ABOUT LEVEL GROUND
Level Ground is an award-winning artist collective and production incubator creating experiments in empathy. We are at our best when we provoke both artists and audiences in spaces that may initially cause discomfort, but are ultimately transformative.
Our Mission
Through organizing and creating with artists, Level Ground is committed to destabilizing oppressive social structures through art making, community building, and resource sharing.
our Vision
Level Ground is a cohesive, horizontal community representing multiple and intersecting identities. We build solidarity across imposed social structures designed to keep us divided as our community strives to be rooted in right relationship with one another, the planet, and our means and economies of survival. We hope to inspire new, collective ways of imagining and organizing public and private communities in the arts and beyond.
our Values
We build creative collaborations based on equitable access to resources, participation, and influence.
We support artistic experimentation by protecting space to see differently and create what hasn’t been tried before (and might not even work).
We provoke empathy by being open to the discomfort of seeing things from a new or opposing point of view.
We foster nuanced conversation, especially between people who wouldn’t otherwise connect with each other.
We cultivate diverse relationships because progress is realized when we build solidarity across the imposed social structures designed to keep us divided.
Our programs
Artist Collective
A community of artists in Los Angeles who share a desire to root our creative lives in experimentation, collaboration, and radical empathy with one another. Through the Collective’s own organizing, we produce community-building programs for artists and audiences.
Production Incubator
A program to support diverse creators working on emerging, innovative, and/or experimental nonfiction media projects. Through the incubator, creators receive mentorship and think together about the social, the aesthetic, and the economic as a part of their storytelling.
Creative Studio
A revenue earning program wherein Level Ground contracts creative services to other businesses (i.e. video and event production, marketing and impact campaigns, creative consultations, etc.) and then oversees the Collective artists we hire to work on those projects.
our Community Agreements
For artists and supporters of the Level Ground Community:
We prioritize making space to witness and hear first from people of color, trans, nonbinary, and disabled people.
We are a trans-inclusive space and will always invite folks to share their pronouns.
We acknowledge the multiplicity of everyone’s identity (including our own).
We lead with self-awareness and empathy.
We take space to participate if we’re holding back, and we make space for others to share if we’re over-engaging or dominating conversation.
We encourage one another’s curiosity and exploration through horizontal, communal, and reciprocal learning.
We share experiences and ideas without fear of being judged, and we receive others’ experiences and ideas without judgment.
We respect one another’s work and journey outside this space.
We do not encourage or feed “grind culture” in our work and relationships.
We will not sacrifice our rest or well-being for the sake of productivity or deadlines.
Adapted from discussion agreements created by .turay and Lauren {lola.rose.eros} for the 2020 Syllabus Project, Level Ground offers these agreements as evolving, communal, and adaptive to our community's expressed needs and desires. We ask that if you need something, please ask for it. If someone oversteps these agreements, please let them know directly. And if you hurt someone or overstep yourself, please apologize.