Home | Contact Us | Shop | Donate | Buy Tickets

Mission & history

Founded in 1992 as a professional theater company that included actors with disabilities, Interact expanded its vision in 1996 to become a recognized center for both the performing and visual arts. Interact is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and a licensed day care facility.

Today, Interact Center is the only center nationally that offers professional-level training, performances, and exhibitions in multiple artistic disciplines, for artists with a wide range of disabilities, from physical to developmental to mental to behavioral. At Interact, adult artists with disabilities explore and expand their creativity as actors, writers, painters, sculptors and musicians.

Interact’s three overarching goals are:

—To provide artists with disabilities skills and opportunities for creative expression, artistic growth, professional performance and exhibition opportunities, and opportunities to earn income from their work. 

—To challenge existing stereotypes that assume people with disabilities are not capable.

—To challenge the arts community to recognize and include the unique talents and vision of people who have long been marginalized.

Interact Founder/Artistic Director Jeanne Calvit has a long history in both theater and social services. Her committed advocacy for artists with disabilities has led to heightened public awareness that many people with disabilities are creative and talented, but that their creativity often is ignored or discouraged. Many of these people depend on assistance from local social service programs, but those programs are geared toward placing people with disabilities in minimal-skill, low-paying positions that may not challenge them.

At Interact, over 90 artists earn income through theater performances and sales of artwork in the organization’s public gallery, The Inside Out Gallery, the first gallery in the Twin Cities to feature Outsider art. Interact is now a vital participant in the Twin Cities arts community.

Regional and national performances and exhibitions by Interact artists enable the public to see work that is raw, honest and explores visions and voices that would otherwise not be seen or heard. Furthermore, Interact effectively demonstrates a progressive model for integrating artistic and social service systems in ways that build on people’s strengths, rather than focusing on their limitations.