About

Murielle Borst Tarrant (Kuna/Rappahannock Nations) is a playwright, performer, director, cultural advocate, fantasy novelist, and educator whose work centers Indigenous resilience, theatrical innovation, and community transformation. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Safe Harbors NYC, a platform dedicated to supporting Indigenous artists navigating urban spaces, institutional systems, and cultural reclamation. She is also the author of The Star Medicine, the first in a fantasy series that reimagines Indigenous cosmologies. Her solo show Tipi Tales from the Stoop, ritual-based performance Feast of Ghosts, cabaret satire Don’t Feed the Indians, and internationally recognized More Than Feathers and Beads reflect her commitment to layered storytelling, community healing, and radical reimagining.

Murielle is a six-year Playwright Fellow at La MaMa Theater through the Mellon Foundation, where she continues to develop new works that challenge colonial frameworks and elevate Indigenous aesthetics. She formerly served as Assistant Professor of the Practice at Brown Arts Institute and as an Artistic Practitioner Fellow at CSREA. She is also former faculty at the National Institute on Directing & Ensemble Creation.

Her artistic lineage includes direct collaboration with Spiderwoman Theater, founded by her family and known for pioneering Storyweaving—a methodology central to her dramaturgical practice. As Associate Director and dramaturge, Murielle helped shape the company’s evolving aesthetic while honoring its foundational principles of intergenerational storytelling and cultural resistance. She also directed Artistic Director Muriel Miguel in Red Mother, a one-woman show loosely inspired by Brecht’s Mother Courage, which toured nationally and internationally and brought Spiderwoman Theater’s legacy to new audiences.

Murielle believes in theater as ceremony—a space where story becomes medicine, where performance is a communal act of healing, remembrance, and resistance. She sees literature as cosmology, a way to chart Indigenous worlds, spiritual systems, and mythic landscapes that exist beyond colonial imagination. And she understands ensemble as tapestry: a living weave of intergenerational knowledge, cultural survival, and relational storytelling. Each collaborator carries a thread—memory, movement, voice—and together they form a textured whole that honors legacy while making space for transformation. Her work does not simply document—it activates. It challenges erasure, invites dialogue, and offers future generations a blueprint to imagine themselves whole, powerful, and present.