“The ancestors know who we are.”

~ Storme Webber, Multidisciplinary Artist

Beginnings

My formative years were spent in San Diego, where, aside from my brother, I didn’t know a single other multiracial person and had no mentors to advise me on how to feel whole in my identity. This is probably where my desire for multiracial people to connect comes from. In San Diego, I wasted time and energy trying to figure out where I fit in.

From San Diego, I went to Minnesota to study at a small liberal arts school in Minnesota. Culture shock! After working as an actor and, of course, waiting tables, I got accepted to the MFA program at the American Repertory Theatre for Advanced Theatre Training/Moscow Art Theatre School.

After grad school, I lived in NY for several years, and spent time in a number of other cities while on tour, which is how I ended up living in Seattle around 2004.

Accomplishments

One of my favorite accomplishments is my teaching certification from the Fitzmaurice Voicework ® Institute. What I learned has shaped my worldview. I tend to see things in terms of the balance between structure, chaos, and directions of energy. Certification also allowed me to financially sustain myself as a voice-over talent and director, voice teacher, and dialect coach.

Grants & Awards

Grants and awards along the way include NEA grants for playwrighting through CD Forum and Key City Public Theater, a Ford Mellon Grant, GAP grants, and City Artist grants.

For acting, I was fortunate to receive a Heylen Hayes Award, a Katharine Cornell Award, and various other awards and nominations. For my novel, Returning the Bones, I received a Foreword Indies Award and was nominated as a National Indie Excellence Award Finalist.

Locally, the stage production of Returning the Bones was nominated for three Gregory Awards, and very recently, Living IncogNegro was nominated for a Sound on Stage Award for Best Original Production.

Another major component of my work over the years has been …

Multi-character solo shows, partly because they were like a container for the complexity of my multiracial identities, though I could still be only one character at a time.

The Living IncogNegro Project is different: instead of pouring myself into other characters, I’m allowing myself to show up whole, acknowledge experiences I’ve had as a multiracial person, and create a conceptual pathway for other multiracial folk to do the same so that we may come out from the margins of the margins and outwit attempts to delegitimize us.

I now realize that if I want community, it’s on me. I am signing up to break waves and be an elder in this discourse, mainly because it pains me to witness how younger multiracial generations are experiencing the same delegitimizing nonsense I did way back in the 1900s. I know this because of how audiences reacted to the stage production of Living IncogNegro. During post-show talkbacks, there were funny stories for sure, like the man and his mom who got arrested in Morocco because when the police saw them together, they assumed she had solicited a prostitute, but there were even more tearful stories that people confessed to saying aloud for the first time. Many of them used the word “taboo” to describe what it felt like to share their truths.

Through the play, the graphic novel, and an interactive photography project, I am attempting to create space for multiracial people to build community.