Get your tickets for PRISONCORE! written by kanishk pandey and directed by me, playing at The Brick through Exponential Festival this January.
I am overjoyed to share I’ll be part of the 2025 Exponential Festival!
About Exponential: “Exponential is a month-long January festival dedicated to New York City-based emerging artists working in experimental performance. The participants in this multi-artist, multi-venue festival are committed to ecstatic creativity in the face of commercialism. Exponential is driven by inclusiveness and a diversity of artists, forms, and ideas coupled with utopian resource-sharing, mentoring and the championing of risky, rigorous work in eclectic fields.”
In early January I’ll be directing kanishk pandey’s PRISONCORE! — the ecstaticly creative play that I’ve been workshopping with him and media designer Lauren Serafica for several months now.
From the Exponential team: “After receiving an incredible amount of wild applications, our curation team reviewed, voted, met, shook our fists in the air, watched samples, debated endlessly, circled and noodled, ruminated, moved things around and came to a vibrant group of artists and venues for 2025.”
Stay tuned for more info, and get excited for some very experimental theater at the start of next year!
So excited to be going into rehearsals this week to continue to workshop PRISONCORE! written by kanishk pandey with exceptional media design by Lauren Serafica. We had a blast presenting the project at LPAC — check out pictures below! And this week we’re presenting the next iteration through The Brick’s Gestating Baby program. Performances are May 1-4 at 8pm. Get your tickets and join us on this wild look at power and panopticons.
Shots from PRISONCORE! at LPAC’s Rough Draft Festival, featuring Sasha Diamond as Rain and Meade Morrison as Lucky.
P.S. Extra exciting news about PRISONCORE! coming soon!
I am so excited to be returning to the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center this month to present PRISONCORE! — a multimedia extravaganza I’ve been working on with kanishk pandey and Lauren Serafica. I had such an amazing time presenting Packing and Cracking online through LPAC back in the very first few weeks of COVID. It is a joy to be reunited with the amazingly supportive folks there, get to work with them in person as had been the plan for Packing and Cracking, and get to continue to work with kanishk and Lauren.
The three of us have been developing PRISONCORE! for a few months now, including workshopping it at Brick Aux in February. Come see what it’s shaping up to be!
I’ve also been continuing to develop GUN TALK, which brings together people from across gun backgrounds and views to find common ground and new ways forward. This has included on-the-ground research in more states and a ton of contextual and culture investigations, too. Check out my current read and watch.
I’m thrilled to be spending most of this beautiful Fall month at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. I’m here to continue developing my newest project, tentatively titled Gun Talk, which brings people together from across gun experiences and views to find common ground and new ways forward.
I’ve been researching this project for just over a year now, traveling to places across the country to do field work and ethnographic study. I’ve visited a wide range of states, each with their own unique gun policies, practices, and cultures:
Research sites for Gun Talk, Sept 2022-Nov 2023
It’s been lovely to share my ideas with my exceptional fellow Kimmel residents, talk to Nebraska locals about their gun backgrounds, and get inspired every day to keep trying to tackle one of the most complicated issues our country faces.
More on the project as it continues to develop!
The first half of 2023 has been so full of so much fun — and the rest of the year will surely match. I got to work on great, hilarious short plays with rock stars Rory Kulz and Kanishk Pandey, at The Tank and The Brick, and next month I’ll get to direct Kanishk’s Clubbed Thumb writer fellowship reading (get tickets here!). Being a Clubbed Thumb directing fellow back in 2020-2021 was such a magical experience and I’m so happy to be working with them again .
I’ll also have three (!) residencies later this year: in June at Tofte Lake Center in Minnesota, in September at Wildacres in North Carolina, and in November at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska. I’ll be working on new projects about one of my favorite topics — bodily autonomy — but via different, exciting avenues. For months now I’ve been working on these new projects through embodied research all across the country, and I’m so thankful to have so much time coming up to sit down, sift through, synthesize, and start to create work to help keep our bodies safe, in such an unsafe time.
