Our Mission

The Ensemble Studio Theatre was founded by Curt Dempster in 1968 with a group of 20 theatre artists. It has since grown into a company of over 600 actors, directors, playwrights and designers.

The Ensemble Studio Theatre develops and produces original, provocative and authentic new plays. We engage and challenge our audiences in New York City and across the country. EST is a dynamic community committed to a collaborative process and dedicated to inclusion across all aspects of identity and perspective, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, sexuality, physical or mental ability, physical or mental health, and recovery. We acknowledge and work to end systemic marginalization and oppression at all levels of our organization. EST discovers and nurtures new voices and supports artists throughout their creative lives. We believe that this extraordinary support and our commitment to inclusivity are essential to yield extraordinary work.

Land Acknowledgment

We acknowledge that the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the city of New York is located on Lenapehoking, the unceded traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people who are also known by the colonial government as the Delaware Nation. The majority of Lenape peoples and the main political and cultural body of the tribe ended up in Oklahoma after repeated removals and relocations spanning over 50 years of exodus, leading halfway across Turtle Island in what is now known as North America.

We pay respect to Lenape people past, present, and future and their continuing presence here and throughout the Lenape diaspora. We acknowledge the Indigenous peoples who have and who presently live, work, create, and contribute to communities here in Lenapehoking.

However, this acknowledgment is incomplete without the input of the Lenape community. We recognize the importance of Indigenous nations to define their own terms, and EST is working to collaborate with members of the Lenape Center to create an updated acknowledgment.

We at EST know that these kinds of acknowledgments can be misused for stand-ins for actual decolonization work, which is something we bear in mind while we begin to dismantle the ongoing effects of the colonial legacy at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and elsewhere.

Learn more about the Lenape People at thelenapecenter.com

Learn more about the land you inhabit at native-land.ca

Labor Acknowledgment

We’ve been here.
We are here--
We’ll continue to be here.

EST would like to recognize the labor exploited on our colonized land -- labor forced from enslaved Black and African diasporic peoples and the continual forced displacement and systemic oppression of Black, Indigenous People of Color in the colonial United States.

We here at EST are reckoning with what this means for us and we are in the process of creating language to more comprehensively acknowledge the exploited labor of BIPOC people in the history of our country, New York, the theatre industry, and within our own organization. We have the privilege of rethinking the foundations on which our country is built, and in this moment there is an opportunity to change the story about who we are so that we can change how we move forward.