Emily Hooper Lansana

Storyteller & Community Builder

2024 Next Level Awards / 2021 3Arts Awards

Teaching Arts

If you hear Emily Hooper Lansana (she/her) tell stories, you may hear an African folktale, a moment from Black History, a personal memory, or a journey into the future. Whatever the form, you will hear a story that inspires.

Here's how it started...

Once upon a soulful time, a little black girl, Emily, the youngest of three, was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio to two hard working old-school Black people. They invested in the intellectual, spiritual, and artistic education of each of their children. They nurtured their dreams and encouraged them to believe anything was possible.

Her sister and brother found their creative voices in music, but she found her place acting on stage. Her daddy used to say, "My baby girl is going to grow up and go to Yale University." When he passed away the day before her 16th birthday, she was compelled to honor his dream. She received a scholarship to Yale and majored in Theater and Performance Studies and completed a Teacher Preparation program for Secondary English. While most of her theater friends moved to Los Angeles and New York, she decided to move to Chicago because she believed it was a place where you could make things happen. She was inspired by the cultural history and myriad Black institutions.

The theater community offered fewer opportunities for young Black women than she had anticipated. In the midst of a time of soul searching, she was invited to a concert presented by the world-renowned storyteller, Jackie Torrence. Emily sat in the audience and was transformed. How magical to watch this wonderful artist use the craft of storytelling to capture a room of adults and hold them spellbound. Inspired to pursue the craft herself, Emily received a grant from the Illinois Arts Council to study storytelling with Shanta Nurullah through their Master/Apprentice Program. She began storytelling, teaching, and performing in schools with Glenda Zahra Baker. Their performance duo, In the Spirit, has performed locally and nationally. Emily also attended Northwestern University where she received a master’s degree in Performance Studies.

She continues to develop and expand as an artist and a teacher. Her work as a storyteller and community builder has helped her to develop an extensive performance repertoire featured at local institutions from the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center to the Chicago Humanities Festival, and nationally, from the Mississippi Museum of Art to the National Storytelling Festival.

Early in her journey as a teaching artist, Emily was interested not only with creating engaging ways to share her artistry but also with the larger structures of how arts education is shared. She began to take on leadership roles that would both allow her to teach but also to consider how teaching enviroments can support artists and communities. This work has taken her from community focused institutions like eta Creative Arts Foundation to national organizations like Lincoln Center for the Arts.

How it's going...

As an arts educator and facilitator, Emily believes in helping people to, "tell the story only you can tell." Her compassionate approach to this work has helped cultivate stories in diverse communities, including Pre-K–12th grade students, beginning social workers, community advocates, and organizations focused on supporting those impacted by incarceration. She has worked to bring storytelling to leaders who are developing strategies for housing equity and social justice and working to center diverse approaches to liberation.

She is a member of the senior leadership team at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Her work at the Logan Center has provided an important space for cultivating community engagement, artistic exploration and teaching in traditional classrooms and innovative learning spaces. She looks forward to teaching a new course in 2025 on Community Engagement and Teaching Artistry. Emily is excited to work in partnership with a range of artists, organizations, and community members on the South Side of Chicago which she is proud to call home.

Emily believes storytelling is her calling. Artistically, she is grateful for each opportunity to tell stories, curate performances, and create individually and collaboratively. Recent projects include curating and performing in a pop-up performance commissioned by Project& for EXPO Chicago, artistic direction and performance with SOL Collective, Tell Open Stories: a virtual community storytelling series of classes, a commissioned performance for the Southern Foodways Alliance, and residencies where she teaches the craft and practice of Black storytelling including with Free Street Theater and Beyond Prisons.

She has been honored by the E.P.I.C. Women of Color Conference, Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University, and Ox-Bow School of Art.

Profile image by: Keyana Marshall

Emily Hooper Lansana's Website