I’m still aglow after spending most of September in Dorset, Vermont, through a residency with Marble House Project. I was there to continue my (now) long-running research in and response to the past, present, and future of abortion access in the United States. The suite of projects I’ve produced around it, collectively known as VIP, asks if people getting abortions in the US have ever been treated as VIPs and how we can build a country in which they are.
A stamp from 1973 (the year of the Roe v. Wade decision) promoting the use of ZIP Codes, which were first introduced 10 years earlier.
While at Marble House Project, I focused on the fallout from the overturning of Roe, learned the history of ZIP Codes, and spent 10 hours listening to major Supreme Court cases involving reproductive justice and writing down every single ZIP Code (over 9,000) where abortion has become illegal since June 24, 2022. A huge determinant of abortion access has always been where a person lives, and this has become even more true as state after state bans access to this vital, life-saving care.
I also researched Judaism’s views on abortion, which are much more progressive and healing than what is typically associated with religion and abortion. Finally, I created a library with resources around abortion access and self defense, taking a stab at what I want to build out into something called the Sexual Risk Avoidance Camp… stay tuned for that.
I was in residence with some of the best artists and people I’ve ever met: Amy Ritter, Alexis Convento, Matt Siegle, Toisha Tucker, Asia Stewart, and Leilehua Lanzilotti.
Marble House Project - Residency Cohort #51
Deepest thanks to Marble House for having me, and to my fellow residents for being so inspiring, supportive, and engaged.
A book about one of the most impactful projects I’ve ever worked on, City Council Meeting, is out today!
The book, written by the City Council Meeting co-creators and general awesome inspiring theater folk, Aaron Landsman and Mallory Catlett, is called The City We Make Together. It looks at how we make art with communities, how we perform power and who gets to play which roles, and how we can use creativity and rigorous inquiry to look at our structures of government and democracy anew. I’ve been hyping it to folks for years; I’m so glad everyone will be able to read it now.
I started working on City Council Meeting right out of college and kept working on it for 5+ years. I was the assistant director, but over that long period I did all kinds of things (like transcribe dozens of hours of city council meetings, cold call powerful people working in various local governments, and figure out how to get a lot of those blue books you used to have to write essays in for standardized tests and then learn how to make real-looking fake standardized tests and shrink wrap a ton of them — good times!). Aaron and Mallory taught me so much, connected me with so many, and highly influenced the course of my life.
To focus in on one thing I was taught/learned: one day, in either 2012 or 2013, Aaron sent me a book about how to write a book proposal and told me to read it. So I did, and shared what I had learned, and then we all worked together on writing a book proposal, for this book, for a very long time. And then… ten short years later, there’s an actual book, all published and everything! So be sure to get your copy of this long-awaited, quite magical book today.
(Speaking of 10 years ago, check out this retro City Council Meeting website: www.citycouncilmeeting.org and in the bottom right you’ll see a picture of a much younger me wearing a shirt I loved when I was 22, and doing the kind of being-a-facilitator-in-political-theater style of acting I still love doing today.)
It’s been a whirlwind spring that turned into a whirlwind summer that, somehow, is nearly almost fall?!
In May I finished my Beatrice Terry Residency at the Drama League with a lovely presentation of How to Put On a Sock. So many thanks to the wonderful performers, managers, and designers who made it happen: Janice Amaya, Yonatan Gebeyehu, Aubyn Heglie, Rachel Sachnoff, Sean Byrum Leo, Jacob Russell, and Alex Haddad. And of course a HUGE thank you to The Drama League, who has been a beacon of support to me for so long.
In May I also created a utopic pro-abortion zine with incredible visual artist Becky Bailey, whom I got to know at my residency at Monson Arts in Maine last December. The zine was instigated by another incredible visual artist, Lydia Nobles. It happened to launch a few days after the leaked draft of the anti-abortion Supreme Court decision, featured in what turned out to be an especially well-timed Abortion Stories arts festival. Check out the zine here, and add what you want the future of abortion to be:
Speaking of abortion: I’m gearing up to go to Vermont for a month in September, as a resident at Marble House Project in Dorset. While I’m there I’ll be doing… something about abortion! So much has changed since my last residency for my VIP abortion project at Monson Arts in December. I’m looking forward to having a solid set of weeks to revisit what I made and rethink completely what is needed in this very new moment.
