Meet Our Scholars

Maggie Keenan-Bolger was born and raised in inner-city Detroit, where at age 14 she came out as the only openly queer-identified individual in her high school. This lead to conflict and rejection on both an individual and school-wide level. She was forced to attend anti-homosexuality lectures, and when Maggie’s mom passed away from breast cancer her junior year, she lost both a parent and an ally. Maggie then attended Oberlin College where she majored in Theatre and Gender and Women’s Studies. Later, as the Dr. Joan. Shelley W. Fernandez Named Point Scholar, Maggie acquired her Master’s Degree, using theatre as social change in the Applied Theatre Program at the City University of New York. Maggie then went on to receive her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College as the New York Point Honors Scholar. In 2013, Maggie founded her own theatre and media company, Honest Accomplice Theatre (HAT), dedicated to the creation of new works that challenge the status quo by allowing communities historically excluded from theatre and media to construct their own representations of themselves for the stage or screen. (www.honestaccomplice.org) HAT has produced and toured a number of theatrical events as well as a free educational YouTube web series called the Trans Literacy Project. Diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder in 2018, Maggie’s life shifted drastically. She’s now working to examine the ways that ableism shapes the queer, theater and media spaces she inhabits and is fighting to challenge assumptions about productivity, worth and play within those systems.