N’Spirit Theater Company

Who is N’Spirit ?

N’Spirit was created by nine students of color at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts. Now, we are our own entity. Our journey started with a conversation between three of our founders, Ananda, Mercedes, and Jamaica, about being a minority in an arts institution and feeling like sometimes our voices aren’t represented in the art we produce. Hungry to create a space for Black women, we decided to put on For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, a choreopoem by Ntozake Shange. We wanted to do a devised version of this piece, and it later became Everything a Black Girl Has Left Unsaid.

In 2025, Ananda came up with an idea to do our very own Black History Month performance, and we connected with several other people of color at Mason Gross to make it happen. From that first performance, each member agreed to dedicate themselves to creating spaces where all different points of view could be expressed and appreciated by creating a theater company.

N’Spirit contains a diverse number of theater disciplines (lighting design, scenic design, media arts, acting, and dancing), identities, and lived experiences. Using the Black woman’s body as a vessel to express universal yet specific adversity charged this piece to grow with boundary-breaking interpretation, so we later put it on again in April 2026 after becoming a recipient of the Rutgers Collaborative Arts Grant. In summer 2026, we were invited to perform again at the Harlem Hip Hop Film Festival in New York.