ideas of creativity, care and time.

https://angelawashko.com/home.html

At a time when theaters everywhere are competing with an ever-expanding array of at-home entertainment and struggling to fill seats, some artists are asking not what plays to produce but how to produce them differently. Graham Wetterhahn’s answer was to found his own company, After Hours Theatre Company in Los Angeles. With a background that spans traditional theater, theme parks and digital media, he has spent recent years creating “immersive-enhanced” productions that invite audiences not just to watch a story unfold but to step directly into it.

In After Hours’ 2018 production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” for instance, audience members were admitted to a fictional 1960s psychiatric hospital and cast as patients, free to explore hidden rooms and interact with characters for a full hour before the scripted performance even began. The production cleverly merged immersive design with a fully staged, licensed play, creating an experience that theatergoers of all stripes — and with varying levels of comfort with the notion of participation — could embrace. And it worked, selling out night after night and drawing in an audience that was overwhelmingly under 40.

After Hours has gone on not only to produce a broad array of successful immersive-enhanced productions but also to organize the Los Angeles Immersive Invitational, a collegial competition that brings together the city’s most adventurous immersive storytellers under one roof and gives them 48 hours to create a new 10-minute piece based on a single prompt. The L.A. Invitational just completed its fifth iteration, and After Hours is now producing Invitationals in other American cities.

In this episode, Graham shares why he believes After Hours’ hybrid experiences may hold the key to live theater’s future, how the company has built a sustainable — if still scrappy — for-profit model, and what his journey has taught him about turning casual eventgoers into passionate theater fans.

https://www.grahamwetterhahn.com/

https://www.afterhourstheatre.com/

To call conductor Jessica Bejarano an outlier in the American orchestral world is a mild understatement. Not only is she female at a time when there are still astonishingly few female conductors of professional orchestras — according to Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, in the 2024-25 season, only 20.8% of concerts by the top 21 orchestras in the U.S. were conducted by women, and today only one of the 25 largest American orchestras has a female music director — but she is also Latina and lesbian. When Jessica Bejarano steps onto the podium, therefore, she doesn’t just conduct; sporting visible tattoos — her favorite conductor Tchaikovsky is prominently featured on her right forearm — and projecting a down-to-earth warmth and grit she learned from her immigrant mother in working class East L.A., she redefines what leadership can look like in the orchestral world.

By 2019, Jessica was already building a solid resume, leading community orchestras in the Bay Area as well as accepting freelance directing gigs around the world. Continually faced with the glacial pace of change in the classical music world, however, she took a leap of faith and founded her own ensemble, the San Francisco Philharmonic. The SF Phil’s mission is to center diversity, equity and inclusion not just as a tagline but as a lived experience for musicians and audiences alike. In the last six years, under her leadership, the SF Phil has collaborated with everyone from Grammy-winning composers to local rap icons, while also offering masterclasses for emerging conductors and commissioning new works by underrepresented composers.



In this interview, Jessica shares the winding, impassioned path that led her from East L.A. trumpet player to visionary conductor and founder. She discusses how she built the SF Phil from scratch — including funding its first concert out of her own savings — and how she continues to push the boundaries of what a 21st century orchestra can be.

https://www.sfphil.org/about