Women Center Stage arrives!

It's here! It's here! With great fanfare and excitement, I present to you all...

...drum roll please...

...Women Center Stage!

WCS is our multi-disciplinary festival that brings together women artists, activists and thinkers whose work calls attention to human struggles globally.

Through July 17 we'll present Pulitzer Prize-winner Samantha Power, spoken word poet Staceyann Chin, Eve Ensler, Carol Gilligan to Azar Nafisi, a play about human trafficking, a film about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and a concert series featuring women artists who are activists in their communities.

What we're really looking to do here with Women Center Stage is to vehemently promote women’s work – in art, in action, and in imaginative and vibrant visioning of the future.

While I usually feel relatively icky about singling women out as "nurturers" or having more capacity for compassion than men, it has historically been true that women play a unique and potent role in innumerable struggles for social change - in large part because they tell stories that don't otherwise get told, they hold community memory, wisdom, and culture; and they bear witness and engage us all to respond.

Not to mention the fact that women remain consistently underrepresented in all arenas. So we're using this festival to gather artists, activists, thinkers and other important voices for justice - to build community and solidarity, share stories and ideas, and challenge one another to act and react.

Democracy is about action, and we are looking for a diverse audience of those who take action and those who will take action, who as audiences will take what they see, hear, and experience away with them - to carry the call further out into the world.

Thank you Wythe, for your fantastic appreciation of the Men's Equality Congress (who I would like to thank for giving me a good laugh last week), and thanks to Alternet for their kind words about us:

This summer, at a time when the media is dominated by bombastic male voices, New York City's Culture Project's multidisciplined festival of women voices provides a welcome antidote.