Directing The Race 2020 at the Institute for Creativity, Arts & Technology, a hybrid theater production adapted from Sojourn Theatre’s play The Race
The stories we tell -- and the stories we don’t tell -- shape our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. Through my work as an artist, consultant, and researcher, I am driven by my curiosity for the way we perform our identities out in the world, and how we perform in our civic discourse.
I invite people into imaginative spaces that can make the seemingly impossible, possible. I create opportunities for people to perform differently with each other, on stage, in our organizations, and in civic life. The practices I draw on are oral history, Theatre of Oppressed, cultural organizing, and arts-based pedagogy and practice.
I work closely with artists and community advocates through the lens of civic practice, which are projects
that bring people into collaboration and co-design with each other to work
toward a collective vision or challenge.
As an artist, I make theater and live art that invites people to investigate the places we live in. I create living history projects to develop forums where people reflect, connect and mobilize across social and economic divides. My theater practice incorporates storytelling (physical and verbal), and methods from architecture and urban planning. The theater I make often combines fact, fiction, and real people's stories, and my usual collaborators are people that do not ordinarily identify as artists.
As a consultant, I use creative play and popular education processes to make inaccessible civic processes more transparent. I enjoy the challenge of creating democratic space to host complex conversations, enabling group deliberation and encouraging intergenerational dialogue.
As a researcher, I integrate the arts and culture into the work people do to shape, preserve, and resource their communities, with attention to grassroots efforts. My bread and butter is qualitative research (especially performed ethnography, oral history, and creative practices). I see my work in the legacy of restoration urbanism, repairing the ways in which we are fractured phyically and socially by segregation and inequality. My work often looks like supporting morale through difficult times using the arts. Only the people can preserve democracy; we must start from our relationships. Developing the ability to reweave our social fabric is essential.