Advisory Council: Mari Brown

Mari Brown is a writer and dialogue facilitator based in New York City.  She recently ran a successful dialogue series called "Urgent Conversations" at the Daryl Roth theater after performances of "Masked," an Israeli play about three Palestinian brothers, which involved over 50 conversations about aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with over 100 participants, including rabbis, imams, pastors, artists, diplomats, activists, international reporters, and community leaders.  The series was featured on Al Jazeera English and in The New York Times. 

Mari is co-founder and co-president of Word on the Street Productions, an artistic company that creates and produces documentary theater.  She is the author of "There Goes the Neighborhood," a play about the gentrification of a neighborhood in Brooklyn which was the subject of two New York Times articles and which is currently being developed into a television pilot.  She and her creative partner are working on a new interview-based play about pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans.

Mari is active in the New York theater community and has organized and led several politically themed post-show discussions with notable speakers.  These include Adam Piore, the general editor of Newsweek, for Tim Robbins's "Embedded" at the Public Theater; Mike Loew, author of "Citizen You!" for Synapse Productions' "The Orwell Project"; and Leonard Weinglass, defense attorney for the Chicago Seven for Synapse's "The Chicago Conspiracy Trial."  Mari also worked at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum as a dialogue facilitator for ongoing public dialogues about immigration. 

It is her belief that listening to others' personal truths is a crucial way to both learn about the world and become more human, that is to say, to become more compassionate. She was raised Catholic, studied Tibetan Buddhism through the Naropa Institute, and currently considers herself a questioning agnostic.