Meet the Retreatant: Amy Brooks

Amy Brooks is a dramaturg, actor, journalist, and teacher from the wild and wonderful state of West Virginia. She received a BFA in Acting from West Virginia University and is currently an MFA Dramaturgy teaching assistant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is a co-founder and Graduate Producer of the UMass New Play Lab. Her devised theater credits at UMass include a collaborative collage of autobiographical poems entitled Seven, and No Filter/With or Without You, a dance/monologue/spoken word examination of social media’s impact on undergraduate identity. Prior to her journey East, Amy lived and worked as a writer, production dramaturg, and actor in Dayton, Ohio. She was a core company member of the SEED Theatre Project, where she co-directed and dramaturged Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree, as well as company dramaturg and performer with the Free Shakespeare! troupe. Amy’s theater criticism and arts features were published for two years in Impact Weekly (now the Dayton City Paper); she also read scripts for FutureFest, Dayton’s international new play festival, and served as a performance mentor for young actors at Town Hall Theatre and W. Shakespeare & Co.