BIPOC Playwrights Festival at Boise Contemporary Theater

Boise Contemporary Theater is a professional theater company in Boise, Idaho, whose mission is to inspire our community to examine our perspectives and better understand ourselves, each other, and the world around us by creating thought-provoking stories of the human experience.  

Founded in 1997, BCT is the only nonprofit professional theater within 300 miles dedicated to producing challenging new work. BCT is a recipient of the Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, a two-time recipient of the National Theater Company Award from the American Theater Wing, and the 2022–23 City of Boise Cultural Ambassador. In its first 25 Seasons, BCT presented over 90 MainStage productions, including 25 world premieres, such as Eric Coble’s The Velocity of Autumn (which continued to Broadway). 

Our MainStage season of five productions brings more than 12,000 visitors to BCT. Another 3,000-plus visitors enjoy our season-long reading series and summer reading series, both dedicated to bold new works, as well as a children’s reading series. Our annual BIPOC Playwrights Festival, launched in 2021, furthers our commitment to presenting diverse new voices. 

BCT’s education program, A.C.T. at BCT, strives to reach a broad audience representative of our community. We serve over 2,000 students through onsite and outreach Theater Lab programs in which students conceive, write, produce, and perform in their own original productions. We continue expanding our outreach programs to include more underserved schools with high populations of low-income, at-risk, and refugee students. 

BCT’s intimate black box space seats 231 guests. We own and perform in a historic building in the BODO District of downtown Boise, the hub of Boise’s cultural community. BCT hosts or collaborates with myriad local arts organizations, including The Morrison Center for the Performing Arts, Opera Idaho, Idaho Botanical Garden, Idaho Shakespeare Festival, and Treefort Music Fest.