Urban Youth Theater Summer Performance
August 8, 2025
6:30pm
A core program of Abrons Arts Center since the 1990s, Urban Youth Theater (UYT) provides young New Yorkers the opportunity to learn about theater making.
This intergenerational research and performance project brings the archive to life with a century-old cautionary play written by an immigrant teenage girl living in the Lower East Side tenements in 1921.
Image by Michelle Levy
About Urban Youth Theater
A core program of Abrons Arts Center since the 1990s, Urban Youth Theater (UYT) provides young New Yorkers the opportunity to learn about theater making.
A diverse cohort of teen artists–selected through an audition process–is mentored by a professional theater artist who facilitates a devised theater curriculum that includes workshops ranging from improvisation to script writing. Urban Youth Theater participants are paid a stipend for their completion of the program.
In addition to learning about theater making, UYT participants gain valuable social and professional development skills, all while building community with other like-minded teens.
About Jonathan Nathaniel Dingle-el, Abrons Teaching Artist Faculty
As an artist, Jonathan Nathaniel is inspired to create theater that is accessible to inner-city communities of color. As a graduate of the Brooklyn College BFA Acting Program, he has had the pleasure of working with many artists from diverse communities of varying skill sets, who have gone on to found theater companies and various community outreach projects. He has worked with many local organizations such as Abrons Arts Center, The Living Mural, the New York Shakespeare Exchange, as well as The Motor Company NYC, a company whose work focuses on increasing site-responsive theater in local hubs within communities of color. Together, Jonathan Nathaniel and his colleagues work to decolonize theater by bringing it further from the traditional black box and two-thousand seat theaters and situating it within underserved communities in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.
About Michelle Levy, Guest Artist
Michelle Levy is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, storyteller, and educator. She uses performance, video, text, and collective engagement to investigate the mediated spaces where identity is constructed. Through a framework of "The Search" and "Research," she asks, how can we get closer to wisdom or “truth” when we remain alienated and disconnected from our own histories? Levy has presented her work in venues across New York City, as well as in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Krakow, Wieliczka, Szczecin, Warsaw, and Prague. Her current body of work exploring memory, diaspora, family archive, and untold women's stories between New York and Poland, has received support from: New York Council on the Arts; Asylum Arts / The Neighborhood; Abrons Arts Center; The Puffin Foundation; Union Docs; POLIN Museum of the HIstory of Polish Jews, Warsaw; the US Embassy Warsaw; and Festivalt and the Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow; amongst numerous others.