MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program
I have been an artist and an arts activist for over twenty years. My artistic communities have been in Northern California, San Francisco, New York and Minneapolis. I am trained as a theater director and theorist and have directed scores of new works with playwrights and performance artists. Early in my career, I began to adapt, write and direct productions that asked questions about the role of language and linear narrative. Under the influence of Jerzy Grotowski, I began to explore the ways in which meaning could be expressed without language. I created two Shakespeare productions in the woods, where performers used only gesture and sounds to communicate.
As an extension of these ideas, I began to incorporate choreography, still images, tableau, and sound compositions in my work. My recent projects have been installation pieces that utilize live performers, animals, and found texts. These pieces ask questions about the construction of memory and history against the backdrop of “lived” events. I created four pieces on this subject over the past several years and used theater spaces and art galleries as venues. My last piece was an installation in a photo gallery. It involved the choreography of sound/speech, film, trees, mice, projected images and lighting.
Currently, I am working in photography and sound composition in the making of an installation. The piece investigates the space/gap/breath between the self and the natural world. The most compelling question for me now is regarding the best venue for my work. As a social activist, I am committed to showing the work in a public setting as I have concerns about the efficacy of showing works and asking questions in the limited settings of galleries and theater spaces.
I have been significantly influenced by my studies with Augusto Boal, who taught me ways of facilitating the voicing of a community. I have great concern about what I perceive as a silencing of our culture both in terms of the act of speaking and in terms of how what is spoken is shaped for consumption. I am deeply committed to the need for artists to locate their voice, and then, to be able to clearly articulate it in a way that can be heard.
I am the founder and manager of Minneapolis’ Center for Performing Arts, a converted convent where dozens of artists and hundreds of students from different disciplines work, teach, and learn. At the Center, I spent the last 10 years creating a community of artists. I am currently facilitating the process of converting the ownership of the property from private hands into an artist-owned cooperative. As part of my on-going interest in bringing artists together, I also created performance festivals in San Francisco and New York City. I was the co-founding director of the West Coast Women’s Theater Conference in SF and Co-Creator the first Performance Studies International Conference at NYU. I taught at Macalester College and St. Thomas University in St. Paul, MN and New College of California in San Francisco. I’ve been a Visiting Scholar at the U of M in the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies.
My academic writing has been on feminist theory, and feminist performance art. I have written about the aesthetics, creative process and politics of women’s group theaters. My other areas of expertise are in experimental theater, history of the avant-garde, and theories of performance.
Educational Background: PhD, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Dept of Performance Studies; MA, Humboldt State University, CA, Theater Directing (with a focus on new works); BA, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Political Science (minor: Acting).
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