Community engagement

In the summer of 2026, Hamilton partnered with Grundy Safe Communities Coalition’s SPARK (Students Preventing Addiction and Raising Knowledge) program to create an original performance inspired by oral histories the students collected from notable Grundy County High School alumni. The resulting site-responsive performance was presented promenade-style at the historic Littell-Partin Center, former home of GCHS and now a hub for community resources. This project was supported by the Tennessee Arts Commission, the South Cumberland Community Fund, Sewanee’s Office of Civic Engagement, and Dr. Katy Morgan’s Civic Action Lab.

In the spring of 2025, Hamilton taught a course on Community Engaged Theatre that partnered with the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation and the St. Mark’s Community Center, a nonprofit organization serving Sewanee’s historic Black community: elders who are a formative part of Sewanee history but have been systematically excluded from the archive. In the class, students learned the history of the St. Mark’s Community, studied community-centered approaches for generating performance, and collaborated with St. Mark’s Community members to create an original performance which was presented at the end of the semester to a sold-out house at the Tennessee Williams Center.