Brooke is a professional theater director and an artist. She was co-founder of the NYC based company The Theater of a Two-headed Calf and has developed and directed all 14 of Two-headed Calf’s productions including the OBIE Award winning Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (2007 HERE Arts Center), It Cannot Be Called Our Mother but Our Graves a.k.a Macbeth (Soho Rep Lab 2008/9), Trifles (Ontological Hysteric Incubator 2010), and the opera project You, My Mother (2012 at La Mama ETC, 2013 in the River to River Festival).
She is also a co-founder with Sharon Hayes of The Performance Intensive.
Brooke is currently working on a large-scale performance project titled Be Holding with poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, and the new ensemble Yarn/Wire. Be Holding has received generous support from The Pew Foundation for the Arts and will be developed and presented at Girard College as part of the Girard College Campus for the City professional performance curatorial series.
Brooke conceived, directed, wrote for, and performed in the Dyke Division’s live serial Room for Cream (Four seasons — 28 episodes) at La Mama, ETC 2008-10 and at the New Museum 2017. Brooke and the Dyke Division created a version of that work with a collective of radical queer activists in Istanbul, Turkey, which premiered in conjunction with the Istanbul Biennial 2011.
She wrote, directed and produced a nine-part research and performance project titled I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Studies in directing or nine encounters between me and you. The project began in April 2014 at the New Museum, NYC. Included a large-scale performance titled I’m Bleeding All Over the Place: A Living History Tour performed at La Mama ETC in June 2016. Followed by several more one-night iterations through the Spring of 2019. The project will culminate in a book of essays on directing titled Who is in the Room (Routledge EDI Series).
Brooke is also the co-creator of a collaborative performance with artist Sharon Hayes called Time Passes. Time Passes is an 8-hour performance that uses the book-on-tape recording of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as its spine. This show has had two iterations and will continue to be performed for a decade.
Brooke also produced and directed three evenings of the serial drama, And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid by Jeff Weiss and Richard C. Martinez at The Kitchen, NYC in July, 2016.
She is a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Award for Theatre and her work has been supported by numerous awards, grants and residencies including a Velocity grant from the Warhol Foundation, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, several NYSCA grants, a Franklin Furnace performing artists award, an Arts Matters grant, the NEA/TCG Directors program, an OBIE award grant, a residency at The Performing Garage, and several LMCC and Chashama space grants.
She is on faculty in the Creative Writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.