I am a writer, director, actor, and teaching artist.
I practice directing through and as collage.
I create within intersections—between identities, disciplines, genres, and traditions. Where contradiction starts, my work begins. Not a compromise... A combustion. A collage.
I don’t smooth over contradictions, but shape the work around them. I let tension, disagreement, and contrast become the architecture of the piece. If a scene resists easy resolution, that resistance becomes part of the structure. If an idea or wondering disrupts the flow, I don’t erase it, but instead ask how it can live inside the piece.
​
Friction–between people, between traditions, between the unexpected and the unknown–isn’t a problem to be fixed. It’s material. It creates heat, pressure, and energy. Even when simply rubbing your hands together for heat (something your body needs), there is friction. Friction reminds us that we are alive, and I want my work to live.
As a mixed race director, playwright, and actor, I live in the blur, the blue, the both/and. I’m drawn to places where dissonance hums: softness within struggle, disagreement with connection, inherited forms disrupted by invention. I don’t seek to solve tension but to let it sing.
​
My collaborative process is rooted in listening. My training in ethnodrama taught me to treat every room as a space for shared authorship—with actors, with audiences, with text. I come from many theatrical homes: bad high school Shakespeare plays, devised solo work, middle school musicals, large ensemble productions, a no-budget play in an old black box theater. What stays the same across scale is my process: curiosity, conversation, and co-creation.
​
My rehearsal room is a lab, a playground, a map of constellations. We throw a ball and toss ideas. We ask questions without rushing answers. We sculpt silence. We play with form. We fail out loud. And through all of it—we listen. I guide conversations without commandeering them. I create scaffolds that others climb, or deconstruct, or dance around.
​
When directing, I am of service—without disappearing. I bring clarity, provocation, humor, and heart. I translate vision into questions the room can hold. I offer frameworks, not blueprints. I lead with the belief that leadership is simply listening out loud. We are figuring it out together.
​
I write to be changed. My characters change me. I direct to discover what we can only find together.The kinds of stories I’m drawn to? Women working out problems that seem quite small but are actually quite large, dystopian narratives warning us of a dire future, family dramas that are perhaps not all that they seem, an ancient historical figure trapped in a modern world, and classic golden age musicals with an off-kilter twist.
I build theatre as if I am building a new sky of stars.
Each collaborator, including my audience members, are stars.
Each play, a strange new constellation we chart together.
Each work begins with curiosity and a willingness to be changed.
It starts with a spark—click: A provocation, a question, a what-if, a wondering. Pops in my head like a lightbulb.
Then, collecting—woosh: Fragments of stories, gestures, research, people.
Some dancing—lalala: Ideas bumping into bodies, throwing thoughts back and forth, we move around the space.
A fission?—spppt: Something new appears. A story forms.
The friction is the form.
Click. Woosh. Lalala. spppt.
Again.