As an artist-scholar, I am both a maker and researcher within the interdisciplinary fields of media studies, theatre, anthropology, and performance studies. Each of my original projects begins with a question or provocation. As a multi-disciplinary documentarian and theatre maker, I work with a combination of still and moving images, found text, and movement to create live nonfiction theatre and performance experiences. Over my career, my research interests have been driven by several interests: systemic change, collaboration, accessibility, and narrative shifting. My praxis deals with how storytelling can give rise to action. My goal is to elicit political action while evoking a deep sense of compassion and justice.
My dissertation, “Rehearsing the Revolution: Process, Politics, and Identity Formation in Nonfiction Theatre Making,” is an autoethnographic critical (re)consideration of rehearsal practices and processes undertaken while creating nonfiction theatre with artists working in areas affected by active war and conflict and highlights how nonfiction theatre rehearsal builds solidarity within communities affected by war and between marginalized groups across international borders. This research stems from my theatre work in war zones abroad and with youth in the United States. My employed case studies include rehearsal processes developed by theatre makers in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, Native American artists, and artists working with systemically marginalized youth in New York City and investigates culturally specific notions of utilizing nonfiction storytelling to address local social problems and the impact of the creative process on participants beyond psycho-social purposes. My research pays close attention to the radical potential of the rehearsal room in addressing various social, political, and economic issues and constructing personal and collective narratives.
This dissertation includes an in-depth digital humanities component, accessible to audiences outside academia and, most importantly, the artists featured in this project. As a multidisciplinary documentarian, theatre maker, and creative collaborator on many of the theatre projects I discuss, I have accrued extensive photographs, videos, field notes, interviews, and performance-related archival materials about this dissertation’s case studies, which are utilized throughout my project. The digital component of this dissertation consists of 20 to 50 still photographs and ten edited short videos distributed throughout the project and available on community websites without an institutional firewall. These photographs include individual and environmental portraits of rehearsals that will be intertwined with the transcribed text of their interviews. The relationships I develop are at the heart of my documentary practice. Many of these photographs have been published in periodicals and academic journals connected to my dissertation research.
I have received many prestigious fellowships and grants to support my research and public scholarship, including a 2022 CUNY Center for Place, Culture, and Politics Dissertation Fellowship, a 2019 Drama League Residency, Mellon Foundation Publics Lab, and NY Public Humanities Fellowships. After I complete my dissertation and publish it as a monograph, I intend to embark on a collaborative book project on culture makers in conflict zones.
My theatrical work has received critical acclaim for its innovative and intellectually ambitious yet accessible storytelling and generous exchange between performer and spectator. I am the founding Artistic Director of Girl Be Heard; a Brooklyn-based United Nations-recognized NGO committed to empowering young women by helping them write and perform their own stories. Girl Be Heard workshops and performances have traveled across the globe from the White House to stages, community centers, prisons, and refugee camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Taiwan, Bermuda, France, Switzerland, England, and Denmark, on tours sponsored by the United Nations Girl Up Foundation, and US State Department engaging communities in creating collectively devised theatre work on pressing social justice issues while creating a space to heal from personal and collective trauma. For my work with Girl Be Heard, I have been an invited speaker at TED conferences (TEDxWomen, introduced by Jane Fonda and TEDxTeachersCollege at Columbia University). In 2013, I was the youngest Artistic Director to receive the League of Professional Theatre Women’s Lucille Lortel Visionary Award. My tenure at Girl Be Heard, and within the field of youth theatre is discussed in Girls, Performance, and Activism by Dana Edell, published in 2021 by Routledge.
In 2021 my dissertation research and public scholarship led me to create Docbloc (docbloc.org), an organization committed to bringing together nonfiction theatre-makers, photographers, and filmmakers for creative collaborations and pressing industry conversations. Docbloc is committed to fostering local and global creative partnerships across land and virtual borders. In Docbloc’s first year, we partnered with Rattlestick Theatre (New York), Eagle Project (New York), ASHTAR Theatre (Ramallah, Palestine), and New York University’s Verbatim Performance Lab. Docbloc’s current projects include a new play called “I Went to Paterson” about the opioid crisis in the United States, which has been workshopped in NYU’s Verbatim Performance Lab, and a short film called “I’ll Betray My Country,” created in collaboration with the ASHTAR Theatre in Palestine about the impact of art and theatre on youth.
Regardless of whichever medium I am working in, the connecting thread of my practice and research will always be that stories and narratives matter, whether the ones we are telling ourselves about ourselves or what we share with the world.