About Us

Chocolate Woman Collective is an ad hoc group of senior Aboriginal artists, artist/scholars and their collaborators formed in 2007 to research and create the theatrical performance, Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way. These accomplished artists and their collaborators are brought together by our shared interest in research, exploration and practical application of Indigenous aesthetic principles in all areas of the dramatic arts, in theory, process and practice. Chocolate Woman Collective is interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and intergenerational and we are pushing the parameters of our respective art forms as we devise a culturally specific dramaturgy from which to build a performance.

The core artists are playwright/performer Monique Mojica, textile artist/costume designer Erika Iserhoff. They are being joined by collaborators, dramaturg Ric Knowles, lighting/sound designer Michel Charbonneau, Elder/master actor Gloria Miguel, director/translator/cultural consultant José Ángel Colman, assistant director/scholar Alberto Guevara, composer Marden Paniza, administrator and stage/tour manager Gia Nahmens.


Our Mandate

Chocolate Woman Collective is dedicated to the rigorous application of a creative process that privileges Indigenous Knowledges, cultural aesthetics and performance principles. Our artistic practice integrates theory, research (both archival and field) and embodied studio work in the creation of new work that dislodges colonialism from the body. Our mandate is to create collaborative, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and intergenerational Indigenous theatrical performances and to tour them hemispherically and throughout the world. The performances created from this practice serve, for our audiences, as interventions that shift cultural paradigms and contribute to a larger project of cultural/historical reclamation.