John Sullivan: Taking the creative approach to environmental and social issues
by Vicki Wolf

When people live near a chemical plant, refinery or waste incinerator that releases toxins into the air, they face life-threatening health risks, and the stress created by these health issues, every day of their lives. These communities are sometimes called fence-line communities because only a fence separates them from the plant that spews out the poisonous pollution that often makes them and their children sick. Families living in fence-line communities often feel helpless and unable to do anything about their situation. Many cannot afford to move to a safer, healthier place.

John Sullivan empowers such communities with information, education and an ability to organ-ize and work for change. He also works with organizations to understand communities. His crea-tive approach is unique and effective.

Sullivan is a faculty member in the Department of Preventive Medicine & Community Health, an adjunct faculty member within the Institute for Medical Humanities, and is Co-Director of Public Forum & Toxics Assistance through the Sealy Center for Environmental Health & Medi-cine / NIEHS Center at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He is an artist who has worked as a writer, playwright, director, poet, performance artist and arts educator. He has won many writing awards. His work has been published widely and he has performed at various poetry and theater festivals.

From the beginning of his career, Sullivan’s work has been creative and has involved social jus-tice issues. He started out as a special education teacher and went on to receive his masters in Creative Writing at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff. “We ended up doing a lot of thea-tre around the relocation of the Navajo Indians and around homelessness, a big issue in Flag-staff,” Sullivan says. After that Sullivan worked with Theater Degree Zero, a bilingual company in Tucson producing theater on Mexico/U.S. border issues. Next he studied drama therapy at Kansas State University.

One of Sullivan’s major influences was the opportunity to go to Cal Art Theater and study social theater with Augusto Boal, who developed The Forum Theatre of the Oppressed in Brazil. In 1999 he became director of the Boal-influenced Community Outreach Wing / Theater of Libera-tion of Seattle Public Theater. “A month after I arrived in Seattle, the WTO (World Trade Or-ganization) demonstrations happened, and we did a lot of theater around that,” Sullivan says. “It was difficult to be in Seattle and not be involved in it.” While in Seattle Sullivan used theater to communicate about water source pollution, racism, diversity and community relations with the Police Department. “I enjoyed being there,” Sullivan says. “We had a young adult group that did touring with a non-profit organization. We would improvise the show, do image work with an interactive forum, and worked to see a different outcome that would change the oppression.”

Sullivan says he came to UTMB because he thought it would be challenging to use community theater to work with science. He now understands the science behind environmental issues and he knows how to work with communities. With this combination of skill and knowledge, Sulli-van helps scientists understand communities and people living in communities with environ-mental problems understand the science. “It’s been kind of an improvisations process,” Sullivan says. “Steven Lloyd, a University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) scientist, had the original idea to bring in theater with community outreach. It was an experiment, and hasn’t been done here before,” he adds.

Since he arrived in the Houston-Galveston area, Sullivan has worked with the Environmental Protection Agency’s staff as well as the staffs of other agencies, and he’s worked with environ-mentalists helping communities to organize people on environmental justice and health issues. Recently he worked with Baylor College of Medicine / Environmental Health Section to produce a play about scientists studying a community titled, “Blood Diamonds / Diamantes de Sangre.” He’s now expanding his community outreach theater into Louisiana to work on post-Hurricane Katrina issues.

Sullivan lives with his wife, Sheli on Galveston Island. They are both members of Amnesty In-ternational and have co-facilitated theater on the issues of torture and the death penalty.

Nominate someone you know as a Houston Heroe