June 9th, 2021
Black Hills Community Theatre (BHCT) announces that after a nationwide search Jayme Kilburn will be the organization’s next Artistic Director starting in July. Ms. Kilburn is currently finishing a PhD in Theater from Cornell University in Ithaca New York. She has extensive directing experience in both professional and community theatres, within diverse locales and settings from California, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, a men’s prison in New York, and with a native nation of upstate New York and Canada. Kilburn takes over the position from current Artistic Director Zach Curtis who departs in late June to fill the position of Producing Artistic Director of the Chenango River Theatre in Greene, New York.
Kilburn visited Rapid City in May and says “I am beyond thrilled to be joining the team at BHCT! When I visited the theatre, I was struck by its unique collegial and collaborative environment. As a multidisciplinary artist, I am excited to be working with an organization that invites its artists and staff to work in various modes, bringing the full range of their abilities to the table. I look forward to continuing BHCT’s mission of producing dynamic stories, helping to expand the organization’s community outreach, and collaborating with the talented community of artists in Rapid City. As the Artistic Director of BHCT, my door will always be open. I am eager to meet more of the community when I arrive in August!”
BHCT Executive Director Nick Johnson says, “There were an amazing number of highly qualified and talented applicants for the position. Jayme’s accomplishments, unique experiences and especially her personality really make her the ideal person to take up the role of our new Artistic Director. We can’t wait to introduce her to the community.”
Kilburn is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara and New York University. Highlights of her professional career include five years as the Founding Artistic Director of the Strand Theater Company in Baltimore, the curation of an interactive theater piece, The Artist Peep Show, for the FAB Festival in NYC, as well as the direction of traditional plays and musicals, such as The Drowsy Chaperone, for Johns Hopkins University. Kilburn has collaborated with Sue Perlgut, founder of the famed second wave theatre collective, It’s All Right to Be Woman, in creating the Women’s Wisdom Project, and devised a performance with the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne for their annual international festival.
More recently, Kilburn worked with the Phoenix Players Theatre Group founded in 2009 by a small group of incarcerated men at Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Auburn New York. She has also been collaborating on a virtual project entitled Diamantina Rosa, a solo performance that weaves together stories of Mexican women. She previously served on the board of Civic Ensemble, a community-based theater in Ithaca, NY.
For her directing work, Kilburn has won two Best Production Awards for directing projects in the Baltimore Playwright’s Festival. She was named one of broadwayworld.com’s 2006 Up and Comers, broadwayworld.com’s 2007 Best of Baltimore Community Theater for Best Direction, and received recognition for the Strand as one of the “top five theaters in Baltimore 2011” from Baltimore Magazine. Kilburn has directed over thirty plays including Mr. Burns, a post-electric play by Anne Washburn, Real Women Have Curves by Josefina Lopez, In The Blood by Suzan Lori-Parks, One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace, and That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play by Sheila Callaghan. Kilburn’s full-length plays, Ding! Or Bye Bye Dad and Garbage Kids, received their world premiere productions at Venus Theatre in 2014 and 2016.
With an abiding interest in using theater as a tool for social change, Kilburn founded the Women’s Performance Workshop (WPW) in 2015, a community-based workshop for women-identified participants. Using feminist performance methodologies, including community-based exercises and Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, participants write and direct their own stories, cooperatively weaving them together to create a full performance.
In March 2019, Kilburn organized a campus-wide community symposium at Cornell entitled “Feminist Directions: Performance, Power, and Leadership” which brought together dozens of international, national, and locally-based artists and activists to engage in conversations surrounding artistic practice and power. In October 2020, Kilburn collaborated with a group of Cornell graduates and undergraduates to produce Virtual Vibrance: Making, Shaking, Breaking Performance. Virtual Vibrance was an experimental project in form and function that celebrated Black women artists. Kilburn’s research focuses on feminist performance, specifically as it pertains to women directors.