INTERVIEW: Hettie Barnhill Aims To Create a Space, NOW!
Photos by Tom Miller
“Art can not only be entertaining. It can save lives, and you can make money from it.”
We who are brave enough to indulge our imaginations often feel a special pull toward playing with the edges of reality. Many of us are told our presumed places in the world, yet artists and activists insist on seeing things differently. For too many creatives—particularly those from under-resourced communities—this divergence isn't celebrated but stifled, as access to arts and creative spaces increasingly becomes its own cultural class divide.
Enter Hettie Barnhill (she/they)—Broadway performer (Fela! Leap of Faith and Spiderman Turn Off the Dark), dancer, filmmaker, college professor at Union College, creative director, choreographer, and tireless arts advocate. Through her polymorphic talents and unrelenting vision, Hettie founded Create a Space, NOW!, an “interactive social justice platform” using art to inspire change, educate, and activate movements against bias, racism, and systemic oppression. To her, the art is almost more about the function it serves rather than the form it takes.
“We use the message – the why behind our art – as our medium,” she explains.
After participating in the protests that erupted prior to Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, now commonly regarded as the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement, she traveled back to New York with the overwhelming urgency and feeling of responsibility to continue the fight for justice and decided to center her work and art around issues that called for equality, equity, and justice for all. Create a Space, NOW! offers a necessary arts space founded on inclusivity, accessibility, and collaboration.
Though she has played many roles throughout her career, this feels like a culmination of them all, one that thrills her and fills her with purpose. Despite a plethora of accolades she could point to while describing success, instead she tells me, “A successful career is doing what you love…unapologetically…so much so that you attract other individuals to get behind a shared vision.”
From the first conversation with Hettie, it’s clear that the "space" she champions is both urgently needed and intentionally fluid. Oxymoronic? Maybe. But Hettie is no stranger to balancing forces—whether performing on Broadway while working with A Long Walk Home, a non-profit using arts therapy for violence survivor advocacy and social change, or, most recently, winning the 2025 NYS Dance Choreographers Initiative Award while maintaining grassroots spaces.
For Hettie, these “spaces" represent the deliberate balancing of family, purpose, career, and wellness. Growing up in the greater St. Louis area, she found refuge in funded arts programs while her mother worked to make ends meet and provide arts enrichment for her curious child. Now, Hettie’s channeling those experiences into Create a Space, NOW!, building the kind of creative incubator she and many others benefit from, curating productions and films confronting colorism and prolonged effects of trauma, to providing workshops on arts education and movement for students throughout Upstate New York.
These, in Hettie’s words, define her mission of the work: “If I only went by what I saw in my childhood, I wouldn’t be anywhere of purpose.”
This ethos fuels programs like their annual Activated Artists Fest at Proctors Theatre (August 9), a “dream realized” for Create a Space, NOW! where hundreds of attendees experience art-activism hybrids. At this festival, activists and artists alike come together to explore the cross sections of praxis and process to combine our efforts in a mission for justice across people and communities.
"We exist whether we’re trying to be silenced or not," Hettie declares. "We’re here. And we won’t be silenced."
What began as a need to confront the silencing of Black voices and racial injustice in America has now grown into diverse programs—educational curricula, performances, and conferences—that amplify a wide range of perspectives. Ironically, Create a Space, NOW! has yet to have a permanent physical space—until now. The team is ready to establish a tangible home for their work, currently fundraising for a disability-accessible Albany hub with sliding-scale studios, a testament to their grassroots growth and unwavering dedication. Arts and activism have always called attention to injustice; Hettie asserts, even in the face of defunding arts and eliminating critical thinking, that this shared mission is here, and not going anywhere.
The organization also serves as a process-oriented incubator for artists committed to progressive change, offering connections to local nonprofits, arts spaces, and creative solutions to social justice issues. When asking about inspiration for her org’s physical space, Hettie’s eyes lit up.
“I love looking back on places and buildings that have changed over time and remembering, ‘Oh! That started out as this.’”
However, even brick-and-mortar plans retain their adaptive spirit: designs show retractable seating for dance workshops that can convert to town halls. She envisions Create a Space, NOW! as a place for professional process-oriented art that promotes health and social justice, challenging the notion that professional art must be entangled with capitalist exclusivity.
"Art can not only be entertaining. It can save lives, and you can make money from it," says Hettie. To meet the pace of our communities present issues in justice, Create a Space, NOW! asks us: when you feel silenced, how could art help reclaim that space?
There’s a profound need for spaces where imagination and justice intersect. Create a Space, NOW! is answering that call—but it can’t do it alone. Hettie invites all support in their mission through donations, volunteering, sharing on social media, or attending their August 9 festival. After all, as Hettie proves every day, the future belongs to those bold enough to create it.
For more information and to donate, visit: https://www.createaspacenow.org. Create A Space, NOW! uses all donations to continue our work, creating purposeful art to engage, educate, and inspire change from within Black and marginalized communities, locally and at large.
