Real stories about real people and their real courage are the hallmarks of my work. Stories about people who, despite the terror in their own hearts, believed in asserting the fullness of their own humanity, and believed that they were a part of something bigger than themselves.

Because these real people have their own innate accents or dialects, preparation for almost every character I have performed, directed, or coached has involved some degree of accent and dialect research. My foundational influences are Gillian Lane-Plescia, Paul Meier, Fitzmaurice Voicework, Knight-Thompson Speechwork, and the legacies upon which those realms of vocal pedagogy were founded. Through performing and coaching in theaters, on camera, and for voice-over, I have aggregated years’ worth of independent primary source research contemporaneously, which has led me to develop my own techniques for helping actors to expand their dialectical range with efficiently and confidence.

Examples of the kinds of stories I tell include the award-winning Westerbork Serenade, which I directed and adapted for immersive theater as well as for VR; Subprime! Inside the Heart of the Mortgage Meltdown, which I directed and which was based on the experiences of someone who worked inside the predatory subprime mortgage industry in 2007-2008; and Returning the Bones, historical fiction inspired by ten years of interviews with my Aunt Bebe, a physician and civil rights activist. This story started a play, which was nominated for multiple awards. All of these are multicharacter solo shows -- a format which I believe exposes the potential we all have to be very different people from who we assume we are.

I also focus on creating work which honors the uniqueness and intelligence of individual audience members. As the director of Dump Site, a macabre immersive theater piece staged in a 4,000 square foot warehouse, we used over 1,000 props, and it was crucial that each prop support the story in some way. This was so that the audience members had time to interact with the items they discovered and come to their own conclusions about who the characters were and why they did what they did. In this way, each audience member could experience the story on two levels: their own, and the one shared by the group.

I feel that this kind of experience can be created digitally as well, and then turned on its head, which is why I have also enjoyed researching how technology and performance can harmonize in such a way that one’s experience of storytelling can be deconstructed and then reframed.

For example, through video game work - both performance and direction - I developed an interest in VR and motion capture. After participating in a VR hackathon, I became acquainted with the Academy Award-winning motion capture studio, MoCap Now. Together, we developed a motion capture workshop that informs what I aspire to create in the future, especially if it means “mismatching” vocal patterns and stereotypes around performance.

Whether it be onstage or in an intimate, immersive setting, what excites me now is the possibility of bringing the worlds of technology and storytelling together so that audiences can experience stories which test the boundaries of who we think we are, and what we think we are capable of.