Statement on Diversity & Inclusion

With seventeen years of teaching experience, I spent the past five years global linking with an arts school in Uganda and devising theater with my students as we celebrate cultural diversity in international collaborations.

Theatre for social change has unfolded many avenues in my life as a playwright, a teacher, and as a theater practitioner. Such as devising theatrical works with patients who have Lupus using poetry and playwriting to strengthen their voice when communicating with their doctor, a Women’s Theater Workshop -- a series of skill-building trainings using creative drama with women in homeless shelters to not only succeed their housing and job interviews, but to pursue their dreams, and The Woolf Series, named after literary pioneer Virginia Woolf, which empowered women playwrights to work in an inclusive and equitable play reading series.

bell hooks shares “to commit ourselves to the work of transforming the academy so that it will be a place where cultural diversity informs every aspect of our learning, we must embrace struggle and sacrifice” [1](33). I am open and ready to continue the conversation in my dramatic works. In fact, my theses details a look at educational reform, lack of diversity and inclusion in educational settings, and the inequities in the school systems. If you’d like to read more of my journey, the theses is available here: https://digitalcommons.hollins.edu/playwritingtheses/6/.

[1] Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks, published by Routledge, 1994.