Currently, a happy resident of Salt Lake City, UT and an Associate Professor of Theatre and Westminster Performing Arts Center Director at Westminster University.
The ephemeral nature of theater has always fascinated me. A theater piece is only truly alive when the efforts and imaginations of many meet, for a few fleeting hours, in a theater space with the audience. The production may show many times, but no performance is identical. The designer’s work supports these ephemeral moments and experiences, but eventually the set is struck, the lights rehung, and the costumes locked away. The inevitable destruction and dismantling of my work is all at once exhilarating and saddening. Sadness from the sense of parting with a team and project, but exhilaration from the prospect of the next project, the next team, and the next experience.
I’m a versatile theatre artist and designer interested in a scenographic approach to theatre design. I believe in understanding the whole stage picture and understanding, appreciating, and contributing to all aspects of visual and sensory story telling. When I can, I enjoy designing both scenery and costume for a production, but I always enjoy being a part of a team of many designers. I find my joint work in scenic and costume design gives me a unique perspective into both fields and I greatly enjoy the interplay between the two. While designing, creating whole characters, whole worlds, and whole environments is the focus of my work. As a creative and an academic, I’d like to further explore working with multimedia design for the purpose of creating visceral theatre and forging a stronger connection between modern audiences and theatre. I firmly believe theatre’s biggest strength is the power of live performance. This makes theatre innately visceral, but audiences, especially new audiences, have a high stimulation threshold. With the advantage of live people on stage, theatre - by incorporating new and creative uses of media, technology, and venue - can draw audiences in closer than ever by overcoming the stimulation threshold and offering connection. Connection like audiences centuries and millennia ago felt when watching live performances. I’d like to contribute to that connection by exploring and further researching theatre’s primal and classical origins and merging it with advances in technology.