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All of us as artists experience defining moments that shape our art, our beliefs, our journeys. My career focuses on how we speak to the here and now with art. Whether through Shakespeare, movement pedagogy, directing, advocacy, yoga, consent training, or theatre as healing, my work aims to change how we connect.
As the Education Director of Arkansas Coalition Against Sexual Assault (ACASA) and Executive Artistic Director of South Dakota Shakespeare Festival (SDSF), I center on how art shapes empathy, heals, and builds new narratives. ACASA recognized me with a National Sexual Violence Resource Center Visionary Voice Award when we first collaborated on telling the survivor experience through theatre. Now I use theatricality, movement, and intimacy principles to teach both responders to sexual violence and college students. My favorite curriculums use theatre to inspire healing with trauma survivors. This looks as diverse as shaping safety in actor/ survivor's body, building community, or developing ownership of our own experiences. These same principles lead the education programming at SDSF with at-risk high school students and the juvenile detention center.
I had the opportunity to teach and direct at both University of the Ozarks and The University of South Dakota. During my years as Asst. Professor of Theatre at Ozarks, our productions balanced between light-hearted to focusing on issues affecting our student population. Among the many I directed there, we devised two productions during those four years specific to the students represented on our campus. One, as the students learned to process life with art following Covid and the death of George Floyd, the other coming together to celebrate the differences in culture on our campus. For Hurting Hands aired during The Kennedy Center American College Theatre National Festival and was honored with two national awards including a Citizen's Artist Award.
With a broad history ranging from studying Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University, interning with The American Shakespeare Center, freelancing as a director and intimacy choreographer, earning an MFA in Directing from The University of South Dakota, achieving my 200-hour yoga certification, devising theatre as a way to bridge perspectives, to studying advocacy and neurobiology of trauma to inform my work, I learn so much every day and am still only at the beginning of my path.
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
- Thomas Merton
