Artists Repertory Theatre has made a commitment to touring that has been realized over the years with regional tours, both derived from Mainstage shows (The Laramie Project, A Midsummer Night's Dream) and original works, such as Chasing Empire's Soul, a multimedia innovative touring piece on the legacy of Lewis and Clark. Artists Rep has produced several tours of American plays under the sponsorship of the U.S. Information Agency to the Near and Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa. A 1997 tour of Pakistan included an Artists Rep production which represented the U.S. in an international play festival on human rights. In 2000, Artists Rep participated in the Vietnam America Theatre Exchange, the first ever reciprocal artistic collaboration between the United States and Vietnam. In 2004 Artists Rep was one of six companies selected by the National Endowment for the Arts to participate in Shakespeare in American Communities, a national touring project designed to bring professional theater to underserved communities. For the project, Artists Rep co-produced a bi-lingual production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with Vietnam's Central Dramatic Company. 

Rebecca Martinez, Artists Repertory Theatre's Director of Education and Outreach, traveled to South America in the spring of 2007 to work with youth in poverty-stricken areas from four different countries. She traveled to La Paz, Bolivia; Caracas, Venezuela; Quito, Ecuador; and Managua, Nicaragua to teach young performers and working theatre professionals with an interest in pursuing theatre as a career.  In addition to sharing valuable skills used in North American theater, she also brought skills and elements of South American theatrical styles back to Artists Rep for use in their future projects. In this exchange, she has acted both as teacher and student, attempting to transcend ethnic and linguistic barriers, and promote understanding and communication between North and South American cultures.

In each city, Martinez worked with a group of fifteen to thirty young adults, rehearsing with them for ten days - a process which culminated in an open-to-the-public presentation. The work consisted typically of two short plays, which Martinez helped the performers to prepare and memorize. The young performers brought their own performance style - very physical, with strong comedic tones, incorporation of music, and elements of clown and dance - and she supplemented it with focused text-based work, which these youth are, for the most part, unaccustomed to.

United States actors, especially in professional companies, usually make textual analysis and interpretation a foundation for their stage work, skills they pick up in a university or conservatory program. In a country like Bolivia, however, there are no theater academies. "The young performers there would get ideas from movie actors like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin," Martinez says, "and work to emulate what they are doing, and create their theater from what they saw in these movies." Other differences include their technical approach, characterized by Martinez as "super bare bones," and their approach to the student/teacher relationship, which she describes as more familial, and less formal, than our own.

Stage Two of the project brought 11 of the workshop participants for a West Coast tour of theaters in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland. Artists Rep acted as their home base for this tour, where the performers engaged in theater workshops, met with Artists Rep's staff and other local artists to discuss how professional theater in the U.S. works, and tour the building to see an example of how a North American theatrical facility functions. Martinez's mission operates as part of a focus on cultural outreach which Artistic Director Allen Nause brought with him when he took over the reigns of Artists Rep in 1989, and continues Artists Rep's dedication to bringing communities together through the medium of theater.