Nikki Meñez is a bundle of positive energy — the kind of person who looks for the best in what you’re saying, who laughs biggest and longest at your jokes, who implicitly gives you permission to be your fullest self.
Now, at just 28, the Bay Area native is poised to take full advantage of those skills as the new curatorial director atZ Space,the Mission District producer and presenter of adventurous theater, dance, performance art and category-defying new work.
Meñez, who uses gender-neutral (and feminine) pronouns (and with whom, full disclosure, I used to work at New Conservatory Theatre Center), joins a trailblazing leadership team. Following last year’sdepartureof Executive Artistic DirectorLisa Steindler,Z Space instituted a distributive leadership model whereby a triumvirate shares decision-making power. Meñez, who started Jan. 10, is the final piece of that puzzle, co-leading with interim Producing Director Rose Oser and Executive Director Shafer Mazow, who is believed to be the country’s only transgender financial leader of a major theater.
Meñez is responsible for rentals, while Oser handles in-house productions.
“The idea of distributing leadership in this way is about expanding the artistic voices that can be in this space,” Mazow said. “An artistic director carries a certain power. That term has history and culture associated with it,” he went on, adding that the trio’s new titles are a way to “disrupt that power.”
All three, who have put their desks in the space Steindler’s used to occupy, report to the board.
Meñez, whose hiring was announced at the end of December, grew up the child of Filipino immigrants, moving from San Mateo to different locations in the East Bay. At UC Santa Cruz, they said, “I stumbled into theater and made it a dance.” The school’s student-run multicultural theater troupe, Rainbow Theater, was an especially important outlet.
自毕业以来,对积累assistant-directing, directing and choreographing credits at Bay Area theaters from American Conservatory Theater to much smaller, newer outfits, including Awesome Theatre and Queer Cat Productions.
At NCTC, they rose through the ranks, eventually directing YouthAware, the company’s educational theater program. One lesson learned there, Meñez shared, included realizing “different ways of how you produce theater with people can be different acts of how you love another person.”
A second is knowing that “making a healthy choice for yourself is also a healthy choice for the person next to you,” they said, “and I think that applies to the way we walk through the world as professionals, the way we walk through the world as collaborators.”
Or, put another way, Meñez explained that “giving myself grace also gives me room to give other people grace. Grace can mean time, energy, attention, five minutes to better craft an email and give a more empathetic response.
“That making of time for both self and other is a big thing for me.”
They describe their sunny aura as both naturally come by and hard won. “My optimism, my positivity is born out of necessity and survival. I have to have hope in order to protect my peace.”
Meñez connects it to being the child of immigrants. Motivation to succeed was never a problem, but now, “success is something I can define for myself.”
They’ve long loved the way Z Space artists use the space and relate to audiences in so many different ways — there’s no proscenium to box things in. They liken Z Space to a “think tank of performing arts.”
“I’m so excited for it to be my job to reach out to some of the people that I love in this community, that I am a nerd for in this community, and invite them in,” they said. “I am so ready for it to be safe enough for Bay Area theater to pop off — because it will.”