Teaching

Assistant Professor of Theater, Wesleyan University, current

Quinn Martin Guest Chair of Directing, University of California San Diego, 2017

Anschutz Distinguished Fellow, American Studies, Princeton University, 2017

Visiting Lecturer, Theater Dance and Media, Harvard University, 2016

Graduate Teacher, Brown University, 2014

Visiting Lecturer, Whitman College, 2011

Teaching Artist, Montclair State University, 2010-11

Adjunct Professor, University of Texas @ Austin, 2007-09

Courses:

Intro to Directing/Directing II

This 2-semester sequence provides an entryway into the mechanics and ethos of directing. Basic aspects of staging, script analysis, and planning the rehearsal process will be covered, as well as leading a room, working with actors, and developing the director’s voice and vision. Directing II moves students into preparing for production. This sequence is also a chance to consider the role of theater in the context of our current social, political, and environmental realities. Why choose to direct theater, NOW? How does theater as an industry need to change, and how can theater-makers offer more care to themselves, each other, our audiences?  As a director, what role do we have to play in righting wrongs, providing alternate realities, creating new futures?

The Live Event: The Politics and Practice of Creating Site-Specific Performance

In this course students consider the role of site in performance making. We start the semester with the assumption that there is no site that is not specific: every place carries with it a political, social, and historical identity, as well as an aesthetic and an architecture. At the same time, we as artists and makers are driven by our own values and interests. How do we enter into a collaboration with a site to create a live event with meaning and impact, both for ourselves and for our audiences?

Following Fornés: Creativity, Intimacy, Imagination

This course undertakes an investigation and application of the creative process of visionary iconoclast María Irene Fornés: a queer, Cuban-American writer and director whose wildly idiosyncratic plays defy both convention and categorization. Students will engage with Fornés’s own creative process via her writing exercises and her ephemera: in this case, the spoken fragments, outtakes, and audio marginalia left behind from the filming of her documentary collaboration with director Michelle Memran, The Rest I Make Up. Our work will be further contextualized by readings of Fornés plays and research into Fornésian object-ephemera, all of which will locate Fornés as a key figure of the American theater.

The Collaborative Imagination: Devising Methods and Practice

Learning from companies that have developed systems of devising, learning by doing it ourselves. How do we successfully create as a collective without losing what is most vivid, idiosyncratic, and powerful about ourselves as individuals?

The Artist-Citizen:  Socially Engaged Art in the 21st Century

This course takes as its context the fractured state of our country: at a time when the United States is tending towards division, we will investigate artists whose work is choosing to bring us closer together. Read full description here.

Theory and Performance

What theories have inspired contemporary avant-garde theatre, feminist performance, performance art, installation, and new media? In this interdisciplinary course we examine seminal works from each genre in their historical, political, and social contexts.

Writing plays now: Following Your Own Path

A practical writing course that positions itself within the current American playwriting context. By looking to contemporary playwrights who are forging non-traditional paths in their writing, we can expand our own sense of structure and possibility.

Directing New Work

A laboratory course designed to strengthen skills and improve communication and collaboration between writers and directors by putting them in real-world scenarios from the new play development world. Secondary focus is on the art of negotiation within creative collaboration.

Workshops

I frequently teach short workshops in Fornés, creative collaboration, site-specificity, theater through a climate lens, and community-engaged theater. Contact me if you’d like to bring me to your community. Here are examples of two recent workshops:

Multi-media investigation: Maria Irene Fornes
(with filmmaker Michelle Memran, 2016)

For and With: Making Work in Communities
(with PearlDamour and Ashley Sparks, University of Washington 2015-2016)