Connecting

One of the main reasons I do theatre is because I believe theatre is a tool that allows us to reflect injustices in society back at audiences to make people engage with difficult subjects, build empathy in and around communities, and imagine and create a world better than the one we are living in now. That is why connecting my artistic practice with social justice and issues that impact on a broader, external context is so important to me, and why it has been a theme throughout my teaching and artistic practice. Here I highlight some of that work.

In Fall 2020, one of the first courses I took at NYU was The Teaching Artist taught by Courtney Boddie, the Vice President of Education and Social Engagement at New 42. Part of the objectives of this course were to identify what our core values were as a teaching artist and how can we use those core values to develop programming that is engaging and impactful for students. My core values that I identified were "fun," "fostering and sustaining collaboration," "building confidence in students and allowing their voices to shine," and "telling stories that are important for our world to hear." These core values formed the foundation of my final project for the course. I wanted to build off some of the work I had done with my former students in Connecticut where I was a faculty advisor for our after school club Queer Without Fear for students who identify as queer and their allies. This five-session residency I created is called "Never Be Bullied into Silence: Queer History, Advocacy, and Art." The overarching goal of the residency is to develop artistic and emotional confidence in queer teens to use spoken word and performance as a form of advocacy and activism for the LGBTQ community. You can view the entirety of the written residency, including detailed lesson plans, here:

For two summers, in 2015 and 2017, I worked as the Acting Teaching Artist at the Boch Center's City Spotlights program in Boston, MA. City Spotlights is a five week teen employment program that hires teen actors, singers, and dancers from all over Boston to come to the Boch Center and work with teaching artists to learn how to be advocates and teachers for social justice in their communities, and how to create art that matches their advocacy goals. The students create an advocacy presentation that they present in the State House to local representatives, as well as workshops and flash mob performance pieces that they bring to community centers and schools across the city. The program culminates each year with the creation of an original devised performance piece, created from weeks of work from each artistic discipline. I worked with students to create scenes, monologues, and spoken word pieces based on the prompts and social justice themes talked about over the course of the summer. I would have the teens share out their work, and teach students how to give feedback in a productive, ethical way. I would work with students to polish their work to have a finished product we could bring back to the rest of the group that would be incorporated into the bigger production. I also helped stage the final show and worked with students on performance skills to make sure they were getting their messages across to their audiences as professional artists. The artistic work the students created dealt with issues of racism, homophobia, technology, bullying, equality, and gentrification.