Dr Clare Hammoor is a collaborative educator and theatre-maker committed to justice and joy with experience teaching, directing, and devising in universities, public and private schools, professional theaters, and prisons. Clare is fascinated by object-oriented ontologies, playing with things, ritual work, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Clare has taught at New York University and University of Denver among other institutions and given lectures across the US and Europe. He has led classes and workshops internationally and his writing appears in articles, chapters, and journal editorships. Clare's passion for joy and justice has also led him to teach university courses in prisons for the past twelve years. He has been collaborating with Tara Rynders and The Clinic to develop and facilitate resiliency workshops virtually and in-person for healthcare providers and educators across the US and Europe over the past four years.
Clare is the Director of Performance and Pedagogy for the DU Prison Arts Initiative where he started a series of play-based arts workshops for children and their incarcerated parents. He is particularly animated by directing theatre with ensembles inside the prison system as a way of collectively imagining a more just and joyful world. Through DU PAI, Clare directed 30 residents of Denver Women’s Correctional Facility in a performance of A Christmas Carol which was seen by over 1100 members of the public at the Newman Center for Performing Arts in addition to another 1800 audience members inside the prison. He recently created a performance for camera project with 16 incarcerated people about the history of Colorado’s oldest prison titled ‘These Walls’ and recently directed an incarcerated team of 150 actors, musicians, designers, and artists in GODSPELL. In further supporting this work, Clare is the Wellness Consultant for the Prison Journalism Project.
Clare has been the Director of Inquiry and Instruction at Compositive Primary and the Theatre Specialist and Director at Blue School in Manhattan. During his time at Blue, Clare collaboratively developed an arts integration curriculum with a team of children, teachers, administrators, materials, and arts specialists. While in New York, Clare worked with Brooklyn Acting Lab as its Director of Education. He has directed and devised theatre professionally in New York City and across the United States.
Clare earned a doctorate from NYU where his research focused on the agencies of children and things in play. If you’re looking for a particularly niche conversation starter, his diss is titled Theatre of Children: Absurd Agencies in/of the Anthropocene. He also holds a MA in Educational Theatre from NYU, a BA in Theatre and Religious Studies from Indiana University, is an ordained interfaith minister through The New Seminary, and a certified advanced Integrated Energy Therapy practitioner. Clare is the founder of Sojourn Home Church, a progressive community of seekers animated by ritual as utopic action. He was the Intern Minister at Namaqua Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Loveland, Colorado.
If that’s not enough, his CV is right here and his headshot portrait by Evelyn Walker is here. You can even start an email conversation here.