empowerment | mutual support session — international producers

Producers often enable and hold spaces for other parties and their processes. As interfaces that often work alone, they mediate between all artistic and administrative, creative-organizational and creative-technical participants. But what about their own needs and experiences?
Through various mutual support sessions with Michelle Bray, produktionsbande offers a safer space for exchange that centers producers with experiences of Black, Afro-German and producers of Color and their perspectives. Michelle is Black German and has been working in German-speaking theater since 2006.
This session will focus on the following topics: What does it mean to live and work in Germany without being a native speaker? 
What experiences have you had with cultural integration and adaptation in the German context? What strategies could you develop to network with other international producers who are facing similar challenges? Is there currently an opportunity to build a network of mutual support and collaboration within the international producer community in Germany?  What wishes do you have for your work practice? How should it change if necessary? 
Of course, you can also share and bring your own topics and problems during the session: What can mutual support look like? What needs and wishes are there for this exchange, such and similar spaces in general and especially in the context of produktionsbande? 

Michelle Bray was born the year "Farbe bekennen: Afro-German Women Tracing Their History" was first published, she was born in a small town in West Germany as a Black girl with roots in Germany, Greece, and North America. Questions of belonging and inclusion, as well as an intense preoccupation with the issue of racism, thus played a role in her life from an early age.
Since 2021, Michelle Bray has been working as a freelance diversity developer, bringing experience from the different fields she has worked in to this work through an interdisciplinary approach. Diversity development is more than "just a job" to her - it brings together everything she is interested in and passionate about. It is a pivotal concern, as she cares deeply about both the issues and the people she works with.