About

For more than 20 years, I have been making socially engaged theater and performance both inside and outside of traditional theatrical spaces—primarily as a director (and also as a performer, dramaturg, and occasional designer)—often working site-specifically and engaging the natural and built environment as source material. This work pushes the limits of the physical body in performance, plays with the materiality of time and space, re-imagines the audience-event relationship, and expands our understanding of what is possible in live art and in our everyday lives.

My artistic practice draws from and contributes to multiple genres of performance, blending physical theatre, immersive theatre, post-dramatic theatre, site-specific theatre, music theatre, dance theatre, performance art, community-based performance, and art as social practice. This critically acclaimed work has been presented at theatres, galleries, colleges and universities, and public places throughout the U.S., including Austin; Amherst; Biddeford, Maine; Chicago; Lubbock, Texas; Northampton; Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; and Wassaic, New York. My 7-year performance project, floodlines, was supported by a grant from the City of Austin’s Division of Cultural Arts, The Texas Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The nationally touring community-engaged performance project, pink: a (love) courier service, was commissioned by First Night Austin with support from the Stillwater Foundation, and was the subject of the documentary film, Love Delivered (SEMA Films/dir. Wes Browning). Recent work includes a devised adaptation of Euripides’s Medea with original libretto and live harmonium; the food-based, community-engaged immersive performance, good luck: a regathering at Fringe Arts, with artist Devyn Lorelei Manibo; and the durational performance, 24H Medea, in which the Greek tragedy repeats and revises 24 times over the course of an entire day (currently in progress). I am also director of The Movement Lab, an itinerant performance company focused on movement research—founded in Florence, MA in 2010 with Javiera Benavente and Heather Kuhn and currently in residence in Austin, TX (2024-ongoing).

My scholarly research centers on live art as it intersects with questions of time, space, history, and memory. This research takes me into the convergent fields of performance studies, performance criticism, cultural studies, queer and transgender studies, feminist theory, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, trauma studies, and affect theory. My first book, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Northwestern University Press), examines the capacity of performance to revise histories of racialized and gendered violence, as well as to reveal queer and transgender futures not determined by past harm. The book also experiments with form, moving between academic prose and creative nonfiction. Time Slips was a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies. I am also the co-editor, with Stacy Wolf, of Sondheim from the Side (2023)—a Special of Issue of Studies in Musical Theatre which focuses on the impact of the late composer Stephen Sondheim’s work on minoritarian artists and critics.

I have contributed writing to Ollantay Theatre Magazine, the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, TDR/The Drama Review, Theatre Topics, and Theatre Journal, as well as in various edited collections, including the Oxford Compendium on Hope (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), the groundbreaking Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US (Routledge, 2021). My writing focuses on new work by minoritarian artists whose practice upends disciplinary boundaries and identity-based categories. Subjects of study have included, among others, Alain Buffard, Marga Gomez, Carmelita Tropicana, Deb Margolin, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. I have published essays on ritual, affect, archives, feminist and abolitionist pedagogy, queer and trans temporality, race and visual culture, sex, state violence, and experimental modes of art and cultural criticism. My essay about performance criticism and queer politics, which I co-authored with Jill Dolan and Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, appears in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. More recently, I co-authored, with director Katie Pearl, “Total Dramaturgical Collapse in the Method Gun: American Theatre in Pandemic Time”—a conversation about performance criticism in the age of COVID-19. I also sit on the Editorial Board of Imagined Theatres.

My writing for performance is published in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and The Austin Project, edited by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth (University of Texas Press). From 2004-2005, I was an active member of The Austin Project, a women of color and allied artist/activist/scholar collective, founded by Jones and Bridgforth, that create original performance in what Jones calls a “theatrical jazz aesthetic." My creative nonfiction essay, “On the Conviction of Derek Chauvin in the Murder of George Floyd, or, Blue,” was published by QT Voices, the magazine of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Austin Project. Its companion essay, “Future Perfect,” and my untitled gloss on beck haberstoh’s “someone has to take out the garbage,” were published in Imagined Theatres, edited by Daniel Sack. My current collaboration with Lindsay Reckson, Loving Description, is a long-form, open-source, site-specific writing project that attempts to place art and cultural criticism in the public sphere.

As an educator, I specialize in experimental performance and queer, trans, and feminist theories and methods. My courses combine studio-based practice with the rigorous study of social history and critical theory—training students to be skilled theater and performance artists, efficacious activists, socially engaged writers, and astute semioticians of the worlds that they create in both print and embodied forms. I am currently Associate Professor of Theater at Penn State-Abington, where I hold the Career Development Professorship. Directing projects at Penn State include Sophokles’s Antigone (trans. Anne Carson); Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood; and Exit, A Banquet Piece—a devised adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, co-created with my colleague, Marissa Nicosia. This production also inspired our essay on abolitionist pedagogy, “‘Emergent Strategy’: Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time (2023). In the 2020-2021 academic year, I served as a Regional Faculty Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at The University of Pennsylvania (Forum on “Choice”). In fall 2023, I co-taught the seminar, Performance, Literature, and the Archive, with my colleague Lindsay Reckson at Haverford College, where I also served as a guest artist.

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, I taught in the Theater Department at Reed College, where I held an affiliate appointment in the Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies Program. I’ve also held visiting positions at Haverford College (2014-2018), Hampshire College (2010-2012), and Northern Arizona University (2012-2013), and I’ve served as a guest artist and/or speaker at the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, Arizona State University, Brown University, Bryn Mawr College, Colby College, Dickinson College, Haverford College, Princeton University, Swarthmore College, St. Edward’s University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas at Austin, and the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale–as well as in various community-based contexts, including the Dell Jewish Community Center, St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, and Nellie Muir Elementary School. 

I received my BA in Performing Arts from Washington University in St. Louis and MA and PhD in Theater from the University of Texas at Austin (designated emphasis in Performance as Public Practice), earning Doctoral Portfolio Certificates in both Cultural Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

I have completed advanced training in Lecoq with The Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training and Paola Coletto/The School for Theatre Creators; Viewpoints and Composition with Anne Bogart/The SITI Company, Mary Overlie, Tina Landau, and Kim Rubinstein; Suzuki with The SITI Company; Devising/Performance Creation with La Mama Umbria International, DoubleEdge Theatre, Plasticene Physical Theatre, and Michael Rohd/Sojourn Theatre; and land-based art practices with Land Arts of the American West. Other artists with whom I have studied and/or collaborated who have had a major influence on my practice include choreographers Ann Carlson, Rosie Herrera, and Liz Lerman; and interdisciplinary performance artists Laurie Carlos, Daniel Alexander Jones, Sekou Sundiata, and Split Britches.

A first generation / third generation American Jew (Ashkenazi), my family immigrated to the U.S. as refugees in 1949, after surviving the Holocaust in occupied Poland and forced displacement in Germany; and from the Pale of Settlement in the early 20th century, after surviving the pogroms in the Russian Empire. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and currently live primarily in West Philadelphia, PA, on occupied Lenape land. It is my intention that my work be in service to the rightful return of all land to its peoples, and towards healing, justice, and liberation for all.

CV available upon request.