state arts action network

Brad Erickson

 Brad serves as the president of the board of directors of California Arts Advocates, the statewide advocacy organization for all the arts.  He leads CAA’s efforts in developing and promoting arts-positive public policies at the state and local levels.  He also serves Americans for the Arts’ State Captain for California. 

For eight years, Brad has served as executive director of Theatre Bay Area, one of the nation’s largest regional performing arts service organizations, with 400 theater and dance company members, and nearly 3,000 individual members throughout the San Francisco Bay region.  He leads the organization’s efforts to support, promote, and advocate for the region’s vibrant theater and dance community. 

He is the co-founder and co-director of Arts Forum SF, advocating for the arts in San Francisco, and is the chair of the Mid-Market Project Area Committee of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.  Before coming to Theatre Bay Area in 2003, Brad served as executive director of the Northern California Supplier Development Council, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting and strengthening ethnic minority-owned businesses.

Also a playwright, his play, Woody & Me, received an NEA grant for its 2001 world premier at the Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis, IN and was selected as best new play in the 2000 Festival of Emerging American Theatre. His play, The War at Home, received its world premiere at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre in September of 2006, and won an award for Best New Script from the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. 

Currently Brad is developing two new plays: American Dream, el sueno del otro lado, at New Conservatory Theatre Center where it is set to premiere in 2012, and Milagro, through the Playwrights Lab at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley, CA.  As an actor, Brad was last seen onstage in the Magic Theatre’s West Coast premiere of Steve Yockey’s Octopus.