Stephen Clapp is a Filipino-born cultural strategist, equity facilitator, change agent, performing artist and choreographer who maintains a professional creative practice as Co-Artistic Director for Dance Box Theater with his creative and life partner Laura Schandelmeier. Clapp is Creative Producer with Dance Exchange (Takoma Park, MD), and a co-owner of DC Vegan, the national capital region’s premier plant-based delicatessen specializing in cruelty-free and sustainable practices. His creative work aims to build social capital among communities with engagement through choreographic inquiry, devised theater performance, anti-oppression curriculum development and training, anti-racism facilitation, equity-based strategic planning, organizational development and cultural equity consulting. Clapp’s approach to community engagement and organizing employs movement-based arts-integration strategies that foster self-determination, innovative thinking, open dialogue, collective decision making, power analyses, resource development and creative problem solving. With over two decades of professional experience using the arts as a tool for grassroots community development and creative changemaking, Clapp understands the necessity for transformative evolution for individuals, communities, organizations and businesses in order to move away from racist, neo-colonial and otherwise oppressive and problematic tendencies, towards a vision of equity, diversity and justice, where culturally marginalized voices are centered, honored, activated and celebrated.
