I work as Producing Artistic Director at Square Top Theatre and Associate Professor of Theatre & Dance at Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA.
As a director, I create new performance-based work, nurture on-going, diverse collaborations, and explore the potential for that work to engage across boundaries—between people and cultures, between methods and disciplines. I am drawn to the transformative qualities of theatre, film, and other collaborative arts where communities may be changed or formed through participation.
The dialectic collisions within my work are central. Once I engage the audience, it is for each individual viewer to complete the creative act. My link with the audience is not unlike the poet/reader relationship, as described by Anne Michaels, “not two to make one, but two to make the third, just as a conversation can become the third side of the page.” I cultivate projects that place divergent methods, media, aesthetics, and cultures in collaborative environments to create harmonies between seemingly dissonant parts.
I’m curious about the ongoing role and possibilities for embodied performance given our increasingly mediated, disembodied culture. As ritual theorist Tom Driver notes, “no good ritual is disembodied.” With this in mind, my work with performers begins with a focus on collectivity, physicality, and embodied cognition. My projects often explore themes and questions of pilgrimage, memory, place, and address, which John Berger explains “consist(s) of the way a landscape’s ‘character’ determines the imagination of those born there.”
Recent directorial projects for Square Top Theatre include: Climbing Eros (2021), a short documentary filmed in Greece about crossing distance and returning to earth; Koppmoll (2020), a short documentary filmed in the far north of Norway about home, family, loss, and a nearly forgotten war; The Scent of a Thousand Rains (2019) by Damon Falke, a performance piece in verse for an actor and a violinist; and Laura, or Scenes from a Common World (2016).
Recent projects for Gonzaga University include: Romeo ∞ Juliet (2019), the premiere of Coming Home: A Soldiers’ Project (2018), a site responsive production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (2017), and an original, physical production based on Rilke’s Book of Hours (2016).
I returned to the U.S. in 2012 after teaching and directing in China with the U.S. Peace Corps at Guizhou University. While in China, I directed cross-cultural productions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. The latter production was invited to perform as part of the Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival in Hong Kong.
Read more about my current projects here, or view my portfolio of past projects here.
Society of Stage Directors & Choreographers – Associate
Network of Ensemble Theatres (NET)
National Peace Corps Association