Hello! My name is Matthew Armstead (they/them). I weave Blackness, queerness, and spirit with structure, curiosity, and creativity to build power and belonging.
I founded Culture Work Studios for partnerships with organizations, groups, and leaders. Connect with me there at cultureworkstudios.com.
Learn more about me below.
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I infuse theater, music, and body-based practices into organizational processes. Creativity encourages innovative thinking, welcomes cultural margins, and creates sustainable cultures. This helps you plan strategies, manage cross-cultural teams, develop new leaders, navigate conflict, and access your wisdom.
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I use participatory tools, in-person and online, that increase engagement by embedding assessment and experimentation throughout the design process.
With this support, you identify and engage areas for growth, create policies and systems, and develop strategic plans that increase engagement.
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I write, perform , and co-create performances that engage audiences as active participants.
Biography
Matthew Armstead cultivates the intersections of justice movements, artistic expression, and collective liberation. They have over 15 years of experience building organizations, developing leaders, and resolving conflict across social and structural power differences. Their facilitation style weaves in theater practices to create opportunities for people to embody the futures they strive to create.
Matthew has organized and won campaigns for environmental justice, racial justice, LGBTQ liberation, and accountability among masculine-identified people. They have trained, coached, and designed programs for US-based and global audiences, including Southerners on New Ground, Amnesty International USA, New Economy Organiser, Resource Generation, Theatre Horizon, and the Sunrise Movement.
In their theatre practice, audiences are engage as active participants to co-create and play. They weaves together community organizing, popular education, and physical theatre techniques to create performances that engage audiences as active participants.
Recent performance, playwriting, and co-creation credits include: Song Bridge (Cannonball Festival); Pirate Queen & Church of Loneliness (Philadelphia Fringe Festival); Boy Project (FringeArts Philadelphia); and Inspira: The Power of the Spiritual (Theatre for Transformation).
Matthew founded Culture Work Studios in 2019 with the hope of helping people welcome liberation now. Matthew serves as Senior Partnerships & Practice Specialist at We Make the Future where they work alongside state, national, and grassroots partners to implement the Race Class Narrative and other empirically-backed narratives. They support training and capacity building for activists and organizers as a Core Trainer with Training for Change.
Their work is informed by Niyonu Spann of Co-Creating Effective and Inclusive Organizations, Training for Change, and the Process Work Institute. Matthew has a M.F.A. with Pig Iron Theatre Company and University of the Arts, and has a B.A. in Theater and Women's Studies from Swarthmore College.
View a pdf of Matthew's resume here.