Artist Statement

I am an award-winning director/writer of hybrid work based in NYC. I construct work for the stage – hybrid, opera-theatre, adaptations, classics. I work in a collaborative, process-driven way to fuse different disciplines into a cohesive whole.

I am always hungry to create relevant and resonant works for our time, outside of the limitations of the existing canon. I am truly a hybrid artist, from my earliest work where I incorporated theatre and dance with live music, to developing an intensely physical performance style, to layering in media to expand and deepen storytelling, to conceiving new cohesive works by forging connections between seemingly unrelated source materials, to my current work where I am world-building as lead writer.

I choose to make theatre because it forges community. I believe community can be formed when a group of people share live art with each other in the same space and time. And, within community, we can then examine our shared assumptions and find meaning in our lives. I seek to create immediate work that reverberates with the complexity and intensity of today’s culture.

At the core of my work is risk-taking, both in form and content. I have explored what it means to be American with participatory works like LUSH VALLEY, dealing with the American Dream, citizenship and civic responsibility, and TRADE PRACTICES, about value and who gets to decide, set in a company with owners, workers and managers. These works asked audiences to participate actively and wrestle personally with ideas in order to animate the conversation. Throughout my career as an artist and activist, I have used art to instigate conversations and cultivate communities.

I engage with complex social issues like privacy, surveillance capitalism, homelessness, and ethnic ambiguity with works like LOOKING AT YOU, a fun, immersive techno-opera, where we datamined that night’s audiences’ social media and incorporated it or my upcoming JOAN OF THE CITY, using mixed reality to portray a modern day Joan of Arc, who is unhoused and is fighting gentrification.

My work is constantly evolving as I use what I have discovered on past projects to help me tackle the challenges in new ones.  Each phase acts as a stepping stone to the next. And I am always eager to take that next leap.