 Good morning everyone and welcome to day two of the eighth annual Inclusive Theatre Festival. I'm so excited for all of us to be here together today. My name is Ashna Rai, I use she her pronouns and I'm a sophomore here at Northwestern University. And I am this year's conference and engagement director for C-South Theatre. I am so excited to have us all here in this virtual space together today. And this year we explored the idea of making the Inclusive Theatre Festival hybrid available both online and in person to take our commitment to accessibility further and to reach those who could not physically make it to the Northwestern campus. Thank you for being with us as we bring ITF to new platforms this year. To begin this event about diversity inclusion and celebrating people for who they are. I acknowledge that the Northwestern campus, where our organization C-South Theatre is located, is a predominantly white institution built upon stolen land. Our campus sits on the traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Parawadami and Odawa, as well as the Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations. It was also a site of trade, travel, gathering and healing for more than a dozen other native tribes, and is still home to over 100,000 tribal members in the state of Illinois. While the land acknowledgement is a good beginning, it is not enough. We need to be very aware of the fact that that is exactly what it is, a first step. It must be paired with action. Your welcome packets include a couple links that I have found useful in my journey of understanding the significance of Native American and Indigenous communities in the modern United States. And I encourage you to keep looking and educating yourself. It's the least we can all do. I also encourage you all to scan this QR code to go to a platform where you can explore the tribes and Indigenous lands for where you are located personally. For students at Northwestern, please reach out to the wonderful members of the Native American and Indigenous Student Alliance, NESA, if you'd like to be more connected with their work. Yesterday was as wonderful an ITF day as I could have asked for. We had Ali Easton speak to us about disability consulting. Sahai Abair talked about her experiences writing and creating art as a black woman with disability. Terry Hudson explained the importance of hiring disabled actors, and Dr. Tina Childress closed out the event with her brilliant and informative presentation on audio accessibility from the audience perspective. We have four just as exciting presentations lined up for you today, and I am so excited for the opportunity to learn from all these folks from around the United States. I am excited to continue sharing the spirit of joy, celebration and learning that was so clearly present in the room yesterday. Today's presentations will all take place in this Zoom room. Please remember that participation looks different for everyone, and we encourage you to take part in ways that feel comfortable and enjoyable to you. While we would love to have your cameras on, we also completely understand if that is not a possibility for you, and we are simply happy to have you present in this space in any capacity. Some presentations will call for more interactive activities and discussions, while others are more of a traditional lecture format. It might be useful for you to click on speaker view in the top right corner of your Zoom screen while a presenter is speaking to optimize the experience for yourself. AI captioning has been enabled, so please feel free to add that to your Zoom screen if you'd like to. The option is at the bottom of your Zoom screen. If you need anything at all throughout the conference today, I encourage you to send a message to me or Monica Williams via the Zoom chat on the right. We will add CSOT to our name so you know who the CSOT team on the call is. This year we have been fortunate enough to collaborate with two amazing organizations. Calling up Justice, which has acted as our co-producing organization, is a collective that produces performances of justice online, onstage and in real life. They have been our mentor organization for this process and helped us make this entire conference more authentically accessible. The HowlRound Theater Commons, a free and open platform for theater makers worldwide, is live streaming our entire conference to their website this weekend. We could not be more grateful for their support and guidance in giving us this kind of exposure and helping us connect to the larger theater community outside of Northwestern and Chicago. I encourage you to learn more about both of these organizations and the amazing work they are doing by scanning any of these QR codes. On the note of HowlRound, this meeting is currently being live streamed to their website through Zoom. If you have any concerns or questions about this, again, please feel to send me a message via Zoom. While the camera will mostly only be recording the presenters, it might swing to you if you ask a question. You can keep your camera off if you'd prefer to not be on camera for the live stream. I want to emphasize that this is not an issue at all, and we are happy to either cut your section from the final video or make sure that you aren't seen, and we are more than happy to accommodate any requests that you may have. Claudia Alec from Calling of Justice, along with their colleagues, Jasenia and Maya Mama, have been the most wonderful mentor to me for the past three months. She has helped me build a conference that reflects the causes that I am passionate about in an authentic and innovative way, and I could not be more grateful. I now want to invite her to join me as we start day two of the Inclusive Theatre Festival. Claudia, would you like to say a few words? It's such a pleasure to be here with you and the Inclusive Theatre Festival. I just want to say I am so impressed with your ability to say yes to the disability justice access aesthetic provocations I came to you with. Because y'all, Ashna came to me and said, would you be willing to do a presentation? And I said, no, I'd be willing to participate in making your entire festival hybrid and accessible to people remotely. And this has just been a gorgeous and beautiful collaboration, and it was really beautiful to be able to attend the full festival yesterday through HowlRound. Thank you to HowlRound. Thank you to all of these amazing disabled speakers sharing their knowledge. This is what disability justice is about, our community sharing our skills with each other. So I'm just excited for an awesome day to day, super excited to learn from Momo and just gigantic thanks and shout outs to one free community as well. And thank you so much for having us here with Calling Up Justice. We'll drop some links in the chat for anyone who wants to connect with us in the future. Could everyone just acknowledge all of the labor, the beautiful awesome labor that Ashna has done to start the journey to making it all accessible. We know that perfection is a concept of white supremacy culture, and this is a devising process. And so we are on the never ending path to making it more accessible. Let's have a great day everybody. Thank you so much, Claudia. This has been such a beautiful learning process for me and I'm so grateful to have had you survive my side throughout all of this. With that, I welcome all of you to the Inclusive Theatre Festival.