Mae Early

Mae Early came to Philadelphia in 2004 to serve as the Directing Apprentice at Philadelphia Theatre Company, and has kept Philadelphia close ever since. Formerly they were the Director of Education at Philadelphia Young Playwrights, a theatre education organization which uses playwriting as a vehicle to increase students’ comfort with writing, literacy, and creative expression, and Program Manager for First Person Arts Trigger VIP Program, which helps teens learn how to use storytelling as a tool for processing, expression, and advocacy. Currently, they are the Training Program Consultant and creator of Bartol’s 20-hour trauma-informed training for teaching artists and arts administrators, which has been offered by the foundation since 2018. They are also a member of Philadelphia Young Playwrights’ Board of Directors.

Within theatre education, Mae’s workshops focus on playwriting, directing, and performance. Within writing, he facilitates workshops about the fundamentals of storytelling, revision, poetry, discovering the creative voice, and engaging playfulness with writing. In addition to teaching over 1500 workshops at a multitude of schools in the Greater Philadelphia Area, Mae regularly facilitates professional development across sectors and ages in the areas of trauma-informed and healing-centered teaching, teaching artistry, arts education pedagogy, and workforce development. He has facilitated workshops on trauma-informed practice and the arts for numerous organizations including Intimacy Directors and Coordinators (IDC), NYC Arts and Education Roundtable, the Cincinnati Arts Association, Hawai’i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, ArtistYear, Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Philadelphia Teaching Artist Institute, Philadelphia Musical Alliance for Youth, ArtWell, Rock to the Future, Spiral Q, and Fleisher Art Memorial, to name a few. He is certified by Lakeside Global Institute as a Trauma-Competent Professional, where he has completed 150 hours of trauma-informed training to date, including classes such as Processing Pain and Facilitating Healing and Enhancing Capacity for Applying Trauma-Informed Principles. Mae has presented on the intersection of arts and trauma-informed work at conferences such as the Theatre for Young Audiences, American Alliance for Theatre Education National Conference, National Capital Puppetry Guild Summer Conference, Third Annual Philadelphia Trauma Training Conference hosted by Thomas Jefferson University, the Fourth Annual International Teaching Artist Conference, and the Kennedy Center VSA Intersections Conference.

She and her colleague Brittany Brewer had their chapter “Transforming How We Trust: Actualizing trauma-informed, arts-based instruction in ELA classrooms” featured in Special Issues, Volume 2: Trauma-Informed Teaching: Toward Responsive, Humanizing Classrooms, published by the National Council of Teachers of English.