Tyler Thomas

As a theater maker, I engage the body, text, and design to create movement-forward, communal experiences that bridge the ordinary to the sublime and center life on the periphery.

My work explores embodied cultural memory across the Black diaspora, viewing the body as a living archive. This often leads to collaborative experiments rooted in the found and the verbatim, engaging the archive as a means of (re)interrogating the past and weaving it to the present anew.

Through an interplay of dance, video, and primary source material, I seek to champion the intimate in the face of the systemic, making use of both personal account and historical record to challenge the myriad of forces that would have us forget.

Equal parts reckoning and recollection, my work aims to create the cultural conditions in which new ways of seeing and being can collectively emerge.

As an arts leader, I am driven by the question of how creative enterprise can be a stimulus for reimagining how our cities are designed and function. In response, I work to build place-based institutions that leverage multi-disciplinary practice as both a cross-cultural convener and a catalyst for new social possibilities.

Tyler Thomas is a director and theater maker working at the intersection of social design and artistic practice. Her work often uses found and archival source material to abstract the familiar, question centers of power, and create pathways for alternative thinking. Through performance investigations of non-traditional text, she creates physical explorations of past, present, and future worlds designed to enable critical inquiry, collective imagination, and unexpected encounters.

In 2020, Thomas co-created and directed Lessons in Survival, a digital anthology series developed with the Vineyard Theatre in New York, NY, and conceived by The Commissary, a pandemic-era collective of more than 40 theater artists co-led by Thomas. The piece re-performed interviews with revolutionary Black writers and artists from the 1960s-1990s through the use of an “in-ear” technique in which actors listened to the interview live and performed their words as they heard them in real time. A second iteration of the piece, Lessons in Survival: 1971, was staged at the Vineyard Theater in 2022, re-embodying the seminal 1971 conversation between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin that aired on SOUL!. Her work with The Commissary also included Why Would I Dare?, a virtual performance of court transcripts from the 2018 trial of Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas wrongfully convicted of voter fraud in 2016. The piece was produced in partnership with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, producer New Neighborhood, and Mason’s lawyer. Thomas is currently developing and co-directing We Shall Someday, a new musical amplifying the history and legacy of the 1961 Freedom Riders. Beginning in Montgomery at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the project will travel along the Freedom Riders route, partnering with local heritage and cultural organizations to engage community in the ongoing work for civil rights.

Other works directed by Thomas include the West Coast premiere of Stew, by Zora Howard, at Pasadena Playhouse, Pasadena, CA (2023); we are continuous, by Harrison David Rivers, premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, MA (2022); and The Sandalwood Box, by Mac Wellman, at The Flea Theater, New York, NY (2019). She has contributed writing to The Journal of Civic Media, Emerson College, Boston, MA (2024); Recipes for the (R)evolution (Yonkers International Press, 2023); and A Moment on the Clock of the World (Haymarket Books, 2019).

Thomas has been an Artist in Residence at the Vineyard Theatre (2021) and a participant in Lincoln Center’s LCT Directors Lab (2018). She is the recipient of the Vineyard Theatre’s 2020 Susan Stroman Directing Award, and New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Artistic Fellowship (2020-2021). 

As Associate Artistic Director of the national arts and health initiative, Arts for EveryBody, Thomas was a leader of one of the largest public art campaigns in recent United States history, supporting 18 cities to create and premiere an artistic project designed to improve community wellbeing. 

She has been a Visiting Artist at the Athens Conservatoire; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Santa Cruz; and New York University. Thomas holds an M.A. in Arts Politics and a B.F.A. in Theater from New York University Tisch School of the Arts.