Story Agency Lab: Reclaiming the Stories We Live

Story Agency Lab is an 8 week LGBTQ+ affirming, body-inclusive, and accessibility-centered participatory theatre and storytelling workshop open to adults of all identities. The workshop offers a gentle, imaginative space for people to notice, question, and reshape stories that have been handed to them about identity, care, belonging, bodies, relationships, work, goodness, and worth. The workshop combines restorative creative practice with concrete narrative and relational skills. Through gentle arrival, optional sensory and movement-based exploration, imaginative story-distance, folklore and metaphor, writing or drawing, optional voice work, and consent-based peer witnessing, participants explore at their own pace and in the form that works for them.

About Janine (she/her): Chicago-based storyteller, theatre artist, educator, narrative coach, and trained folklorist with an MA in Folk Studies, Janine is a graduate of the Global Arts in Medicine Fellowship and current participant in GAIMF Advance, where she creates participatory, healing-centered theatre and storytelling experiences rooted in narrative agency, imagination, ethical witnessing, and community care. Janine is also a co-founder of Theatre for Hope & Healing, where she helps create performance, workshops, and conversations that invite people to reclaim their stories and practice hope together.