Summary

A senior lecturer in performance, my background is as a playwright/director/performer of experimental theatre, and as founder/co-founder of three alternative performance organisations. I have presented performance work and spoken word extensively in Phoenix, which was my home base until I moved to Portsmouth in 2018. I have also performed and presented in art spaces, living rooms, and theatres in Brooklyn, Berlin, and Krakow, among other places. In September, 2018, my book of experimental prose, 'dog's ear', was published by Hoot n' Waddle Press. I have been teaching at the university level since 2003, and have taught courses in experimental theatre, race and representation, playwriting, and ritual studies. I am currently teaching performance histories, forming a company, performance & society, performance criticism & analysis, and major academic project at the University of Portsmouth. I advise MRes, serve on PhD committees, and have advised for MFAs and PhDs at previous institutions. I've served on both the Race Equality Charter and ATHENA Swan committees. In July, 2021, I completed my FHEA. My interests are in intercultural performance, Latinx & Latin American performance, race & representation, and African diasporic ritual traditions.  Currently accepting PhD students as 2nd advisor for projects related to ritual, representation and issues of cultural and gender identity, Practice as Research. 

Research interests

My research is both practice-led and practice-based, inquiring into the nature of the performer's phenomenological experience, the intersections between ritual and the digital in live performance, and the stage as a haunted site. I completed my PhD from Plymouth University and the Transart Institute for Creative Practice in 2017, and my thesis is titled, 'The Medium and the Message: Afro-Cuban Trance and Western Theatrical Performance'. My article/manifesto, 'Theatre for the Dead', was published in June 2020 in Global Performance Studies. I write, sometimes direct, and often perform, in my texts for performance, and I have written over 80 texts, with productiions in Phoenix, New York City, Merida, Mexico City, Seattle, Berlin, Vienna, and other places. My text 'Scattering Salt', directed by Dr. Erika Highes, was performed at the 2019 Brighton Fringe Festival and for DarkFest in Portsmouth. 

I co-authored a paper on Lacan and performance with Dr. Laura Gonzalez for the peer-reviewed Else Journal, and published a paper on performance and haunting, 'Hearing Ghosts, Speaking Spaces', with Dr. Matthew Wagner for Text and Performance Quarterly. I have also had two conference panels at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) devoted to my work: one on Teatro Caliente, an intercultural experimental performance festival I curated and produced in Phoenix for nine years, and one on digital technology in my play, 'r u mad, ophelia'. My research interests include Latinx & Latin American performance, zapatismo (from having spent time in Chiapas on multiple trips since 1996), ritual ontologies and mediated performance.