As a high school student growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, Chelsea Gregory remembers spending her afternoons behind the counter at Marco’s Pita — a sandwich shop that doubled as an unofficial hub for the city’s late-1990s hip-hop and neo-soul scene. One moment she was stacking pita bread, the next she was handing lunch to musical legends like Erykah Badu, Common, Talib Kweli, or André 3000. 

More than starstruck encounters, it was her initiation into a community of artists who believed that music and culture could help to fuel justice and self-determination.

“The dominant narrative I received growing up was that the work of the civil rights movement was complete, and over with,” Gregory said. “But I could still see the inequities all around me. This community of artists showed me the work was still alive — and that arts and culture could carry it forward.”

For over 25 years now, Gregory has devoted her life to creating spaces where all people — across age groups, class, gender identity, culture, and race — can find a sense of connection and belonging through artistic and cultural work. Teaching for the past five years in UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies and now working as a Resident Cultural Strategist with the Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI), Gregory continues to bridge art, culture, and justice in ways that heal, empower, and transform.

But as a practitioner working through an anti-oppression lens, Gregory has encountered familiar challenges — resistance, reactivity, backlash, and the unintended consequence of “othering” some while creating belonging for others.

Four years ago, she began connecting the dots through OBI frameworks. She immediately recognized their relevance — not just as theory, but as tools that could reshape practice. Since then, those frameworks have informed her artistic work, her consulting and coaching, and her teaching at the Haas School of Business and UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies.

“Following the work of OBI has been transformative for me,” said Gregory, “and as an artist, educator, consultant, and cultural strategist OBI has provided me with much-needed language and frames for my own work.”

In this conversation, Gregory spoke with OBI about her childhood in Atlanta, the projects that shaped her path, and why the arts remain essential to democracy and belonging.

You’ve described your Atlanta childhood as shaping your life’s work. What do you mean by that?

Gregory: I was born and raised in the deep South, mostly in Atlanta, Georgia. In the 1960s Atlanta tried to brand itself as “the city too busy to hate,” but of course the reality is that racial othering and systemic racism have persisted there just as they do throughout the U.S.

My mother’s ancestors came to the U.S. as Ashkenazi Jewish refugees from Ukraine. My father’s side of the family were white Southern Baptists whose ancestors came over much earlier from the Celtic Isles. When my sister and I were young, my dad’s family expressed their anti-semitic and anti-immigrant sentiments openly. During my formative years we lived in a working-class Black neighborhood in southwest Atlanta, which had both sides of the family worked up as a result of the racism that all of my grandparents had been socialized into.

So from a young age I saw the world from within these chasms and contradictions, and I had to do the work of bridging out of necessity. The two sides of my family othered each other based on cultural differences and were explicitly racist towards our Black neighbors, who were understandably very wary of our white family, and I could see our racial privilege in many ways through the racial and socioeconomic inequity all around us.

The schools in our neighborhood were under-resourced, so I was part of a bussing program along with many other kids from our neighborhood where I rode an hour each way to an elementary school in a wealthy white neighborhood. My skin color was the same as the white kids there, but I was not welcomed and my Black neighbors were even less welcomed. I didn’t get invited to birthday parties, and most kids weren’t allowed to come to our house.

So from a young age I didn’t really fit in anywhere.

But the arts—dance, music, spoken word poetry, theater—helped me find my place. They helped me find myself, understand my story, and begin to make sense of the dynamics of power, inequity, and belonging.

Do you remember when you knew the arts were more than just an activity for you?

Around age nine or ten, I remember being in a dance class and dancing to Boyz II Men’s “Water Runs Dry.” That was the first time I remember my dance practice as something spiritual and emotional, and being moved more deeply beyond the aesthetics of it. 

Then in my early twenties, I joined We Got Issues! a community-engaged theater project first co-produced by [V, formerly known as Eve Ensler] and Jane Fonda and then carried forward by Next Wave of Women. The creative team interviewed women ages 18 to 35 across the U.S. to learn more about their needs and perspectives on civic engagement, and then we created an interdisciplinary theater piece that was inspired by what the interviewees shared.

