About the Program
As a core value, Theatre Y thrives off of collaboration, dialogue and intimate exchange between itself and its community, and we curate intergenerational spaces where these conversations can happen.
Theatre Y’s Youth Program fosters mentoring relationships between Theatre Y’s collaborators and young people in North Lawndale, with Marvin Tate as the program’s core visionary. As a necessarily collaborative organism, Theatre Y is home to a diversity of high-caliber talent in a variety of art forms, including architecture, sound production, film, and photography. Our objective with this program is to encourage multidisciplinary, lateral thinking in young people and to teach the necessary hard and soft skills for successful careers in the arts and social justice fields. As the program’s coach, Marvin Tate’s extensive and deep-rooted history with the art community of Chicago-at-large will be an indispensable resource to the city’s future artists and educators.
This program launched youth into their expressive selves through the ancient and timeless practice of puppetry and masks, spoken word, experimental music and found object visual art! They built the Youth Puppet Production of Little Carl with Chicago’s puppet master Michael Montenegro, which premiered at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, The Chicago International Puppet Festival, and The Chicago Physical Festival.
In 2026 we have a Year-long Paid Apprenticeship with a rotation of mentors:
March 10 - April 4th: Marvin Tate (Found Object Visual Art)
April 7th - May 2nd: E'mon Lauren (Page to Stage Pt. 1)
May 5th - June 13th: Johnetta Anderson (MOVE)
July 7th - August 1st: Marvin Tate (Concrete Poetry)
August 4th - October 3rd: Makoto Yamaguchi (Jazz Theater)
October 6th - October 31st: E'mon Lauren (Page to Stage Pt. 2)
November 3rd - December 19th: Makoto Yamaguchi (Youth Production)
For more information, please email info@theatre-y.com.
This program has been funded by Innovation 80, The Walder Foundation, The Steans Family Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council.
About the Mentors
Marvin Tate is a Chicago native, born and raised in the North-Lawndale neighborhood. He is an award-winning Poet, Performer, Visual Artist and Educator. His works have been featured on stages internationally and locally, e.g. National Public Radio’s, “This American Life”, Def-Jam Poetry and on the BBC Radio program “The Poetry Detective”.
He has been active in the Chicago music scene since 1993. He has collaborated with Visual Artist, Theaster Gates Jr. and the Black Monks of Mississippi, Video Artist, Jefferson Pinder, and a motley crew of musical talents that include: Leroy Bach, Angel Olsen, Bill MacKay, Tim Kinsella, and Jazz Artists: Ben LaMar Gay, Angel Bat Dawid, Mike Reed, French experimentalist, The Bridge, Composer, Ernest Dawkins, and Soundscape Artist Joseph C. Mills.
Marvin's art is exhibited in many galleries and museums, including The Intuit Museum in Chicago, one of the world's premier museums dedicated to presenting self-taught art.
Tate is represented by The Hana Pietri Gallery in Chicago. Tate combines raw theater, with spoken word, poetry, and song to create powerful and personal narratives about love, death, and the struggle to be present in a constantly changing world.
E’mon Lauren was named Chicago’s first Youth Poet Laureate. Her work unpacks her coined philosophy of “hood-womanism”. She is an artist and educator from the Wes and Souf side of Chicago and has been featured in Vogue Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune. Her work has appeared in the BreakBeat Poets Anthology series, Volumes 1 & 2, Poetry Foundation Magazine, The Reader, South Side Weekly and elsewhere. She is host of her hit talk show, “The Real Hoodwives of Chicago’’, produced by her production company, BlkHoneyBun Productions, LLC. Her first chapbook of poems, ”COMMANDO” , was published by Haymarket Books.
Johnetta Anderson, known creatively as Awthentik Poetry, is a Chicago-based performance poet, educator, and curriculum designer whose work bridges art, education, and cultural empowerment. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently pursuing a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), with a research focus on Black girl literacies. Johnetta has won many awards and fellowships, including the Ann Lynn Lopez Schubert Fellowship for Doctoral Studies and the Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois (DFI) Fellowship. Johnetta has also taught urban education courses at UIC in the Teacher’s Ed program. She has taught at the School of the Art Institute, City Colleges of Chicago, and Chicago State University.
Johnetta develops youth programming and educational curricula that integrate creative and literary arts with lived experiences and mindfulness practices. Her practice centers community engagement, mindfulness, and liberatory learning, using storytelling and performance to cultivate spaces for critical inquiry and transformative dialogue with young people. She has worked with youth from diverse cultural backgrounds and cultures while centering the youth voice. Johnetta is interested in working with youth in out-of-school, community-based settings.
Praised by iconic poets like Sonia Sanchez and the late Nikki Giovanni, Johnetta is known for her hard-hitting spoken word and fierce delivery. Johnetta also mentors younger poets, leading creative writing workshops. Johnetta is known for developing spaces that give artists a platform to showcase their work. She has organized open mic events that have built community and helped to develop newer artists. She is most known for bi-weekly open mic, The Artist Lounge, where she co-hosted along with Dometi Pongo at the historic Southside Community Arts Center, founded by the late Margret Burroughs, which ran consistently for 3 years. In 2022, the Illinois poet laureate, Angela Jackson, appointed Johnetta as the first Illinois poetry ambassador for Chicago.
Makoto Yamaguchi - Assistant to Lighting: Makoto Yamaguchi was born and grew up in Japan. He is a writer, director, and performer. He became interested in acting and took some minor roles in TVs and films in his native country. When he was in a touring theater troupe, he was introduced to American method acting and decided to cross the ocean to learn theater art here. He attended the City College of New York and immersed himself in all different kinds of artistic expressions as well as theater. He has become interested in the physical theater of Jerzy Grotowski and primitive tribal rituals and has been developing a new form of performance called, “Jazz Theater.” He recently performed a solo piece called, HAMLET IN JAZZ, in the Elgin Fringe Festival and often presents his experimentation at the Friday Night Swerve in Theatre Y. He is very grateful to be able to work with all the people in this wonderful Chicago theater and hopes to continue working there.
Michael Montenegro is artistic director of Theatre Zarko which has presented for Chicago audiences original puppet theater plays such as: He Who, Haff (The Man), Sublime Beauty of Hands, Klown Kantos, and Iktu Blas.
For over thirty years, puppet artist Michael Montenegro has been developing his unique style of puppet and mask theater in the Chicago community both as a solo artist and as a collaborator with different theater groups. Commissioned projects include: Argonautica with Lookingglass Theatre, directed by Mary Zimmerman, The War With the Newts and The Long Christmas Ride Home with Next Theatre , and The Puppetmaster of Lodz with Writer’s Theatre which garnered a Jeff Award for Puppet Design. At present he is working on a film entitled Apparaticus in collaboration with Theatre Y.
