11th-and-Pine

Oral History Project

About 11th & Pine

11th & Pine is a documentary theater project exploring how the community remembers the organized protests on Capitol Hill during the summer of 2020. We are interested in capturing the local histories of the CHOP from those who lived, worked, and protested on Capitol Hill at the time. Through oral history interviews, we seek to uncover how community members remember, understand, and continue to be impacted by the events of that summer. In partnership with Sound Theater Company, the collected interviews will be transformed into a live theater work where the community’s stories are brought to life on stage. Weaving together personal testimonies with theater, we will tell the story of the organized protests from the perspectives of those who bore witness to its unfolding. This project gets to the heart of the uniquely localized circumstances that gave birth to a movement.

Contact Us

Did you live or work on Capitol Hill during the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP/CHAZ)? Were you a part of the protests, or know someone who was? We would like to hear from you. We are UW faculty and students looking to capture the local histories of the CHOP from the perspectives of those who lived it. Like all communities, people had different experiences and perspectives of the CHOP, and we want to discover yours. Whatever your relationship was to the protests, your story can contribute to the collective narrative of this landmark event in Seattle’s history. Email us at eleventh.pine@gmail.com to find out more.

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About Us

Nikki Yeboah | Assistant Professor of Playwriting - School of Drama - UW

Nikki believes that stories have the power to move us, open our hearts and minds, and connect us to worlds and people beyond ourselves. She carries this belief into her oral history practice where she interviews people from all walks of life about the issues that matter to them. As a playwright, she adapts oral histories for the stage, reflecting communities to themselves. Her documentary plays have been staged at The Soraya (Los Angeles), New College of Florida (Sarasota), the Hammer Theatre (San José), the Marsh (San Francisco), Links Hall (Chicago), and the Chicago Cultural Center. When she's not writing creatively, Nikki writes academically about the ethics and politics of doing community-engaged performance work. She has been published in; Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and the Western Journal of Communication. She has given talks and led workshops on storytelling at Stanford University, Columbia University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and other academic institutions across the country. Her recent work; The (M)others, was produced with funding from The Andrew W Mellon Foundation, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and The Whitman Institute.

Mona Merhi | Ph.D. candidate - Theatre History and theory doctoral program - UW

Mona became interested in the CHOP for all that it represented and what it hoped to accomplish. Perhaps what she sought was to fill the gap of missing the Lebanese revolution in October 2019 where people also occupied the streets and created temporary free zones against the corrupted regime that never misses the opportunity to practice racism, nepotism, and confessionalism while transforming the city into clusters where injustice and inequality proliferate. She wanted to speak to that!!!

Emily Stone | MFA candidate - Professional Actor Training Program - UW

Emily is in her third and final year studying acting at the University of Washington. In her work, she loves to explore contradictions that bring out the humorous, absurd, and profound. Emily has found great joy and purpose in applying her theatrical training to her activism in the fields of mutual aid, labor, unhoused solidarity, tenant power, and immigrant solidarity. The place where art and action live together is where she loves to play.

Bobbi Kindred | PhD Candidate - Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies - UW

Bobbi Kindred, Cierra Green, writer, author, and storyteller, is a Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Ph. D. scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle. Their research utilizes Black Feminist Theory to address what it means for Black folk to navigate addiction and access recovery through culturally relevant modalities, and more broadly, what does it mean for Black folk to recover, what are we recovering from, and what are we moving toward? In addition to being a participant in the George Floyd protests, they have joined the CHOP project to gain experience in documenting oral histories for this project that feels close to home for them.

Stella Sun | BA Graduate - Drama: Performance - UW

Stella Sun is a writer, actor, game designer, amateur singer and a recent graduate of the University of Washington. Growing up in China, protests had always seemed like a mystery to her. She heard about them from her parents, read newspapers about them, and saw people discussing some of them on the Internet but had never really seen one. She has gathered comments and reactions from the Internet about CHOP for the project and aims to gain experience to research for her projects in the future.

Daisy Harrison Schreiber | BA Student - Drama: Performance - UW

Daisy Harrison Schreiber is an actor, writer, oldest sister, and rising junior at the University of Washington. She is currently majoring in Drama and English, and thinks of the School of Drama as her college home. Daisy believes that denying people access to representative stories is an act of violence and that good art is anything that helps us feel less alone. She is deeply interested in the intersection of storytelling and truth, specifically how honesty can be consciously used to create impactful and valuable narratives. Performance Ethnography strikes her as a beautiful way to explore this very kind of work!

Tori Winkler | BA Student - Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, Cinema and Media Studies - UW

Tori is a student, writer, filmmaker, and artist of many mediums. They are involved in the research for the documentary play project “11th and Pine.” The project is important to them because it is an opportunity to bring the power of community and storytelling together and gain experience with oral history methods.

Sam Sparkman | BA Student - Communication - UW

Sam is a communication student and a performer studying at the University of Washington. His passion is storytelling: the ways that the stories we tell ourselves and others, be they fictional or factual, shape the way we see the world. The stories that came from Capitol Hill in June of 2020 were broadcast across the country and came to define the opinions many held towards Black Lives Matter Protesters. This research presents an opportunity to refocus discussion of the CHOP on those actually involved – to learn and tell the human stories of the protest and draw truth and meaning from the protest’s legacy.

Roman Tano | BA Student - Political Science - UW

Roman is a political science researcher and student. His interests include public opinion, political coalitions and elections. Previously, he has done multidisciplinary research on criminology and social media. He is interested in both the political stories of people working collectively and the emotional story of individual relationships to wider social forces.