Programs

OWNING OUR FUTURE: A SYMPOSIUM
ON BIPOC INSTITUTIONAL OWNERSHIP

PRESENTED BY KELLY STRAYHORN THEATER

SIGN UP FOR UPDATES

KST is leading a groundbreaking national symposium that aims to reshape the future of accessible, equitable cultural spaces owned and anchored by BIPOC communities.

Guided by our vision “Owning Our Future. Thriving Where We Live.,” this three-day gathering in May 2025 serves as a platform to catalyze a critical national dialogue and chart a path forward.

Collaborating with an advisory committee of national and local colleagues, KST curates a cross-industry program that features discussions, performances, and celebrations with leaders in art, activism, urban planning, philanthropy, and government. Together we imagine new financial, operational, and physical structures for BIPOC-owned arts spaces, addressing the structural inequities that the pandemic laid bare.

The symposium spotlights organizations employing new strategies to safeguard culture in their communities. It engages forward-thinking stakeholders invested in emergent models. Look forward to thought-provoking panel sessions, inspiring keynote addresses, and dynamic performances by Pittsburgh and national artists.


GET INVOLVED

FRIDAY, MAY 16 – SUNDAY, MAY 18, 2025

While isolated conversations occur regularly, opportunities for fieldwide and cross-industry gatherings focused solely on this topic are rare. Owning Our Future offers a new platform to expand, reflect on and evolve this important national conversation. Join us as we confront the imperative to sustain cultural homes and envision a just and liberated future for all communities.

We invite you to join us for a variety of programming that includes keynote addresses, panel discussions, performances, offsite activities, film screenings, and community meals throughout the day from Friday, May 16 through Sunday, May 18, 2025. Tickets will be available in February, 2025. Join the mailing list for updates and announcements on our keynote speakers, calls for volunteers.

SIGN UP FOR UPDATES

To sponsor the Owning Our Future Symposium, contact Development & Communications Director Liz Rudnick at Lizrudnick@kelly-strayhnorn.org or call at 412.363.3000 x 321.


ABOUT KELLY STRAYHORN THEATER

Named after 20th century entertainment legends Billy Strayhorn and Gene Kelly, both natives of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Kelly Strayhorn Theater (KST) is a home for creative experimentation, community dialogue, and collective action rooted in the liberation of Black and queer people. We welcome our home to all who uplift Black, Indigenous, people of color, and queer voices. KST is an institutional arts anchor in Pittsburgh’s East End that has served the community for more than two decades. Since launching KST Presents programming in ’08, KST has been Black-led, fostering radical imagination for Black and queer arts, culture, and community in Pittsburgh by cultivating BIPOC and/or queer artists, entrepreneurs, and arts administrators, developing their careers, and shifting narratives around Black possibility.


LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

What we call Pittsburgh is the traditional and ancestral and unceded land of Indigenous people specifically though not exclusively the Osage Nation. The process of knowing and acknowledging the Indigenous history of the land we stand, live, work, protest, and play on is a way of honoring and expressing gratitude for Indigenous people, past, present and future. America was founded on the genocide of Indigenous people, and capture of their lands, and this country still has much work to do to repair the practice of enslaving African and Indigenous peoples. We offer this acknowledgement as a way to ground our work in an honest and transparent context, allowing us to build a future that works to repair these deep and often overlooked aspects of our nation. To find out more about Native land where you are and around the world you can visit native-land.ca.