Magpie Artists’ Ensemble
a collective of Queer artists passionate about collaboration, representation, accessibility, and creative storytelling.
Our Mission
to push the boundaries of print & performance mediums, bringing diverse stories to life in exciting & accessible ways.
Our Vision
a community of intersectional Queer artists and audiences, connected across all barriers.
Pioneering accessibility - for artists & audiences
Magpie is a collective that includes and collaborates with Queer people of color, with disabilities and neurodivergence, and from many different cultures. We prioritize accessibility in our work, both for audiences and artists, and envision a world in which art - especially performance - is accessible to all who want to see it. We work to make this vision reality by providing free or low-cost recordings of our original work online and adapting our creative processes to the needs of our collaborators.
Our reach extends far past live Seattle audiences to people around the world via digital streams and print projects - we average 300+ audience members and 30 artists/collaborators each year.
This accessibility-centric approach leads us to reach audiences of first-time theatre goers who may have seen theatre as a luxury/unaffordable, or simply as something that didn’t have anything to do with them, as it didn’t reflect their own communities. The same can be said of our collaborators; many of our most talented performers are people who hadn’t previously thought of themselves as actors for similar reasons. Our work revolutionizes the way people see themselves, which is an invaluable gift for underrepresented groups.
Magpie is proudly Powered by Shunpike.
Our story
Magpie was founded in the midst of the pandemic, when our Queer artistic community was fractured and experiencing extreme isolation. Our first projects included an immersive novel and a filmed devised theatre piece, created by very small groups collaborating mostly remotely and made available online. Despite the asynchronous nature of this work, we found that it had a profound impact on our audience - feedback overwhelmingly drove home the idea that being able to experience this type of storytelling “together,” even from afar, made a difference for many Queer people who had already felt isolated even before lockdown.
In 2023 Magpie began to stage in-person performances, incorporating larger casts and crews and creating more opportunities for local marginalized artists to tell stories onstage. As we grow in scale and quality of productions, we’ve committed to continuing our work to make the performing arts accessible to audiences across all barriers, including geographic - which resulted in our first original musical, BriarRose, being streamed to audiences on almost every continent.
Since the success of BriarRose we have invested significant time and resources into building up our store of film equipment and training members to capture live performance. Because these recordings can be made available indefinitely online, we are working on creating a large database of original works available at low or no cost, and are hopeful that this will inspire a love of theatre in the next generation of storytellers who may not otherwise have seen what theatre can be.