Reenah Golden

Reenah Golden is an activist, educator, literary artist, and the Founder & Executive Artistic Director of The Avenue Blackbox Theatre in her hometown, Rochester, NY where she continues her life work of over 20 years using arts, culture and creative placemaking as tools of community transformation and healing. Her advocacy is firmly planted in disrupting systemic racism and creating space for art that heals and restores those most impacted by it. The Avenue is the beacon of revolution in a severely underserved neighborhood honoring youth voice and first-person Black narratives as a priority, cultivating Black expertise, and elevating the voices, stories and art of BIPOC LGBTQ+ folk from the margins with radical love and undying respect.

Reenah is a published author of poetry, plays, and creative scholarship that includes; The rhizome of Blackness: a critical ethnography of Hip-Hop culture, language, identity and the politics of becoming (IBRAHIM, New York: Peter Lang, [2014]) and Underprivileged school children and the assault on dignity: policy challenges and resistance (HALL, New York: Routledge [2014]. Reenah’s pioneering international work in arts education, spoken word and urban youth development has been accepted for inclusion at CommonGround, National Conference of Teachers of English (NCTE), The American Educational Research Association (AERA), TEDx and Partners of the Americas and in the first youth-focused slam docu-series, HBO Brave New Voices. Reenah is also a proud founding member of and a founding member of the Critical Pedagogy & Transformative Leadership Congress and two groundbreaking arts collectives; We All Write - a writing, bonding and healing circle for Black women and WOC Art - a collaborative of women of color creatives both based in Rochester, NY. 

Reenah is the mother of one, a native Rochesterian, graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, and Adjunct Faculty in University of Rochester’s International Theatre Program.