A collaboration between U.S. theatre and film artists and acclaimed Ethiopian theatre director and African Presidential Scholar Fellow Zerihun Birhanu Sira and theatre artist Sileshi Wale in partnership with the Addis Ababa University. 

The artistic team co-led a week long workshop intensive at Addis Ababa University’s Performing Arts laboratory for 25 University students, selected via an open call; a diverse and gender-balanced group from different focus areas of study including  theatre, journalism, media, radio, public policy, gender studies. All students were paid a stipend to take part. 

At the culmination of the workshop, a team of Addis Ababa-based performing artists transformed the new material and interviews to create a new live performance that reflected the community's voices and concerns. The theme of the piece was ‘Justice’,  showing with real stories the meaning and impact on an individual’s life, hopes, and accomplishments while living through political and social changes.  Each community-reflective performance included a post-show community conversation. The play performed first at Addis Ababa Unversity and then had its full premiere at the Hager Fikir theatre. Both performances involved post-show talk backs and community performances.  The team then toured to Adama for a workshop, performance and post-show conversation.

After the U.S. team returned home, Zerihun and Sileshi led two workshops for university students in Jimma (in collaboration with Jimma American Corner and Jimma University) and Dire Dawa (in collaboration with Dire Dawa American Corner) exploring the themes and approach from the Addis Ababa collaborative workshops. The final component of the project was the creation of a short documentary tracking the collaboration, created by U.S. filmmaker Nolan Roy.

This project, and the documentary film, was supported by the U.S. Embassy Addis Ababa.