Mission Statement

Fostering community and joy across the St. Louis region through the Shakespearean tradition of art for all.

Since 2001, the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival has offered free, accessible theater guided by and dedicated to our community. Since the initial two-week run of “Romeo and Juliet” in Shakespeare Glen at Forest Park attracted 33,000 audience members, the Festival has grown into a year-round institution producing around 100 public performances for 50,000 families each year. We are committed to inspiring the region with high-quality productions in Forest Park, through our public parks tour (TourCo), the internationally-acclaimed Shakespeare in the Streets engagement event, new works from Missouri and Illinois playwrights and in schools across the region.

Today the Festival is recognized as an arts and culture leader of the region and has received numerous awards including “Best Theatre Company,” “Most Innovative Arts Organization,” and Exemplary Community Achievement from the Missouri Humanities Council. In January 2015, the Festival received the Arts and Education Council’s Excellence in the Arts Award and recently in 2019 Focus St. Louis’s What’s Right with the Region award for fostering creativity for social change.

Impact

Since 2021, the Festival and 4theVille have co-led the Sumner High School Recovery Plan, an innovative model of community-based public education that is not only driving academic achievement but also restoring Sumner as a beacon of excellence for Black students in St. Louis and propelling wholesale revitalization in the Ville neighborhood.

The Sumner Recovery Plan is a multi-year initiative – the first collaboration of its kind in our region – pairing professional Teaching Artists from St. Louis’s leading arts and culture institutions with the public school system to provide free, high-quality arts and advocacy education to the students of Sumner High School. The Festival, in partnership with community organization 4theVille and the Sumner Advisory Board, mobilizes and coordinates 17 arts partners to provide daily classes in nine arts tracks: Dance, Drama, Choir, Piano, Visual Art, Fashion, Living Arts, Photography and Film.

The Festival connected with Sumner High School in 2020 through our Shakespeare in the Streets program in The Ville. The intervention of the Festival along with alumni, neighborhood groups and fellow cultural organizations in 2020 averted the threat of Sumner’s imminent closure, and Sumner maintained enrollment at 200 students. Today the school flourishes, with 340 students enrolled for the fall 2023 semester– a 36% increase over the prior school year.

In 2021, the Sumner Recovery Plan was awarded LaunchCode’s Moonshot “Collaboration Award”. In January 2022, the Recovery Plan was awarded an Arts and Culture Accessibility Collaborative award in the “Initiative” category for “a new plan or action designed to improve or solve a problem while bringing inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility to the forefront and incorporating those attributes into the solution”. The Recovery Plan was also awarded the Arts & Education Council of Greater St. Louis’ 2023 St. Louis Arts Award for “Arts Collaboration”.

Dana Brown Charitable Trust was a foundational supporter of the Festival’s education initiatives. Without their early guidance and generosity, we could not have developed our Education Tour and in-school residencies, which laid the groundwork for our later design and co-leadership of the Sumner High School Recovery Plan.

We are proud to count the Charitable Trust as an essential partner in delivering transformational arts education experiences to the St. Louis region for over 15 years.