Jovelyn is the ultimate creator and storyteller. Her vision as a director and producer and her voice as a writer are so clear and so powerful. What I love about working with Jovelyn is how much feeling and emotion she can evoke in everything she does. Being able to witness her work with a concept and nurture it’s development through to execution has continued to be such a gift to me. I’ve experienced her process including deep interrogation, memory, and play- and have always sensed through her work (and true for what she is doing and how she is doing it!) there is healing and liberation happening.
Jazmin Pilar
Washington, DC
My experience with Jovelyn as both a theatrical director and guest lecturer in my classes over the years has always been excellent, igniting my own creative fires. Her warmth, sense of humor, great talent for innovation and telling us often difficult truths makes her someone who is a joy to work and collaborate with. Her teachings have really hit home with my students, who remembered and quoted her long after classes ended. I also enjoyed co-designing and co-teaching a course with her in one of my Lilith Institute programs.
Kohenet Ruach D’vorah Grenn, Ph.D., Mashpi’ah Ruchanit
Founding Director, The Lilith Institute / Mishkan Shekhinah
Napa, California
Working with Jovelyn is challenging, uplifting, and thrilling. It’s challenging because, in her own sweet way, Jovelyn challenges you to come to terms with your own personal experience of race, especially when you might prefer to leave it alone. It’s uplifting, because it’s ultimately exciting, and extraordinarily life inducing. She leads you into places you don’t want to and never considered going, and you come away feeling renewed and thoroughly refreshed. Thrilling because the experience is, finally, exciting and life affirming. To know that you can confront the ugly, the worst, the most despicable in your experience, and come away feeling, not just glad, but thrilled.
It’s an experience I do not want to repeat, but found rewarding and exciting down to my core.
With love,
Bob Lane (actor)
Walnut Creek, CA
Working with Jovelyn Richards has been one of the highlights of my artistic career. Her ability to pull from the depth of the actor the truth of a character left me in a place of freedom on stage as performer and in life as human being. Her guidance is truthful and tender. Her writing is deeply engaging and liberating. Collaborating with her is always a phenomenal honor. Anyone who has the pleasure of her presence will be uplifted to a new sense of self. A new sense of being. She is in a category of her own. Her expression inspired mine as a writer, performer and producer. She simply is the Jovelyn Richards.
Krystle Liggins
Houston, TX
I first met Jovelyn in 2016 when I auditioned for the SF Olympians Festival. I had no idea what to expect when she cast me but I was in for a surprise. I had never really done theater before but the way she embraced everyone in the cast was like realizing you’ve found a family you didn’t know you were looking for. That being said Jovelyn and I have created art together ever since. I fell in love with the thought she gave every role in her writing but more how she could use those characters to find a depth in the actors playing those parts, becoming those parts. Her work reflects a broken world with people searching for answers, searching for healing. And she gives just that to anyone who is touched by the gift of her being. The amount of confidence that she’s instilled in me not just as an actor or performer but as a person is something that speaks to the shape of her heart. Her passion for connecting on spiritual, emotional and intellectual levels through her societal commentaries allows us to feel how intertwoven we are in one another’s lives. In growing with her she’s helped to open my eyes to so many beautiful things we can accomplish when reach within ourselves to find our hurt and turn it into art.
Chris Posadas
Oakland, California