In rehearsal / in production

I have long experience facilitating radical acceptance; I have written and taught inclusive and anti-racist practices. I have held spaces that foster the feeling of being not merely accepted, but sought out, connected, useful, celebrated as one’s authentic self without fear of judgment. It’s possible — it’s likely that my professional directing career is over. I know I am not willing to go back to the brutal working conditions and unquestioned assumptions that predominated the field before the pandemic. I am looking to leverage my strategic planning, curriculum design, research, analysis, writing, critical and collaborative skills to fight for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. I think art can help. If I can do these things in a theatrical environment, that’s cool, but I may be pivoting, or course correcting, towards social justice, towards facilitating educational opportunities for systems-impacted folx.

I spent a fair amount of my pandemic completing an MFA in Directing with an emphasis on social justice and liberatory pedagogy; I earned my degree summa cum laude in May 2021. I have focused my research on trauma-informed and anti-racist directing practice, pedagogy, and also how the gears of systemic racism turn within both theatre and the criminal justice system. I am looking to be of service and trying to discern the path forward amidst all the dislocations — global, national, theatrical, and personal — during this time of COVID and long overdue racial reckoning.

My last theatrical acts as the world shut down in 2020 were finishing up a class at Carleton College and facilitating a workshop with Redeeming Time at MCF-Moose Lake, where my team of teaching artists and I had been working with our incarcerated ensemble. We performed for the men’s families in the visiting room on March 9, 2020, and on March 11, as the state moved to soft lockdown status, we were the last four volunteers to enter a Minnesota Correctional Facility for the duration.

My husband and I moved back to the East Coast in September 2020 because we had a pair of elderly mamas who couldn’t afford to wait out the pandemic before we showed back up to help support them; my mom died in November 2020, collateral damage to the pandemic.

I directed Much Ado about Nothing with the Guthrie BFA program at the University of Minnesota in Spring 2019. In 2018 and 2020, I taught a new women’s theatre course, which I call Top Girls, at Carleton College in Northfield, MN; I also directed Richard III for South Dakota Shakespeare. In Fall 2017, I directed Sarah Ruhl’s In The Next Room at the University of Minnesota. In Fall 2016, I taught Women in Theatre at UMN; this is the fifth state in which I have worked as a guest lecturer at a university.

I founded the Redeeming Time Project in Minnesota. (Woo hoo!)

Our mission is to use Shakespeare to effect positive change. We leverage the theatrical arts to enable incarcerated and formerly incarcerated adults to develop social, cognitive, and life skills which they will need to reintegrate into the community.

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Between 2009-2017, I served as a facilitator, teacher and director with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison north of New York City. In addition to collaborating with Jeff Glaser on his production of Starting Over in spring 2010, I have team-taught two directing workshops at the prison.  This spring, I have directed Tracy Letts’  Superior Donuts at Sing Sing; we performed the play for the population and for an invited civilian audience May 11,12 and 13, 2011.

Photo by Xavier Mascareñas

I invited actor Michael McKean, who created the role of Arthur at Steppenwolf and then on Broadway, to come speak to the men at Sing Sing.  You can read the article about his late April visit here and see additional photos of his visit here.  You can read the post I wrote for 2am theatre here.