Crystal C. Mercer Watson
Temporary or Seasonal Employee @Arkansas Repertory Theatre
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WORK HISTORY
Temporary or Seasonal Employee @Arkansas Repertory Theatre
At The Arkansas Repertory Theatre is the premiere theatre in the state! My job duties have included being additional crew for many shows, my first being The King and I, Hello Dolly, Doubt, My Fair Lady, A Little Night Music, Bertrand Priest, and many more. Just this past year, I got my first opportunity to being on stage, playing the role in the world premiere of One Ninth, a play about the life of Minnijean Brown-Trickey, a member of the Little Rock Nine, only 16 years old when she was the first of nine black students to enter an all white Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
EDUCATION
University of Central Arkansas
Theatre/Theater
Clinton School of Public Service
Master's, Public Service
Little Rock Central High School
High School Diploma, Mass Communication/Media Studies, Theatre, Foreign Language
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Spring 2010, Theatre Arts and Dance
ABOUT CRYSTAL C. MERCER WATSON
CRYSTAL C. MERCER WATSON is just a little girl from Little Rock, Arkansas. An all-around AfroCreative, Mercer is a Black, Queer Textile Artist, Actor, Activist, Poet, Playwright, Published Author (A Love Story Waiting To Happen, Butterfly Typeface Publishing, 2018, and From Cotton to Silk: The Magic of Black Hair, Et Alia Press, 2021), Found(her) and Executive Director of A BLACK SPACE, a nonprofit that serves and liberates Black folks through culture bearing, oral tradition, and ancestral craft, and Lead Designer and Merchant of Mercer Textile Mercantile. In addition to her creative passions and business savvy, she holds full-time work with Artspace Projects, Inc, the nation’s leading developer in affordable housing for artists and dedicated workspace for arts and cultural organizations. She is also a contracted consultant for the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, leading efforts to promote narratives and storytelling as a catalyst for change and advancing equity in Arkansas, and she’s an artist on the M2 Gallery roster, a space that curates fine art from local to international makers in all mediums. She has a BA in Theatre Arts and Dance from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and is a graduate of the Clinton School of Public Service (MPS). Mercer’s past credits include a number of plays, musicals, and performances in Arkansas, off-Broadway in New York, and internationally in Canterbury, England and Accra, Ghana. She fuses arts and activism by using theatre, poetry, and textiles to tell social justice narratives, through merchandising artifacts of the culture and storytelling, with an emphasis of uplifting voices of color and making marginalized populations visible. A dedicated public servant, a woman of many creative talents, and the daughter of legendary late civil rights lawyer, Attorney Christopher C. Mercer, Jr, she honors the legacy of her father by using artistic mediums as a tool for empowerment, education, and radical justice. Her last name, Mercer, means “a merchant in textiles” and she is a textile maven, stitching by hand thousands of hours a year and dedicating her craft to being a keeper of the culture through the cloth. In every thread of her being, she is weaving a tapestry of her ancestors, draped in Afro-futurism. From Little Rock, Arkansas to Accra, Ghana, Mercer has made an international impact as an artist and an activist, activated by those pillars, she knows, shows, and cares about what’s going on in the hood.
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