06/15/2026
The Mercy Velvet Project creative team highlights continue with our very special Producing Director (and so much more): Shilarna Stokes! Shilarna has been a consistent supporter of kamrDANCE since 2020, has been helping our project navigate the lack of space for dance and interdisciplinary works in New Haven since 2024, and has officially been our producing director since December 2025. It is because of Shilarna that we are premiering this work at the Yale Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies Blackbox and we are SO grateful!
Shilarna Stokes (she/her) is a professor in the Program in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at Yale, an affiliate in the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and a Fellow of Ezra Stiles College. She has directed more than forty new plays and musicals for regional and NYC theaters including Cherry Lane, Geva, Soho Rep, Boston Theatre Works, Epic Theatre, Williamstown Theater Festival, and the Lark among many others. Classics, translations, and other previously published works she has directed include The Comedy of Errors, Measure for Measure,The Ghost Sonata, Hedda Gabler, The Philadelphia Story, Escape from Happiness, Bat Boy! the Musical, Getting Out, A Lie of the Mind, One Man, Two Guvnors, The Chairs, Flight, and The Coast of Illyria. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Second Stage, Williamstown, the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, the Women’s Project, Geva, and the SSDC. While serving as an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Ohio State, she was the founder and artistic director of Be the Street, a site-specific, community-devised project, two years in the making, that worked with hundreds of Columbus residents to produce a new play from their stories performed by a cast of thirty children and adults in Spanish and English. Most recently she has directed readings in New Haven and NYC of The Empty Shell of War, a new play she is developing with Belarusian playwright-in-exile, Andrei Kureichik, and PEACHY, a previously unproduced play by Jasmine Sharma. She holds a BA in Literature and Theater Studies from Yale as well an MFA in Directing and a PhD in Theatre from Columbia.
6/26, 7:30 pm
6/27, 3 & 8:30 pm
