I am currently serving in my second year of a "Visiting" appointment, dually offering instruction and program leadership in the BFA Theatre program at this Carnegie-designated Tier One research institution.As an instructor, I lead undergraduate courses in Playwriting and Theatre History, and a graduate-level course, Dramatic Theory & Criticism, a required course for first-semester graduate students across all MFA/MA areas. The Playwriting Workshop is an ongoing, rotating sequence, each Fall semester exploring a different theme, that serves as part of the core curriculum for the BFA Playwriting students. In Spring 2024, I originated the course, Theater and Sustainability, and also led Dramaturgy in the 21st Century, a combined course with graduate and undergraduate students.As Head of the Playwriting & Dramaturgy program, my duties include overseeing, mentoring, and stewarding the BFA students participating in the university production processes, which includes on-going opportunities to fully produce a graduating senior’s full-length work, as well as a production of student-written 10-minute plays. I also serve as program and curricular advisor for the cohort of BFA Playwriting & Dramaturgy students, and – in collaboration with UH’s Head of Theatre Education - serve as lead recruiter for incoming and transfer students in my area. In collaboration with the Head of Graduate Theatre Studies, I help mentor and steward students in production dramaturgy roles as part of the theatre season and with local professional companies including Houston’s Alley Theatre.My responsibilities also include producing the annual Ten-Minute Play Festival, an event that brings to life nine new student-written plays. I also oversaw the publicity and marketing campaigns, including student video interviews, resulting in sell-outs for all four performances.I also serve on the Graduate Theatre and Theatre Education curriculum committee, and Season Selection committee.

My plays, site-specific projects and sound-art collaborations have been presented in the American cities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Dallas, Austin, Washington DC, Louisville, Baltimore, New Orleans, and outside America’s borders in Victoria, British Columbia; Toronto, Ontario; Kingston, Jamaica; and Zürich, Switzerland. My work has been selected as a finalist for the Heideman Award, a semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award, a semi-finalist for the Northpoint Voices Inside Playwriting Residency, nominated for the F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Theater Artist, and I was selected as the first-ever Resident Writer of the ArtsEdge Residency, created by The Kelly Writers House and The University of Pennsylvania. I am one of three playwrights to inaugurate the Philadelphia Dramatists Center/Plays & Players Playwriting Residency and an alum of the WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory.I have been commissioned by The Cardboard Box Collaborative, Little Fish Theater, and Plays & Players, and am a member of The Dramatists Guild of America (DGA) and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA). My works are published by Heinemann Press, YouthPLAYS, and Playscripts, Inc.I received a BA in Liberal Arts from the Louisiana Scholars College and an MFA in Playwriting from The University of Texas-Austin where I held the James A. Michener Fellowship.

Beginning Fall of 2022, I enjoyed a one-year appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre. I led Fall courses in Directing, Dramaturgy, and Playwriting, for intimate-sized classes of diverse, upper-class students in this Research 1 Institute’s BFA Theater program. This was the first time a Playwriting course had been offered in UL’s Theater department, which was organized in support of my hiring. Each of these classes centered experiential, project-based learning, often connecting with UL’s mainstage theater productions. As a combined project, the Directing, Dramaturgy, and Playwriting classes collaborated on a “New Play Readings” event, publicly sharing work from students in all three classes through the development and presentation of five new, student written, directed, and dramaturged plays.I directed a production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, (November 2022) as part of UL’s mainstage theater season, which featured the work of student performers, a design team of UL faculty, a professional composer, a choreographer, and included UL’s first collaboration with an Intimacy Coordinator.In Spring 2023, I led courses in Acting II, Directing I, Advanced Playwriting, and a “Special Topics” course, Theater and Sustainability, which looked closely at intersections of live performance, theatrical works of eco-drama, natural and creative ecosystems, and sustainable theater practices.

From the Fall of 2017 to the Fall of 2022, I taught Theater Appreciation courses with traditional ACC students as well as students in the Early College High School (ECHS) program, a dual-enrollment path of study. I gave attention to plays and works of theater from artists who may speak best to these students’ own life experiences and our studies included reading, staging, and designing works by Octavio Solis, Lin Manuel-Miranda, Suzan-Lori Parks, Silvia Gonzalez S., Lorraine Hansberry, Sarah DeLappe, Anna Deveare Smith, Naomi Wallace, and Larissa FastHorse. Students regularly created projects in connection to ACC’s Drama productions, as well as activities created around the young audiences play Yana Wana and the Legend of the Bluebonnet, a theatrical telling of local indigenous traditions (Coahuiltecan).I also served on a Task Force to redesign and realign our Departmental Assessment Curriculum (DAC) according to updated Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs). I helped initiate and served on a Green Theater Task Force, bridging the Drama Department with ACC’s Office of Sustainability and Energy, in order to help us collaborate on creating more environmentally-friendly theater practices.In Fall 2021, I joined the faculty of the Creative Writing department, teaching Introduction to Playwriting to enrolled and continuing education students. In this course, students engaged in free-writing exercises, and created multiple complete plays: a 10 minute “bake off” play, as well as a longer work. The course was designed and stewarded to encourage the students to find and trust (and enjoy!) their unique writing voices while learning the fundamental elements of playwriting through the original works created in the class and by reading plays of different styles and voices and by seeing plays in production. Students also practiced thoughtful, ego-less responses to each other’s work, through a feedback model influenced by Liz Lerman’s critical response process.