With my wonderful job at the Center for Artistic Activism — where I’ve worked since early COVID, and where, since the start of this year, I’ve been running its voting program — I’ve been getting to do a lot of travel, too: in May I worked with activists in Florida; in June I worked with activists in Texas and Kansas; and in the fall I’ll be going to Wisconsin and Ohio to work with student activists there. It’s been great to get to see so much of the country, and get inspired by people doing such good, hard work in so many places.
For the past 2 years, I’ve been redeveloping a project I first made in grad school: How to Put On a Sock. It takes the audience on a cross-country tour of U.S. 9th grade sex ed laws and lessons. Featuring actual, in-use sex ed curricula from the California liberal to the Christian conservative. How to Put On a Sock exposes the highs, lows, and in-betweens of what teens — and us all — are and are not taught about sex today.
On Monday, May 9, at 2pm, I’m sharing a workshop presentation at The Drama League in NY.
I’ve been so lucky to get to work yet again with The Drama League, this time through its Beatrice Terry Residency for writer-directors. I was the 2020-2021 Beatrice Terry Residency, which became the 2020-202? cycle thanks to Covid. It’s meant I’ve gotten even more time to work on the project and I’ve gotten to collaborate with some truly fantastic folks, including Janice Amaya, Yonatan Gebeyehu, Aubyn Heglie, Rachel Sachnoff, Sean Byrum Leo, Jacob Russell, Alex Haddad, and more.
It’s a project that’s very dear to my heart and helped set the course of my career. I’d love to share this new version with you!
You can learn more about the project here. And don’t forget to RSVP!
And so many things have been happening it’s hard to keep up.
Staying safe in Maine with residency friends and the color orange
Monson Arts was an absolute dream. I got to bring my project about abortion, VIP, to life for the first time, in an intimate, individualized experience that featured Julia Child, chocolate chip cookies & Cabernet, and truly deep, delightful conversations. I’m now working with one of my fellow residents, visual artist Becky Bailey, on an abortion futures zine to be included in the lovely Lydia Noble’s upcoming exhibit Choice is Individual this spring.
I also got a fellowship to make the most of my time in Maine and do something I’ve been wanting to do for over 3 years: research at the Margaret Chase Smith Library, in my never-ending interest in the many incredible women who have run for US president over the past 150 years.
From Maine I went to Massachusetts, to Associate Direct Ocean Filibuster at ART with some very exceptional people including Katie Pearl, Jenn Kidwell, Sxip Shirey, Evan Spigelman, Lisa McGinn, Jian Jung, Olivera Gajic, Thomas Dunn, and so many more. I got to squeeze in some time at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, too, to continue my research for VIP and more reproductive freedom projects that are in the works.
After 6 weeks in Cambridge, we all went to Houston to present the Texas version of Ocean Filibuster, with our core team—and we added in some of the best students around.
Amidst it all I released a video version of my presidential inauguration project through Clubbed Thumb, Temporary Occupant, with the incredible editor Moti Margolin (and lots of help from the TO team).
And I’ve been putting the finishing touches on my extended Drama League Beatrice Terry Residency. I’m so excited to share my residency-concluding presentation of How to Put On a Sock on May 9. More info to come!
The end of October heralded the return of my project about fair districting, Packing and Cracking, in its third iteration: on a bus!
We drove audience members to sites of gerrymandering in Pennsylvania, and played games along the way to share how maps are drawn, how that drawing is manipulated, how that affects us every day—and what we can do to stop it.
Special thanks to the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics for helping us make it happen!
Right after that, I took a plane (not a bus) up to Monson, Maine, where I’ll be for a month thanks to a residency at Monson Arts. I’m working on my project VIP, about the history of abortion in the United States. It’s cold and quiet and lovely so far!
Two of the resources I’ve been loving have been: Abortion in America by James C. Mohr and the Access podcast. Check them out to learn all about the history of abortion in this country with me!
