Arts in Human Rights Education
Our Arts in Human Rights Education programs offer educators the necessary tools to provide students with opportunities to take action around an issue of personal importance through a medium that they can most effectively and authentically express themselves in.
Through different mediums of art, students will develop projects that creatively express their personal relationship with human rights. By using art to find creative solutions to community and global issues, students will take transformative action that will allow them to see, understand, and engage with the world in a personal and meaningful way.
Our current arts program includes Arts in Human Rights Education trainings; theater; playwriting and spoken-word sessions; the play “Speak Truth to Power: Voices From Beyond the Dark” and guidance for writing and performing defender monologues; a video contest; and lessons that feature the stories of artists changing the world through different mediums.
“All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people – speaking out – in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out – in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes – let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind.”
—Robert F. Kennedy
Voices from Beyond the Dark
Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean-American writer and human rights activist, adapted the stories of human rights defenders featured in Kerry Kennedy’s book Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World into a play featuring a powerful montage of defender monologues. Performing the play enables students to embody these powerful stories and begin to see themselves as human rights defenders.
Download the play in your languages
Additional Monologues
Watch our Speak Truth to Power play performances
How to Produce and Promote a Voices from Beyond the Dark Performance
Writing and Performing Human Rights Defender Monologues
During a three day theater workshop, Lucero Angeles performed the monologue for Oaxaca based human rights defender Marta Pablo Cruz, mother of Jassiel Vladimir Florian Pablo who was disappeared in 2019. Marta is the co-founder of Oaxaqueños buscando a los nuestros A.C., an organization dedicated to raising awareness, providing support for families, and putting pressure on authorities to find those who have been disappeared.
Download Marta’s Monologue
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