Mission
Hatch Arts Collective is a Pittsburgh-based performing arts incubator centering queer and BIPOC artists, stories, and communities. We specialize in new work development and interdisciplinary artistic training. Hatch collaborates to enable the production of work that breaks with traditional expectations of participants, content, or form.

Vision
Hatch envisions a Pittsburgh where queer and BIPOC artists have an abundance of opportunities to develop new performances and share their work publically. We imagine an ecosystem where traditionally marginalized artists can have a sustainable arts practice while thriving locally and flourishing nationally.

What We Make
Hatch creates artistically rigorous and aesthetically surprising theatre. We hope our audiences will laugh, cry, and sit in their anger right alongside us. Hatch performances have included:

• A queer love story seen through the eyes of backyard chickens

• Teenage Andy Warhol and a biblical King Belshazzar as a vandalizing duo

• A documentary audio play searching for an uncle lost to the AIDS crisis

• An Urdu translation of Antigone as an apology to and from a mother

• A karaoke funeral lounge hosted by a Korean adoptee

History
Hatch formed in late 2012 in Pittsburgh, PA, when three friends set out to produce a new play called Chickens in the Yard. Written by Paul Kruse, directed by Adil Mansoor, and produced by Nicole Shero, Chickens brought together a wide range of creative minds to help realize a single vision. Since that first production, Hatch has grown to create multiple new works of performing and interdisciplinary art around this same idea. We believe that diverse views and skills engaged in the same conversation can create powerful artistic work. 

Check out this amazing article by Kayla Berkey about Hatch’s first few years.

Select Milestones

2014 Produced first full season of plays with support from Heinz Endowments
2015 Hatch becomes inaugural Gerri Kay New Voices Fellow at Quantum Theatre
2016 Produced DRIFTLESS, an ambitious community-driven play about fracking by Paul Kruse
2018 Hatch’s production of GLORIA by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was named one of “top 10 Pgh shows of 2018” by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette
2022 Hatch’s production of ONCE REMOVED by Paul Kruse premiered at Tribeca Festival. 
2025 AMM(I)GONE, Adil Mansoor’s solo show developed by Hatch, premieres Off-Broadway in a production supported by The Flea, PlayCo, Woolly Mammoth, and Kelly Strayhorn as it continues a national tour with stops in DC, Boston, and more.

Supporters
Hatch projects have been supported by A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation; Arts, Equity, Reimagined Fund; Dreams of Hope; Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier; Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council; The Heinz Endowments; National Performance Network Creation & Development Fund; Opportunity Fund; The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; The Point Foundation’s Andrew A. Isen Internship; The Puffin Foundation Ltd; The William V. and Catherine A. McKinney Charitable Trusts through the PNC Charitable Trust; and Workhorse Collaborative.

Contact
For more information, contact info@hatcharts.org.

The Founders

Adil Mansoor is a theatre director centering the stories of queer folks and people of color. His performance “Amm(i)gone” adapts Sophocles’s “Antigone” as an apology to and from his mother. “Amm(i)gone” is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creative and Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Kelly Strayhorn Theater, The Theater Offensive, and NPN. Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, PlayCo, and KST are producing a national tour of Amm(i)gone, which presents its Off-Broadway Premiere at The Flea in March of 2025.

Mansoor has developed work with The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, New York Theatre Workshop, The New Dramatists, The Poetry Project, Mercury Store, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, NYU Tisch, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, PearlArts Studios, and others. Recent directing projects include “Daddies” by Paul Kruse (Audible), "Gloria" by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Hatch Arts Collective), "Kentucky" by Lean Nanako Winkler (Pittsburgh Playhouse), and “Once Removed” by Paul Kruse (Tribeca).

Mansoor is a founding member of Pittsburgh’s Hatch Arts Collective and the former Artistic Director of Dreams of Hope, an LGBTQA+ youth arts organization. He has been an NYTW 2050 Directing Fellow, a Gerri Kay New Voices Fellow with Quantum Theater, and an Art of Practice Fellow and Community Leader with Sundance. He was part of the inaugural Artist Caucus gathered by Baltimore Center Stage, Long Wharf, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, and Woolly Mammoth. Mansoor received his MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon.

Nicole Shero is an administrator, project manager, and producer. She has gained experience in a wide variety of administrative practices, including medical practice management, non-profit and for-profit marketing, arts programming, contracts management, facilities management, organizational finances, individual giving, artwork and document archiving, grantwriting, and events planning. After receiving her bachelor's degree from the University of Pittsburgh, Nicole served as a member of Public Allies Pittsburgh, a non-profit leadership development program. In 2013, she co-founded Hatch Arts Collective, a multimedia and performance group, where she produces theater and performance workshops. Previously, Nicole has worked with Einhorn Media Group, PearlArts Studios, Carnegie Mellon University, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, and Pittsburgh Child Guidance Foundation.

Paul William Kruse tells Queer love stories. As a playwright and media artist from Western Wisconsin, his work flows from his Catholic roots and ever-evolving experience of family. Paul often writes collaboratively, drawing from his years of experience as a videographer and documentarian. He is a 2023–2025 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis and a cohort member of Audible’s third Emerging Playwrights Fund. His audio play Once Removed was an official selection at the 2022 Tribeca Festival. Paul’s plays have been produced by Adjusted Realists in Brooklyn, NY; Quantum Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA; the Vortex Theater in Austin, TX; and in high schools around the country. Paul has developed work at The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Yaddo, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and Middlebury College. Paul completed his MFA at UT Austin in 2020, where he was a fellow with the Michener Center for Writers. From 2012–2022, Paul was resident playwright with Pittsburgh’s Hatch Arts Collective, which he co-founded with Adil Mansoor and Nicole Shero.