That project was transformative. 

We didn’t just perform—we spent a month in each city, holding workshops in correctional facilities, domestic violence shelters, community centers, and other local arts and culture venues. We learned to create spaces of belonging — even in places designed for othering. That was when it became clear that this was my life’s work.

That’s so powerful. What kind of impact did you witness?

We heard from many of the young women we worked with that they had not felt safe enough to share some of the most difficult parts of their stories until then. Held by the community we had co-created, these women built relationships through creative process — telling stories, writing poetry, moving together, and collaborating on performances.

I remember one of our workshops in Chicago – we were in a juvenile jail and the rage that came up was enormous. So much harm had been done to these youth. The workshop was supposed to be an hour and a half but went for three hours because before we could get to the creative work — we needed to hold space for that rage — listen to it, and honor it.

That is part of building belonging and making space to reclaim imagination. When unmet needs come up, it becomes part of the work. You have to co-create, not just follow an agenda.

You later created The 6 Project, inspired by the Jena Six case in Louisiana. What was that?

Gregory: In 2006, six Black high school students in Jena, Louisiana were sentenced with 80 years to life for a schoolyard fight — even though white students had initiated the conflict by harassing, threatening, and trying to intimidate the Black students with a firearm and with nooses hung from a tree. The injustice was clear, and one of the organizations I worked with wanted to help raise awareness through some sort of creative project.

So I went to Jena to document a white supremacist rally that was intentionally planned for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and I interviewed a range of Jena community members along with parents, teachers, and students from the high school. I wanted to understand the narratives people held that allowed the Jena 6 case to unfold in the ways it had. Out of that research, my collaborator Tamilla Woodard and I created The 6 Project, a documentary dance theater piece that toured to 12 cities.

In each place we paired performances with community dialogues and workshops where participants examined racial justice in their own context. It wasn’t just a performance — we created space for participants to face what needed to be dealt with in their community, to process that, challenge dominant narratives, and imagine something different.

Fast-forward to UC Berkeley. How did you connect with OBI?

Gregory: I started teaching at UC Berkeley in 2020. While developing a course called The Body in Beloved Community, I came across a powerful conversation between dr. john a. powell and bell hooks that lead me to OBI. In OBI’s work I found language and frames I’d been searching for.

Over two decades of doing racial equity work as a white-identified person, I’ve learned that focusing solely on the term ‘racism’ can evoke resistance when those of us who hold racial privilege don’t understand our positioning within the systems that perpetuate racial inequity. As one who holds racial privilege, I must make space for inquiry around how I might participate in systems of harm, even when my participation is not intentional. There are times we need to focus directly on racism- and times when OBI frames like othering, belonging, breaking, bridging, and targeted universalism can help us zoom out to better understand the larger dynamics of othering and breaking that racism was born out of.

OBI has helped me learn how to be tough on systems and structures while being truly gentle with people, which is necessary if we are serious about relationship-based organizing and cultural shift. Building a shared understanding of the interpersonal, systemic, and structural dynamics of othering creates more possibility for dialogue and bridging with those who hold different worldviews. And when we work through arts and cultural strategy for example, the OBI frames can help us find connections between all of our diverse stories and experiences of othering or belonging, while also strengthening our analysis of the extremely harmful impacts of othering on marginalized groups.

That shift has been transformative for my teaching too.

Students learn how to map power and privilege with less finger-pointing and reactivity. Once we build trust and shared language, we can move more intentionally into the uncomfortable or painful parts of bridging.

How have your students responded?

These frames help my students understand themselves in relation to their identities and process their lived experiences, then use that awareness to bridge more skillfully across difference. In a recent performance workshop I taught, an international student from Pakistan interviewed several of his family members about experiences of othering and belonging. Based on those interviews he wrote a beautiful scene exploring his grandmother’s experience of partition, his father’s insistence on him speaking Urdu with the elders in their family, and the different ways the student said his name based on whether he was in an English-dominant space or not.