Early into the pandemic, New Georges created some magic by connecting me with three other affiliated artists: Deneen Reynolds-Knott, Dina Vovsi, and Emerie Snyder. We’ve now made EXITS, an audio-theatrical journey through one of my favorite Brooklyn neighborhoods (and former Brooklyn home): Fort Greene.
My particular piece of EXITS, called Annex, allowed me to bring together some of my most favorite people. I got Jason Gray Platt to write the words; Marianna McClellan, Yonatan Gebeyehu, and Merlin Whitehawk to record the audio along with Rory Kulz, Aubyn Heglie, Ben Hoover, Marc Atkinson Burrell, and Danaya Esperanza. The audio experience will be out on September 30.
Also starting on September 30 and going through October 4 will be live performances of the experience! Featuring choreography by Kristen Carcone and performed by Marianna and Merlin. They are doing crazy things on the streets of New York! All to tell a story about love, loss, healing—and coffee.
Learn more and reserve a spot here!
So many projects coming up!
HOW TO PUT ON A SOCK: my interactive sex ed tour of the United States! I’ll be wrapping up my Beatrice Terry Residency with The Drama League and will be sharing a fun public presentation in a few months. I’ve been working with powerhouses Kalyne Coleman, Yoni Gebeyehu, Aubyn Heglie, Jacob Russell, Sean Byrum Leo, Emma McIntosh, and more to bring it to new life—stay tuned!
EXITS, an audio-theatrical journey through the Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene, will be on the streets starting October 1—and in your ears whenever you’d like after that. Using physical distance and aural intimacy, EXITS connects audiences with beloved community spaces we’ve departed because of COVID-19 and beyond. The project is supported by a slew of amazing groups, including New Georges, Brooklyn Arts Council, and—most recently—I got a grant through the City Artist Corps, run by NYFA, NYC’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and more.
VIP: the project I’ve been wanting to make FOREVER about the history of abortion in the U.S. I am thrilled to have been awarded a residency at Monson Arts in Maine from mid-November to December to finally dive in to developing it! I love Maine, I love residencies in Maine (thanks to a beautiful time at Barn Arts back in 2018), and I love correcting misconceptions around reproductive justice—and imagining a world in which people getting abortions were treated like VIPs.
And there will also be a movie version of my Clubbed Thumb project TEMPORARY OCCUPANT and a ton of pro-voter projects through my job at the Center for Artistic Activism. Gogogo!
For over a year now, I’ve been part of Free the Vaccine for COVID-19, which works to ensure that COVID-19 testing, treatments, and vaccines are safe, affordable, and available to all. It’s a creative activism campaign co-run by my fave nonprofit (and fave employer) the Center for Artistic Activism.
Recently we’ve been trying to get intellectual property agreements for COVID vaccines waived so that more countries can develop them—and last week, the Biden administration came out in support! And then many, many other countries did, too.
I was in DC when the announcement came, along with beloved members of Free the Vaccine (who I got to meet in person for the first time!). We were at a rally pushing the Biden administration to make such an announcement. And because we’re a creative campaign, the rally was filled with lots of creative things. Like Care Bears.
Why? Because we wanted pharma corporations to share their vaccines with the world—because sharing is caring—and that’s a classic idea from the Care Bears. So why not dress up as Care Bears, hold a huge banner, and dance around on the National Mall? I was the blue one (evidently Bedtime Bear, but there was very little sleep that day…).
It all made for an image that was impossible to look away from. And the press agreed.
It was an incredible day, mixing my art and activism passions to get exactly what we wanted—which will help the world end the pandemic and save countless lives!
Read more here!
Last week I had the unique pleasure of sharing PACKING AND CRACKING with Arena Academy. Arena convenes, trains, and supports the next generation of candidates and campaign staff, and its Academy is a multi-disciplinary political training program. Sharing PACKING AND CRACKING with the next generation of campaign staff was such a joy!
