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* welcome *

Zach Blackwood has spent his career building the spaces where Philadelphia's artists and audiences meet — as a producer, a programs strategist, a funder, and a writer whose own work lives in the same rooms he builds. Across every role, his focus has stayed consistent: making sure ambitious creative work actually finds its audience, and that the experience of showing up matters as much as what's on stage.

==[ poetry ]==

As a poet, Zach is the author of the chapbooks SEXY UNIQUE HOLLOW POINT (glo worm) and ultra-fine (Blush Lit), with poems appearing in Blush Lit, Boxx Press, and elsewhere. He recently completed video of the sun, his first full-length collection — a book about touch, screens, and what it costs to be perceived. He also co-founded Franks O'Hara, Philadelphia's apocryphal poetry cookout, pairing live readings with grilled food on the roof of the historic contemporary art museum.

>>> go read the poems <<<

==[ producing ]==

From 2017 to 2021, Zach produced the curated slate of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival at FringeArts, shaping the city's flagship performance event for four consecutive years. He didn't stop at curation — during his tenure, he launched three new programs from scratch: the Blue Heaven Comedy Festival, Hand to Hand Circus, and High Pressure Fire Service, an incubator built to give Philadelphia-based theater artists a runway for new work. Each program expanded what FringeArts could offer, and who it could reach — proving that Fringe is an alternative mode for making and producing art, rather than a fixed population of artists from relational pedigrees.

==[ funding ]==

Zach now works as Program Officer for the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a funding program of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage established by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 1991, which offers direct support to individual Philadelphia-area artists across disciplines, annually awarding up to 12 unrestricted grants of $85,000 each. In 2024, he was selected to represent Pennsylvania in the National Leaders of Color Fellowship, facilitated by Creative West to develop the next generation of arts leadership nationally — recognition of both his track record and his continued investment in the field's future.

==[ off the clock ]==

When he's not working, Zach collects 1:24-scale miniatures and spends his downtime with his hound dog, Hammer.