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New York City's Visible Theater is focused on promoting social justice through performance; this includes a key focus on people with disabilities as creators, performers and subjects of theatrical work. Visible Theater offers a range of programs and resources, including the development and performance of new plays, workshops and retreats at a fully accessible center outside of New York City. Meanwhile the group's True Story Project seeks to develop autobiographical performance pieces around a given theme that tour throughout New York City.

The group's True Story Project is focused on providing a resource for performers with a disability and creatives, where they can receive training and be taken seriously in their chosen profession. True Story Project themed performances have included works about faith and sex, two areas where people who don't have the experience of disability often make incorrect assumptions about those who are living with disabilities. There is also a children-focused component of the True Story Project that connects children to adults living with different disabilities.

Visible Theater was founded in 2000 by Krista Smith, who is an actor, director and disability advocate. She is also a member of the Actor's Studio and teaches at Johns Hopkins University, with a goal to help creators engage in more inherently truthful storytelling. One of the goals of Visible Theater performances is to connect the individual experience with its greater historical landscape. A great example of this is Kraneknhaus Blues, which was actually commissioned for Visible Theater. The work focuses on the experience of people with disabilities during the holocaust, which is not a subject that has experienced any significant cultural examination. Several of the characters and actors appearing in the play are people living with disabilities.

Visible Theater is unique in that it focuses on people with disabilities as part of every aspect of the creative process, but the theater is not exclusively dedicated to disability issues. Rather, Visible Theater integrates people with disabilities into all aspects of their work, making it clear through a landscape of actors both with and without disabilities that the stories of people living with disabilities have relevance to everyone.

Additionally, by providing a significant role for people with disabilities in works both fictional and factual, Visible Theater effectively addresses the realities of living with a disability on two levels - both in the work that is presented and through those who are involved in the creative process. In a world where actors are often assumed to be people without the experience of disability, Visible Theater reminds audiences of the varieties and possibilities of the human body in its myriad forms. This worldview is represented in the company's motto: "bringing the anarchy of life to the discipline of the stage." The world may not always be as we expect it, but there is always a way to represent those experiences to others.

Visible Theater holds interviews each year to consider new members and particularly seeks out those who feel marginalized due to age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or disability. While the theater seeks experienced and gifted artists, it demands that those artists are committed to continuing to develop their craft and expression. As a non-profit group, Visible Theater relies on the donations of individual supporters and organizations to continue operations. Supporters include the New York State Council of the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, the David Rockefeller Fund, McGraw-Hill and the New Jersey Community Trust.

See Racheline Maltese's Profile on Disaboom
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