I make performances and other projects using people, language, space and time. I often start with questions: how does technology affect the ways we remember? How do we perform power, and who gets to play which roles? Can the person who made you who you are, be the person who messed you up, be the person you forgive now?
I am currently obsessed with with ways that the systems in which we are steeped are reflected in how we treat each other or behave. How are the power dynamics of a government meeting reflected at a family dinner table? How does the rhetoric of tour guide or teacher play out in other relationships, without us perhaps even knowing? I think a lot of my work has been about placing frames around these behaviors, systems and relationships. In performance, this hopefully means we can see each other and how we are together more clearly. That is how form and politics intersect in my work.
Some of my work is co-authored with community members over long periods of time; some is developed through ongoing relationships with other artists; all of it honors collaboration as a driving force.
Collaborating artists include Clarinda Mac Low, Ogemdi Ude, director/dramaturg Mallory Catlett, designer/performer Jim Findlay, filmmaker/composer Brent Green, photographer Paul Shambroom. Venue partners include Henry Street Settlement/Abrons Arts Center, Kulturanova, La MaMa, ASU Gammage, Crossing The Line, and others.
Current projects include: Perfect City, a 20-year art and activism working group created with New York City residents, urban planners and social justice workers; Empathy School/Love Story, a diptych of monologues about landscape, nostalgia, memory and class (NY Times and Time Out New York Critics’ Pick); Language Reversal, a four-country collaboration about oligarchy and translation; and SQUARES, a performance drawn from 583 anonymous cast-off snapshot from a Midwestern photo lab in the 1970s.
From 2012-2014, I worked on the participatory performance City Council Meeting, created with Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay,  in five US cities. I’ve had additional commissioned and presented by The Foundry Theatre, DiverseWorks, The Chocolate Factory, PS122 and other venues.
I am a 2017-18 Guggenheim Fellow. From 2014-16, I was a Princeton Arts Fellow, and the 2013-2016 ASU Gammage Residency Artist. I have performed with Elevator Repair Service in the work of many artists. I am a PATHS Social Practice Artist-in-Residence at Abrons Arts Center, and a Visiting Associate Professor and Belknap Humanities Fellow at Princeton, as well as a recent finalist for the Alpert Award and the Yale Drama Series.