Southeast Asia Spotlight: Abigail G. Billones and Eric V. Dela Cruz

News from Harvard Asia Center Southeast Asia Initiative

Artists-In-Residence

This fall, the Asia Center and its Southeast Asia Initiative welcomes Abigail G. Billones and Eric V. Dela Cruz as its Fall 2025 Artists-in-Residence. Both are senior artist-teachers with the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), a company that has, since its founding in 1967, built a reputation for using theater not only to stage plays but to empower communities, challenge dominant histories, and amplify voices often left unheard.

Their residency will open a window into that legacy through two public events—a hands-on workshop and a reflective conversation—each shaped by the artists’ own unique practices.

Dela Cruz, a Filipino performance-maker, dramaturg, and facilitator, is known for creating immersive, multisensory works that explore memory, community, and the senses. As founder of TAXI (Theater. Applied. Experiential. Immersive), he has designed workshops that developed into Relational Sensory Dramaturgy (RSD), a practice rooted in awe, curiosity, and care. His international work bridges performance with sensory attunement, most recently through Sinag Lahi, a project that traces endangered Filipino foodways beginning with the artisanal salt Asian Tibuok.

Billones, meanwhile, brings to the residency her deep experience in theater for healing, advocacy, and youth engagement. As Program Director of PETA's Lingap Sining: Healing through the Arts, she has led initiatives at the intersection of narrative change, mental health, and human rights. Since 1994 she has facilitated more than 150 workshops worldwide, partnering with organizations such as Misereor, Asia Foundation, and UNICEF. A performer and educator with nearly 70 productions to her name, Billones has dedicated her career to using the stage as a platform for civic engagement and social transformation.

Together, the two will lead Sensing Stories, Shaping Change (October 7–8, 2025), a two-day evening workshop where participants will explore how memory and imagination, awakened through movement, sound, and collaborative exercises, can be shaped into powerful stories of connection.

They will then join Asia Center Associate and postdoctoral fellow at the American University of Paris, Aurélien Bellucci for Performing Narrative Change: Participatory Theater in the Philippines (October 9, 2025), a public conversation reflecting on PETA’s ongoing work to challenge historical narratives and engage communities—from grassroots workshops in Manila to February’s Changing Narratives festival, which showcased diverse art forms from puppetry to digital drama.

Through these events, Billones and Dela Cruz will invite participants and audiences to experience what PETA has long embodied: that theater is not only a form of art, but a way of sensing, shaping, and performing change.