It was very powerful for him and for all of us that got to experience his work, whether as a performer or audience member. A Pakistani-American student who performed in the scene really valued the opportunity to reflect on his own family’s experience of assimilation. It resonated in a different way for everyone, whether our family had recent experiences of immigration or we held other relationships to cultural identity and belonging. And the creator was able to bridge with his Pakistani-American peer, with participants of various other ethnic and cultural backgrounds, as well as between the generations of his family.

He found connections between his grandmother’s survival, his father’s assimilation, and his own experiences of othering and belonging. The way he unpacked that through his artistic work was a real testament to the power of arts and culture.

Workshops at Our Future Economy events in Richmond

Now you are a Resident Cultural Strategist with OBI. What does that work look like?

I’m working with the Community Power & Policy Partnerships and Arts & Cultural Strategy teams on a series called Our Future Economy, co-created with our Richmond and North Richmond-based partner organizations. Richmond and North Richmond, California have been impacted by the Chevron refinery for over a century now – causing immense harm to the environment and every aspect of community members’ well-being, in part through manipulation of the local economy and political landscape.

Chevron responded to community and city advocacy by agreeing to pay a large sum of money over the next 10 years to the City of Richmond to account for the harms they have caused. Our work is to help build a coalition between local partner organizations and learn what community members want to prioritize as these funds are used to build a new economy in which all can thrive.

We’re working through arts and cultural strategy to center Richmond and North Richmond residents’ visions for community-driven just transition, and to hold space for community members’ creativity and radical imagination as they envision a new economy. In this way of working, arts and cultural strategy are understood as essential, not seen as an accessory to the “real” work. Our approach has been guided by OBI’s transformative research toolkit as we use arts and cultural strategy to strengthen community engagement, widen the field of data, and generate new knowledge through participatory research and decision-making processes.

We are already seeing how this arts and culture-based approach brings more voices and perspectives into the process, and creates space for community members to access radical imagination in a political moment that has made that very difficult. This approach also strengthens relationships between community members and partner organizations, and makes space for participants to rehearse a future economy that is of benefit to all.

You also have worked with OBI’ers Sarah Crowell and Sangita Kumar with the Belonging Resident Company. What has the impact been in that work?

The Belonging Resident Company is a dance theater company that began as an ensemble housed by OBI, and we’ve brought arts, culture, and embodied practice to the OBI conference and many other spaces. We are now working on a documentary dance theater project called “We Keep Us” that I started developing a few years ago inspired by the work of Black intersectional feminist practitioners of healing justice and abolition like Mariame Kaba, Cara Page, and Erica Woodland. This project seeks to lift up the many creative ways that people come together to take care of each other, especially in times of crisis and disaster.

Every day we are inundated with stories of conflict and harm, so this project seeks to balance that out by lifting up stories from a diverse range of people reflecting on acts of care, community, and safety beyond systems of harm. We are wrapping up the research phase, and moving into the creative process where we devise a performance piece based on interview text and other source materials, developing what will be shared with the public.

The first performances will happen in November 2026 and will include community dialogue so audience members can connect, reflect, and share information about how to plug into local resources for mutual aid and other forms of community care, community safety, and a range of other opportunities for bridging in these challenging times.

In the current context of this political moment: What do you want people to understand about this work in arts and belonging?

Right now, the infrastructure of arts and cultural work in the U.S. is being rapidly defunded and dismantled. This is intentional — it is a move that we see echoes of throughout world history, which demonstrates precisely how powerful arts and culture are.

In times of urgency and poly-crisis it can be easier to dismiss arts and cultural work as unnecessary or frivolous. But the truth is that arts and culture are how humans make meaning — and as dr. john a. powell says “humans are meaning-making animals.” Arts and culture shape how we understand the world, how we make decisions, how we engage with each other, how we build or destroy lives.

If we want to live in a world that is rooted in belonging, healthy arts and culture eco-systems are not optional.

They are central to our emotional and psychological well-being, to our ability to bridge across divides and learn how to work collaboratively across difference, and to co-creating a life on this earth where both the natural world and all people can thrive.