Nataki Garrett (Oakland, CA), a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, is widely recognized as an innovative and influential artist and arts leader. She is the former executive artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the former acting artistic director of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently co-artistic director of One Nation/One Project, leading their national arts and health initiative #ArtsforEveryBody. She is also the CEO of Ladder Leadership Services. Across her career, she has fostered and developed new work for the stage and award-winning work for the screen—Garrett’s vision is to support artists; to manifest innovation; to inspire creativity and to ensure the future of performing arts by centering artists as thought leaders and change makers who transform culture. Garrett co-created the Professional Non-profit Theater Coalition to advocate to ensure that nonprofit nonprofit arts organizations were included in the Small Business Administration’s Shuttered Venue Operators Grant during the pandemic. Garrett conceived the award winning interactive and immersive digital platform O! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and created QuillsFest - intersecting extended reality (XR) and theater in a virtual festival setting. She executive produced 71 films and XR projects through 10 QuillsFest programs including the Visual Sovereignty Project, which focused on producing XR projects and films about Indigenous sovereignty, and You Go Girl, which received a Sundance Award in 2022. She is the recipient of the Ammerman Award for directing in 2019, a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship and the 2005 Theater Communications Group/National Endowment for the Arts Career Fellowship for Directors.