Brad Erickson

Background

About Brad Erickson

Artist, advocate, executive leader, coach: I am passionate about helping mission-driven arts professionals and organizations live out their values, reconnect with their purpose, and achieve their vision. An award-winning playwright, actor, arts administrator and advocate, I relocated from San Francisco to Summerville, SC in 2021. Here my husband and I co-founded South Porch Artists Residency where we support artists with the dedicated time, space and community they need to advance their creative work. Before coming to South Carolina, I served for 19 years as executive director of Theatre Bay Area (TBA)—one of the nation’s largest regional performing arts service organizations, counting 300 theater companies and nearly individual artists as members. During my tenure, TBA expanded its programming, and enhanced its impact and reputation nationwide. I spearheaded groundbreaking national research initiatives such as “Intrinsic Impact,” focusing on the deeply-felt impact of the art experience, and “Triple Play,” exploring the “triangular relationship” between artists, audiences and theatre organizations. Partnering with artEquity, I led TBA to launch Theatres Advancing Social Change (TASC) an initiative to advance equity, diversity and inclusion in the Bay Area’s theatre sector. I am a committed arts advocate and served for 16 years on the boards of California Arts Advocates and Californians for the Arts. In 2016, I was honored to receive the Alene Valkanas Award for Statewide Advocacy from Americans for the Arts. Previous to TBA, I served as the executive director of the Northern California Minority Supplier Development Council, a nonprofit committed to advancing economic equity. I am also an award-winning playwright and actor with a BFA in Acting from Chicago's Goodman School of Drama (now The Theatre School at DePaul University). Plays of mine that have received full productions include, among others, American Dream, el sueño del otro lado which premiered at New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC) in San Francisco; The War at Home, which premiered at NCTC and won “Best New Script” from the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle; Woody & Me, which was named best new play by the Festival of Emerging American Theatre and received a grant from the NEA for its premiere at Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis. I currently have several scripts in development including a new musical Kinda Home, with composer and lyricist Min Kahng, and Kansas, which has received developmental support from PURE Theater in Charleston and the Djerassi Artist-in-Residency Program.