Missions & Values

Mission

Red Eye is a vital artistic hearth where experimental performance and art-making flourish. We support artists pursuing liberatory investigation, tending voices from periphery and emergent futurisms, weaving creative constellations across experiences and geographies. As a vital part of the Twin Cities' many iterative artistic ecologies, Red Eye offers sites for communal dreaming through performance, foregrounds visceral knowing in art-making, and creates space for artistic works that envision systemic transformation and healing with the land.

Red Eye cultivates developmental opportunities for artists, incubating experimental practices and making space for all of us to navigate our own creative constellations. Through residencies, performances, and collaborative projects, we support multi-faceted contemporary performance communities. Grounded in resource stewardship, reciprocity, and radical discernment, Red Eye operates as a platform where artistic practice becomes a space for profound shared densities—igniting connections between people, creative practices, and felt propositions for new worlds that emerge through the transformative power of performance and art.

History

Red Eye was founded in 1983 and for 35 years was lovingly stewarded by Steve Busa and Miriam Must, who built the organization into a vital force for experimental performance and community engagement in Minneapolis. Under their leadership, Red Eye became known as a place where artists could take risks, explore new forms, and develop work that challenged conventional boundaries.

In 2019, Steve and Miriam made the intentional decision to pass Red Eye on to a community of artists, transitioning from individual leadership to collective stewardship. This shift reflected Red Eye's deepening commitment to shared decision-making and artist-led governance—values that had been growing throughout the organization's evolution.

Today, Red Eye continues to work collectively with artists, community members, and stakeholders, embodying a model of relational leadership that centers the voices and expertise of working artists. This collaborative approach guides everything from programming decisions to organizational development, ensuring that Red Eye remains responsive to the changing needs of the artistic community it serves.

Over four decades, Red Eye has maintained its commitment to supporting experimental work while continuously evolving its practices around equity, accessibility, and community engagement. The organization's journey from founder-led to collectively-stewarded reflects a broader commitment to liberation, shared power, and the belief that the most transformative art emerges from genuine community collaboration.

Values

Collective Care & Interdependence

The wellbeing and success of our community is everyone's responsibility. We cultivate a deep sense of belonging and create a culture of anti-ableism where all are valued and supported and work actively against all forms of oppression. We share stewardship for the conditions of making and witnessing. We cultivate discernment needed to work effectively with communities and we understand that care for the whole strengthens each individual and builds bridges within our collective.

Liberatory Exploration

We hold space for different people to have different valid experiences of the same situation. We cultivate a hive for artists pursuing liberatory exploration, especially those tending voices from periphery and emergent futurisms. We seek ways for each person's experience to be heard, understood, and validated while working toward mutual understanding and transformation.

Indigenous & Ecological Wisdoms

We honor the Dakota land Red Eye inhabits and recognize that space carries history, responsibility, and immense possibility. Our work is grounded in place and relationship to land. We learn from Indigenous ways of knowing and being, understanding that this connection informs how we approach sustainability, community, and artistic practice.

Relational Integrity & Practice

We build relationships on trust while embracing imperfection and learning. Our work is a continuum, where mistakes become opportunities for deeper connection and growth. We take responsibility for ourselves and accountability for our actions within community.

We maintain authenticity and consistency in our relationships, ensuring that our stated values are genuinely reflected in our everyday actions, agreements, and accountability structures. We value collective wisdom, understanding that our continuous process of understanding shared humanity requires ongoing commitment to relationship and community discernment.

Land Acknowledgment

Red Eye respectfully acknowledges that we operate on the sacred, unceded ancestral homelands of the Dakota people, who call this place Mni Sota Makoce - the land where the waters reflect the skies. For countless generations, the Dakota have been the original stewards of these lands and waters, which were unfairly ceded in the Treaties of 1837 & 1851. We recognize their ongoing relationship to this place, as well as the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) and other Indigenous peoples who have also called this region home.

The Dakota and Ojibwe people continue to live on this land, including the sovereign nations of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe, Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Grand Portage Chippewa, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, Red Lake Nation, White Earth Nation, Lower Sioux Indian Community, Prairie Island Indian Community, Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, and Upper Sioux Community. These Indigenous people and more continue to live on this land despite genocidal efforts and forced removal by the State of Minnesota and the United States Government. The land we are on was, is, and will always be Indigenous land.

