I’m a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and cultural strategist exploring how we make meaning in an increasingly fragmented world. My work moves through performance, storytelling, systems, and space—always circling questions of identity, power, and purpose. I create to understand my own contradictions and to build spaces where others can do the same.

I began my artistic development in professional theater at age 13, training under visionaries Jesse Merz and Judy Goff. Studying Meisner technique as a teenager shaped how I relate to the world: it taught me deep listening, presence, and the ability to track what’s unsaid. Those tools became the foundation for everything I do now, onstage and off.

I grew up in a politically and culturally mixed household in Vancouver, Washington, a short twenty-minute drive from the grungy and weird Portland, Oregon of the 90s and 00s and one marked by conservatism on the fringes of the city. As a queer person coming of age in that environment, I found myself navigating tensions between faith, desire, and the erasure of self. That experience continues to inform my artistic practice, which often uses performance as a site of both vulnerability and provocation. In my solo show Bottoming For Jesus, I chronicle my teenage conversion to Mormonism and explore the strange overlaps between sexuality, belief, and the longing to belong. It’s part cabaret, part testimony, part spiritual ritual. And like much of my work, it holds humor, ache, and critique in equal measure.

Storytelling is at the center of how I create, not just as performance, but as a technology for navigating complexity. I build works that invite audiences to wrestle with their own longing, alienation, complexity, and connection. Sometimes that looks like theater. Sometimes it’s a dinner, a deep discussion, or a database. I see no contradiction there. I’m interested in how the back-end of our lives, the systems, logistics, and decision-making frameworks are also part of our stories.

As a producer and curator, I’ve championed bold voices across the contemporary arts scene. I’ve worked with artists like SOPHIE, Sebastian Hernández, Jermaine Spivey, and Harmony Holiday supporting work that queers genre, unravels expectations, and expands the notion of collective experience. At NAVEL, the experimental art space I co-founded and co-led from 2017–2023, I advised and helped fund over 33 artist-led community research projects through our ASSEMBLIES program. In 2022, I co-produced Justin Elizabeth Sayre’s Lottie Platchett Took a Hatchet at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival, where it received 5-star reviews.

In parallel to my artistic work, I’ve spent years developing sustainable infrastructure for creative projects. I served as Assistant Director of Loyalty Marketing at Lincoln Center, and later, as Executive Director of NAVEL, where I co-developed models for horizontal governance, kinship-based collaboration, and mutual aid. Those experiences helped me see how deeply creative work depends on solid, caring structures, and how rare those structures are.

That realization led me to found Family Affairs Studio, a consultancy and creative production company where I help artists, creative ventures, and institutions build systems that align with their values. My work here bridges cultural strategy, organizational design, event production, and creative mentorship, rooted in the belief that infrastructure can be intimate and alive.

I hold a BS from the BYU/Marriott School of Management with an emphasis in Marketing (2010) and an MA in Performing Arts Administration from NYU/Steinhardt School (2013). I’m also a graduate of the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics (2005), which first nurtured my belief that stunning artistry and rigorous inquiry belong intimately intertwined.

Ultimately, I see my artistic and organizational work as interconnected facets of a larger project to enact what are called "prefigurative politics"—a term coined by social scientist and film studies professor Carl Boggs and inspired by anarchist principles—the embodiment, in the here and now, of the kind of world we wish to inhabit. My work tries to enact that ethic through radical hospitality, deep relationships, and the slow work of building things that are real and lasting. I want to create spaces that feel like a rehearsal for a different future.

I’m deeply shaped by thinkers and artists like Gloria Anzuldúa, adrienne maree brown, Donna Haraway, and José Esteban Muñoz, whose work lives at the confluence of identity, performance, futurity, and care. I’m grateful to be in conversation and collaboration with artists and cultural producers like Spenser Theberge, Chris Cruse, Mandy Harris Williams, Nora N. Khan, Patricia Garza, Win Mixter, and Studio 3XP, and so many others who stretch and sustain me.

Whether I’m writing, performing, designing an automated workflow, or hosting a gathering, my hope is to create the conditions for tenderness, transformation, understanding, and new ways of being together. In a time of certain uncertainty and constant unraveling, I return again and again to story: as a tool, a prayer, and a place to begin.

Updated April 2025