For me, theatre and painting are world building and dream making — they are visceral, emotional, and cerebral. My own artistic vision transpires through the act of piecing together unlikely components, creating juxtapositions among the material, subject, and tone to create stories that live just on the tips of our tongues.
I am a theatre director, scenic and costume designer, scenic artist, and fine art painter constantly exploring new media and diversifying my skillset. My multi-faceted experiences serving in the Peace Corps in Madagascar, conducting academic research in west Africa, teaching at the university level, and working as a well-rounded theatre maker means I have accumulated daring, optimism, and vision and am always in search of the next project.
Having traveled the world, tackled masters and phd programs in theatre studies, and delving into my own creative practice, I continue to dedicate my artistic work to the worlds of imagination that can build communities by helping us understand and become more empathetic to the world around us.
I look forward to sharing my journey with you!
For me, theatre and painting are world building and dream making — they are visceral, emotional, and cerebral. My own artistic vision transpires through the act of piecing together unlikely components, creating juxtapositions among the material, subject, and tone to create stories that live just on the tips of our tongues.
I am a theatre director, scenic and costume designer, scenic artist, and fine art painter constantly exploring new media and diversifying my skillset. My multi-faceted experiences serving in the Peace Corps in Madagascar, conducting academic research in west Africa, teaching at the university level, and working as a well-rounded theatre maker means I have accumulated daring, optimism, and vision and am always in search of the next project.
Having traveled the world, tackled masters and phd programs in theatre studies, and delving into my own creative practice, I continue to dedicate my artistic work to the worlds of imagination that can build communities by helping us understand and become more empathetic to the world around us.
I look forward to sharing my journey with you!
For me, theatre and painting are world building and dream making — they are visceral, emotional, and cerebral. My own artistic vision transpires through the act of piecing together unlikely components, creating juxtapositions among the material, subject, and tone to create stories that live just on the tips of our tongues.
I am a theatre director, scenic and costume designer, scenic artist, and fine art painter constantly exploring new media and diversifying my skillset. My multi-faceted experiences serving in the Peace Corps in Madagascar, conducting academic research in west Africa, teaching at the university level, and working as a well-rounded theatre maker means I have accumulated daring, optimism, and vision and am always in search of the next project.
Having traveled the world, tackled masters and phd programs in theatre studies, and delving into my own creative practice, I continue to dedicate my artistic work to the worlds of imagination that can build communities by helping us understand and become more empathetic to the world around us.
I look forward to sharing my journey with you!
For me, theatre and painting are world building and dream making — they are visceral, emotional, and cerebral. My own artistic vision transpires through the act of piecing together unlikely components, creating juxtapositions among the material, subject, and tone to create stories that live just on the tips of our tongues.
I am a theatre director, scenic and costume designer, scenic artist, and fine art painter constantly exploring new media and diversifying my skillset. My multi-faceted experiences serving in the Peace Corps in Madagascar, conducting academic research in west Africa, teaching at the university level, and working as a well-rounded theatre maker means I have accumulated daring, optimism, and vision and am always in search of the next project.
Having traveled the world, tackled masters and phd programs in theatre studies, and delving into my own creative practice, I continue to dedicate my artistic work to the worlds of imagination that can build communities by helping us understand and become more empathetic to the world around us.
I look forward to sharing my journey with you!
Art & Design
Selected New Play Development
Blue, Black, and White, written by Donald Molosi follows the romantic relationship between Sir Seretse Kama (the first Botswana president after independence) and his British wife Ruth. Donald asked me to produce and direct this staging because of my experience living and working in Africa. Together we navigated the complications of representing a multi-cultural African community on stage with a Californian student body, negotiated how music and dance work within the script, faced the challenges of embodying rural African life, dove into learning various accents and speaking Setwsana (the language of Botswana).
Blue, Black ,and White
I've had the honor of working with a number of emerging playwrights staging early versions of the work in minimalist production contexts so that they playwrights can get a stronger sense of how the texts come alive and to help them identify any gaps and points of confusion in the story arc, complications that may arise in production, and the scope of the technical needs of the scripts.
Reasons the House Burned Down by Diana Small is a rather absurdist look at the life of a young women trying to put her life back together after her house burned down. We staged this as part of a dissertation project on Site-Specific Theatre. We chose this location of an abandoned gas station to capture the feel of desolation and decrepitude of the context of the inciting incident in the play. The audience stood in the space as the action moved about and through them. After this production, the script and our video were sent along to another performance group in another state where they were asked to choose a new site and new staging, but they were also asked to incorporate a certain number of things from the original production, thus creating a sort of performance telephone.
Reasons the House Burned Down
This is Not a Love Song
This is Not a Love Song by Hee-won Kim is a performance ethnography. Hee-won conducted ethnographic research on perceptions of and interactions with Asian women in an on-line dating context. The characters in the play are based on men she encountered during her ethnographic research. We staged this in a small art gallery as part of the inaugural season of On The Verge, an summer theatre festival in Santa Barbara, CA. Through this production process, we confronted the challenges of incorporating research methods and rigor into theatrical entertainment, the use of the grotesque -- in this case contrasting the sweetness of strawberry cupcakes with their gross consumption -- as a means of reinforcing sociopolitical issues of the white, male, gaze and the exoticization of theAsian women.