How We Live This Acknowledgment

We honor the resilience of Dakota and Indigenous communities who have maintained their cultural traditions and connection to this land through active partnership and mutual support. As neighbors to the Franklin Corridor, where many Indigenous services and gathering places are centered, Red Eye walks with the work of Native and Indigenous artists through concrete actions:

Prioritizing Indigenous Voices: We actively seek out and center the work of Native and Indigenous performance makers and artists, providing resources and stage time as acts of reciprocity rather than charity.

Removing Financial Barriers: We subsidize costs and provide financial support where possible, recognizing that economic access is essential for meaningful participation.

Learning and Sharing: We generously share our expertise and knowledge while humbly learning from Indigenous lived practices and worldviews, understanding that Indigenous ways of knowing offer profound wisdom for our collective work.

Relationship to Land: We strive to inherit and practice Indigenous understandings of our relationship with land and place, recognizing that this connection informs how we approach sustainability, community, and artistic practice.

Building Relational Partnership: We forge community and partnerships rooted in mutual respect, long-term commitment, and Indigenous leadership, moving beyond symbolic gestures toward genuine collaboration.

We strive to support Indigenous voices at every opportunity and invite you to learn more about the true history of this place and to seek out the wisdom and stories of the Dakota, Ojibwe, and other Native people still here. We ask you to commit to supporting Indigenous people wherever you are, understanding that land acknowledgment without action perpetuates harm.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Red Eye

Red Eye is committed to fostering a genuinely diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment for all individuals involved with our organization—staff, artists, audiences, collaborators, and community members. We welcome people of all races, ethnicities, religions, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, ages, socio-economic backgrounds, and national origins.

We understand that DEI is an ongoing journey of learning and cultural transformation. We're all learning and evolving in our understanding and practice, and we view challenges and mistakes as valuable opportunities for growth and deeper understanding and embodiment.

Our commitment to DEI is rooted in actively working to dismantle systemic oppression in all its forms. We strive to meaningfully engage and support individuals from all backgrounds, celebrating neurodiversity, diverse physical experiences, and the richness of varied lived experiences. We are dedicated to providing equitable access and opportunities for all to participate and engage with Red Eye without burden or tokenization.

Our Commitment to Practice

In Our Programming

• We actively seek out and support artists from diverse cultural backgrounds, identities, and artistic practices, prioritizing voices that have been historically underrepresented, including disabled artists whose creative practices challenge ableist assumptions about artistic expression
• We use equitable selection processes that recognize different ways of knowing, creating, and communicating
• We build genuine partnerships rooted in mutual respect, reciprocity and understanding

In Our Operations

• We cultivate a workplace culture that prioritizes safety and values diverse perspectives and ways of knowing
• We regularly review our policies, compensation, and working conditions to ensure equity and consider how workplace structures can be more accessible and inclusive of different bodyminds and ways of working
• We sustainably integrate DEI values, practices, training and education in our everyday operations and program cultures, grounded in disability justice principles
• We prioritize diversity in our hiring practices, actively seeking candidates from all marginalized communities

In Our Community Engagement

• We do targeted outreach to diverse communities about opportunities to participate in and attend our programs, including disability communities and organizations
• We actively remove barriers to participation from the outset, understanding that what creates access for disabled people creates better experiences for everyone
• We nurture relationships with individuals from historically marginalized communities, including disabled people as leaders and collaborators, not just beneficiaries
• We practice versatility in our approaches to collective possibilities, prioritizing the diversities, sensibilities, rituals, cultures and practices of people of the global south.
• We build communities relationally, and divest from transactional practices that tokenize or exploit marginalized people

Accessibility and Accommodations

Access is built into everything we do from the beginning. We align with disability justice principles that recognize disabled people as experts in their own experiences and embrace disability as a natural part of human diversity. Our physical and digital spaces are designed for universal access and inclusivity, understanding that accessibility benefits everyone and creates stronger, more vibrant communities.

We regularly offer accessible programming including ASL-interpreted and audio-described events, and we work to expand these offerings based on community needs. We believe that true inclusion means moving beyond compliance to create spaces where disabled people are not just accommodated, but genuinely welcomed and valued as essential community members.

Need an accommodation or have accessibility questions? We're here to help. Contact us and we'll work with you to ensure you can fully participate in Red Eye programming. We approach accommodations as collaborative conversations, not burdens.

Questions or Feedback

We welcome your input on our DEI efforts. For questions, suggestions, or to report concerns, please contact Valerie Oliveiro at staff@redeyetheater.org or (612) 870-7531.