An image from the Arena version of PACKING AND CRACKING
There’s a ton of other stuff coming down the pike (as they say), including other new, unexpected venues for PACKING AND CRACKING, continuing with my Drama League residency for my show about sex ed—HOW TO PUT ON A SOCK, and a whole new show that’ll be happening this fall. Stay tuned!
TEMPORARY OCCUPANT happened last week and was an astounding success! Thank you to all of the incredible people who made it happen, from Clubbed Thumb leadership to its Directing Fellowship mentors to the Connelly Theater’s management to my beloved team: Frank Oliva, Jacob Russell, Kate Eberstadt, Isaiah Howell, Mextly Couzin, Djuna Knight, and Ethan Dubin.
It was beyond beautiful to create a space for a personal inauguration after the presidential one—and especially beyond beautiful to make it in a theater, and to share it with so many people (one person at a time).
For full credits and also sources, head here!
Photo and video documentation coming soon!
I’m thrilled to be presenting an in-person installation next week as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Winterworks 2021.
TEMPORARY OCCUPANT will take place at the Connelly Theater in the East Village by reservation only.
I’m working with some of my favorite people, old and new! It’s been great to make something with Mextly Couzin, Ethan Dubin, Kate Eberstadt, Isaiah Howell, Frank Oliva, and Jacob Russell. I’d love for you to see it.
As has already been said by likely everyone you know, it’s been quite a year. I have been extraordinarily fortunate in many ways, especially because I’ve gotten to work with wonderful people on wonderful things. Some highlights:
My collaborator Joseph Amodei and I presented Packing and Cracking in-person in January with some of our favorite people (Caitlin Ayer, Rory Kulz, Aubyn Heglie; and thanks to Caden Manson and The Wild Project for hosting); then we moved it online to present it in April through the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, in September through the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and in October through UNC-Chapel Hill’s Process Series (and were joined by the wonderful Jacob Russell and Josh Kerry to help make that happen). Extra special thanks to the Center for Artistic Activism for supporting us through its Unstoppable Voters Project, and helping us to get featured on CBS. We’ll continue to work with C4AA to present a very different version of Packing and Cracking next year—the year that maps will be redrawn all across the country.
I started reworking How to Put On a Sock. The Drama League has been so exceptionally supportive of me over the past few years, and they awarded me their 2020 Beatrice Terry Residency to make that project even better than it was when I presented it at Carnegie Mellon in 2017. I’ll keep working on that well into 2021, and I’m very excited to do so.
I finally got to work with Clubbed Thumb through its Directing Fellowship program. AD Maria and Associate AD Michael are a dream, and it was amazing to learn from mentors Anne Kauffman, Daniel Aukin, and Laurie Woolery. First up for me in 2021 is presenting an in-person (!) experience for one audience member at a time at the Connelly (!), right after the presidential inauguration. I’m working with collaborators old and new to make this happen, and it feels incredible to be able to bring something into physical life right now. More on that soon.
I also got a few jobs that have brought me more joy and growth than I could have imagined: becoming the Special Projects Coordinator for C4AA and the Lead Project Manager for one of their current campaigns, Free the Vaccine. That work will continue into the new year, too. And I got to work again with long-time art crushes Aaron Landsman and Mallory Catlett, to help them put together their book on their project City Council Meeting, which is one of the first things I started working on when I graduated from college many years ago. Working on that book was also learning from reading that book, and I can’t wait for more people to be able to read it when it finally comes out.
I hope you’re all able to end the year with some kind of peace, and that I get to see you for the above and more soon. <3
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind!
Packing and Cracking happened at the Philly Fringe AND at UNC’s Process Series.
Read more about the latter here, and if you’re in NC, watch it on tv (!) from now through 11/3.
Packing and Cracking also got a huge grant through the Center for Artistic Activism’s Unstoppable Voters Project, which supports projects that celebrate voting rights and counter voter suppression. The other grantees are truly incredible—check them out!
I also started working for the Center for Artistic Activism as their Special Projects Coordinator and it has been a dream come true.
And I started working with another long-time arts organization crush: Clubbed Thumb. I’m one of their directing fellows for the year.
Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and also: VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!