writer, producer, director, performer, artist, curator

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In 2017, as a durational performance artwork that took place over the course of three months, I ran for Mayor of Santa Barbara, California. I created campaign headquarters where I invited artists, local politicians, and community members to make socially engaged art and hear my campaign speech. My platform called for an end to white supremacy in the arts, creating affordable housing for working artists, and strengthening local environmental protections. 

An interdisciplinary collaboration with artist Lauren Ruth, I wrote, directed, and staged performative interventions that query the conventions of contemporary social ritual and curatorial/artistic practice. Founded as an immersive theater and conceptual artwork, The Shaft initially transformed a dilapidated warehouse elevator into a white cube gallery for its own solo exhibition in 2011. The Shaft continued to provide free and alternative experiences in the elevator for 5 months until it was forcibly evicted. While located in the elevator, The Shaft staged a romantic French bistro, a corporate outreach event for a pseudo-sustainable energy company, and a dance party for a new artistic movement called Pre-Vaporism. The Shaft’s performative interventions combine sound, video, digital technology, and site-specific art. Upon moving out of the elevator, The Shaft created a White Cube Getaway commercial for a six-week intensive training school for artists enrolled at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts. The school consisted of two open-air galleries/theaters without walls on a main thoroughfare, which allowed people off the street to participate in the course free of charge. The Shaft went on to officiate elaborate public marriage ceremonies in which passersby could marry art and ideas, including Wedding Packageat a police sub-station in Baltimore, Maryland. In Miami, The Shaft hosted a romantic dinner party in the private home of a contemporary art collector, during which guests received a “Fast Fiancés” questionnaire and a PowerPoint presentation on the olfactory senses and salmon spawning. In this project and others, The Shaft critiques the social fabric of late capitalist American culture.

Chimera is a one act play and performance that I wrote, directed, and acted in at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2019. I built and painted the sets and staged a public reading with students and faculty at UCSB. Entertaining the fate of our existence in an era of climate change, Chimera discusses technological innovations that move us closer to “the singularity”—the moment when super intelligent machines evolve without human assistance—as we simultaneously grapple with the more immediate threat of environmental collapse.