I taught courses in “Dramatic Analysis”, “Theater History I”, “Theater History II”, “American Theater”, and “Theatrical Experience”. I was instrumental in the expansion of the course, “Philadelphia Theater: Let’s Go!”, an experiential class in which students attend and design creative responses to 6-8 live events over the course of the quarter. Promoted to an interim full-time position from September 2010 – August 2011. In the position of Assistant Teaching Professor of Theater, I led my usual classes and mentored a small group of advanced students in the course, “Director’s Lab”.During my six-plus years at Drexel University, I designed, organized, and directed multiple studio projects, bringing my own creative and professional work onto campus, culminating in public events sharing my and the students’ collaborative discoveries. One of these processes (The Babel Project) led to further development at WordBRIDGE Playwrights Lab and then to production at Towson University; another (Of Plastic Things and Butterfly Wings) led to multiple professional productions in multiple countries and publication.From February 2015 – June 2015, I served as the first General Manager of The Co-Op Theatre Company, Drexel’s resident professional theater organization. In this role, I led the company’s Audience Outreach efforts, seeking an “ethical marketing” approach that involved creative activity, food exchange, and direct personal contact, resulting in 7 of the 8 performances selling beyond its full complement of tickets. I collaborated with the production team and graphic designer to help create printed, digital, and social media publicity materials. In this role of General Manager, I served as House Manager for two productions in which I supervised our student box office manager and assistant, ushers, and other volunteers. I reconciled ticket sales and kept detailed records of purchases and accounting of tickets.

As an Adjunct Faculty member in the Fine and Performing Arts department, I taught “Introduction to Theater Arts” and “American Theater” courses. These courses were mostly taught for non-Majors and designed as an introduction to the history of the theater, its uniqueness as an art form, its place in various cultural contexts, and as part of the University’s mission of cura personalis. The “Introduction to Theater Arts” course was designed similar to the courses I taught at Drexel University, with the “American Theater” course taught in the same spirit, focusing on the experience of theater in the United States, beginning with the current moment, then working from the beginnings of 18th Century American theater, punctuating important movements (melodrama, the development of Musical Theater, realism, off-off Broadway/Regional theater) and moments (the World Wars, the Great Depression, Civil Rights movement) in American history through the turn of the 21st Century.

During this intensive six-week program, I worked with advanced college students and recent college graduates in a collaborative, project-based curriculum on the grounds of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. I worked with a small group of advanced playwriting students in developing their skills, exploring their writing voices, challenging them to risk, and by pushing them off-balance with intentionally restrictive and creatively demanding writing assignments. These assignments were developed further through collaborative rehearsals with the rest of the student ensemble and presented as laboratory performances every Tuesday evening during the summer. Additional classroom/curricular work included intensive writing exercises exploring space, imagination, transformation, character, etc. Students also engaged with reading assignments that include plays, manifestos, and theory as well as viewings of visual and recorded works by Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, and Richard Foreman. Additionally, the students attended and participated in performances at the National Playwrights Conference, National Music Theater Conference, and National Puppetry Conference.

As part of my writing residency created by the University of Pennsylvania, I taught during the spring 2009 semester in UPenn’s Creative Writing program. My course, “Creative Writing: Space, Place, and Character in Playwriting and Fiction”, took a close look at the relationships of space, place and character in the effort to illuminate, appreciate, and explore the differences and similarities in Playwriting and Fiction. Weekly writing exercises allowed students to look as three-dimensionally and as actively as possible at various physical spaces, using them to form short plays and short fiction. Coursework involved readings of plays, short fiction, and articles/manifestos/dialogues about writing and space as well as field trips to various architectural, geographic, and topographical spaces.

For three semesters, I taught “Survey of Theatre Arts” and “Script Analysis” to first-year Theater majors. As building block courses, students learned major units of theater study through intensive exploration into plays of the Western theatre canon. Major objectives of the “Survey” course were to broaden students’ theatre knowledge and vocabulary and to think and write critically and creatively about live theatre. In “Script Analysis”, students read at least one play a week, learning to identify, understand, and discuss elements of dramatic structure as well as how to appreciate plays within their historical contexts. Students also attended and responded to numerous live events during the course of the semester.

During my final semester of graduate study, I designed and taught “Playwriting I” for university students with a beginning interest in playwriting. We examined theatrical space, with a focus on recognizing and understanding the unique three-dimensionality of the art form. Explorations included the work of Shaffer, Shepard, Wallace, Albee, among others. Students also attended and responded to several live events during the semester and participated in an on-going writing studio. Over the course of the semester, students created several short works—a 5-minute play, a 10-minute play, and 15-25 minute final project.