WELCOME, FUTURE COLLABORATOR!
about me:
I dig the body as a performance site.
I dig visceralness – work that hits you in the gut.
I dig women behaving badly and young people revolting against poisoned worlds.
I dig environmental and site-specific work – inspired by how place and space move us.
my story:
Born and raised in Virginia, USA, I studied dance at Rhythm Street Studio (modern, contemporary, ballet), classical voice with Catherine Harendza, and performed in plays and musicals in my community. I graduated with a BA in Interdisciplinary Arts Administration from the University of Virginia (Go Hoos!), a combination of arts business, media studies, drama, and economics.
At UVA, I discovered directing after first being cut from the cast of a show. A year later, I proposed and won the slot to direct for the following year’s incoming first-year students. This entry to directing was forged out of a painful experience of not-belonging for me – and so, from the start, I knew I was doing more as a director than putting on a show: I was creating a community.
As a student, I worked with Julie Hamburg at Live Arts in Charlottesville, VA, the Tabard Theatre in London, Colin Hovde at Theater Alliance in Washington D.C., and the Kennedy Center’s DeVos Institute for Arts Management in International programming.
After moving to Boston in 2014, I began my professional career with Bevin O’Gara and Peter DuBois in the artistic department at the Huntington Theatre Company, Fresh Ink Theatre Company, and José Mateo Ballet Theatre. I assisted directors Maria Friedman (Merrily We Roll Along, now Broadway-bound), Peter DuBois, and Summer Williams. My directing work has been seen professionally in Boston at the Huntington Theatre Company, New Rep, Fresh Ink, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, the Umbrella Center for the Arts, Stoneham Theatre, Bad Habit Productions, Wellesley College, The Open Theatre Project, Reckless Theatre Company, Boston Public Works, and others. I was also a fellow of the 2016 Insted Israel Director’s Lab (Tel Aviv, Israel).
Between 2018-2021, I earned my MFA in Directing at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, one of the top professional theatre training programs in the US and which accepts only students per year, studying with Lisa Portes and Damon Kiely. In the course of graduate study, I directed eight full projects ranging from contemporary plays to absurdist classics to experimentation between live and online spaces. These include Dance Nation (2021), A Love Play (2020), and Polaroid Stories (2019).
In 2021, I moved to Berlin, Germany as the US Fulbright Arts Research Scholar in Theater Directing. Here, I studied tanztheater, specifically through the work of Pina Bausch, and started to develop an original multimedia piece about climate change and new folklore. During this period I worked with Volksbühne (MiniMe, dir. Kornél Mundruczó), arthaus.berlin Centre for Embodied Performance, was an artist-in-residence for the collaborative exhibitition Embers at Kulturschöpfer’s IN/BETWEEN Residency, and a participant in the 2022 Sommer Film Akademie in Görlitz, DE where I made the tanzfilm Lady in White.
In Fall 2022, I became a freelance director and teacher based in Germany. I work currently as a lecturer in the Screen Acting department at Catalyst Berlin as well as a Arts teacher in German public schools with InterACT English. With Berlin as a homebase, I have the ability to travel to teach or create work in collaboration with other local artists.
Upcoming: Viewpoints Workshop + Lady in White screening at the TanzortNord Festival (Lübeck, DE, June 2023), artist-in-residence at kodekü (Weißwasser, DE, August 2023).
join me in exploring:
forms:
indie filmmaking and movement for film/tv
new play development
theatre and movement direction
devised and collaboratively built work
musical theatre direction and choreography
environmental and site-specific performance
educational directing (high school and collegiate)
subjects:
contemporary plays by/about smart, dangerous women
bodies – as a site of wonder and disgust
epic and mythic stories + folklore and fairy tales
climate justice and environmental activism
the natural/wildness – and the resiliency of living places