I am a theatrical designer invested in bringing visibility to the field by positioning its practitioners as integral to ways of making that stretch beyond our discipline and into architecture, engineering, and live events broadly construed. My career has focused on helping students, and our discipline itself, better understand how we benefit from placing our work in direct conversation with these fields. Taking full advantage of my position inside a comprehensive research university, I have consciously partnered with scholars and makers outside of my field to bring perspective to this work and to engage with the relevance of theatre making beyond the theatre itself.
Scholarship
My book project, Experience Makers: Careers in Live Events (currently under contract with Routledge), will be the culmination of my career in leading and mentoring students to apply the skills of their discipline across a broad range of live events industries. This project studies the lived experience of makers in the performing arts, themed entertainment, museum exhibitions, parade floats, haunted attractions, live music concerts, houses of worship, retail experiences, immersive environments, and living history sites. The skills of a maker are universal and this research demonstrates we are all members of the same familial workforce and that our transferable skills can open doors to new fields and professions. As one of the reviewers at Routledge stated, “I would be excited to see the cultural shift in the industry by educating our students and the next generation of artists to truly explore all fields of employment and utilize their transferable skills.”
I generated a solid foundation of research, including more than forty interviews with industry professionals, during my academic leave in the spring semester of 2022. These included interviews with company presidents, founders and CEOs, as well as managers, designers, engineers and fabricators. That fall, I engaged with SMU DataArts, the national center for arts research, to conduct a nationwide survey of workforce demographics in the Live Arts, Culture, and Entertainment fields (The LACE Survey) which serves as a key quantitative resource for the project. I am currently engaged with professionals across the country to continue this work and, with more than fifteen thousand dollars of grant funding from sources both in and outside Ohio State, this major publication project is poised for success.
Although my career has always involved scholarship, my research and publications have blossomed since the pandemic. Pivoting quickly from live production into research, I conducted a year-long study of materials used on stages to evoke dirt and their impacts on air quality, costumes, fabrication, and the environment. Since the pandemic began, air quality and environmental impact have been increasingly critical research questions that reach far beyond the discipline of theatre. In fact, the success of this project was a direct result of my reaching beyond theatre and building connections with professionals in the field, local business owners, and new colleagues from around Ohio State in healthcare, engineering and the sciences. I shared my early research findings at the national convention of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) and the project culminated in the cover article for Theatre Design & Technology, my field’s primary quarterly journal.
My article and design for an innovative system of fabric carriers was published in the Technical Invention Prize and exhibited at World Stage Design 2017 in Taipei, Taiwan where my work was awarded Honorable Mention. Like all the scholarship I produced in the past six years, this work generated new knowledge, connected my discipline to the larger field, and had a significant impact far beyond Ohio State.
Creative Practice
Self-production is the entrepreneurial act of our industry. In the same way that small businesses foster innovation, producing new works of theatre can move the field of design forward. My creative practice is centered around designing new theatrical works and I actively partner with established alternative companies that share this mission, as opposed to more conventional regional theatres.
To further advance that work, I co-founded the for/word company, a theatre company dedicated to creating new works. In my practice, I bring the visual world into collaborations early in the process as a catalyst. What emerges is scenography that is not appended to the script, but grows together with it, distilling and clarifying the world. The most recent example of that work was our production of Patience Worth, an original work of theatre born out of a research question on integrating design into the devising process. We premiered this work in St. Louis during USITT’s 2017 national convention and I co-led a professional development workshop at the conference that addressed our technology, our research findings, and our process.
Of the more than one hundred productions I have designed, more than a quarter of them have been premiere productions, many of them involving early collaborations with writers and devising teams. My design work, which includes academic, professional, LORT and Off-Broadway productions, has been recognized by regional, national and international theatre organizations.
This creative practice and embodied research strengthens my contributions to Ohio State’s new works mission. It also impacts the larger field as my designs for new work have been seen around the country and overseas. Additionally, my role as producer for the for/word company has contributed to my strong foundation in entrepreneurship and arts administration. I have been able to apply this experience directly to Ohio State in my role as Season Producer, to our courses and programs, to our Lab Series of student-driven new works, and to the student organizations I advise who are actively self-producing.
Teaching
My work repositioning theatre as central to a range of fields applies directly to my teaching. My current course in theatre architecture provides an excellent example. Seeing an opportunity to make connections across our campus and generate new work for a national design competition, I offered a workshop course on architecture for performance facilities, one of my areas of sustained research and experience. I recruited ten students, graduates and undergraduates from theatre, architecture and industrial design programs, and matched them with professional theatre consultants from two major firms, Charcoalblue and DLR Group. Each team worked their professional mentor throughout the process which began in the fall and extended through March. At the national USITT conference, one of our student teams earned the top award in the nation for their project which was enriched by the diversity of their backgrounds and enhanced by connections to professionals in the field.
Although I am proud of my consistently strong student evaluations, I’m also excited to use their feedback to retool my syllabi and improve my pedagogy. In addition, I actively pursue training to develop my skills in teaching, learn new tools and techniques, and equip myself with anti-racist strategies to support diversity, equity and inclusion. I most recently sought out training led by Jacqueline Lawton entitled “Anti-Racist Training in Theatre” which was commissioned by USITT to address the unique challenges that our field presents. I’ve also achieved a number of teaching endorsements from Ohio State’s Institute for Teaching and Learning, including Digital Flagship Educator.
As an active professional, I am committed to bringing students into the professional setting with me as collaborators and assistants. In the past six years, I brought student collaborators to two-thirds of my professional designs and supported their work each time by providing design fees or course credit. In addition to my role as advisor for our graduate design students, I also foster undergraduate students interested in design and provide opportunities for them in our seasons. For talented but less experienced students, I turn the traditional hierarchy on its head by serving as the student’s assistant designer, helping produce design materials for them so they can focus on realizing their scenographic ideas, a good example of which is my work with Alyssa Thompson on Into the Woods. I am very proud of my undergraduate students who have gone on to success in MFA design programs and beyond. I am equally proud of my former graduate students who have found fruitful careers in professional theatres and academic institutions.
In the past six years, I have taught twenty-five and one half courses in my eleven terms which equates to an overload of three and one half courses. These range from large-section, introductory courses that serve primarily non-majors to advanced, graduate-level teaching. However, this figure does not include my role as instructor for the thirty student designs I’ve mentored in those six years, the eight internships I’ve managed, or the twenty-one independent research, thesis or pedagogy courses I’ve led.
Service
At universities of the scale of Ohio State, siloing the arts away from fields like engineering, for example, is more than just a disciplinary gate—it is a habit of system, structure, and curriculum. My desire to map pathways for collaboration, and to claim theater’s very real role as a nexus of relevant practice, has fueled my significant investment of time in high-level university service in curriculum. Ohio State has the largest College of Arts and Sciences in the nation. As a four-year veteran of the Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committee, one year of which I chaired, I have seen firsthand that building courses and programs that are truly transdisciplinary is a feat that requires pedagogical innovation and savvy coalition building.
In my year of chairing, I led a group of seventeen faculty, two student representatives and three professional staff, in addition to seven sub-committees that involved still more faculty and staff from around the college and beyond. Each year, our committee addresses around five hundred new or revised courses and more than a dozen major, minor and certificate programs. My tenure on the committee also included the creation and implementation of an entirely new, university-wide general education program as well as the abrupt changes to curriculum brought about by the pandemic and the lingering reliance on distance learning.
My leadership in curriculum extends to the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts where I served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for four years. During my tenure, I continued my work connecting our discipline to the broader field by creating a new minor program in Entertainment Design and Technology. Instead of serving as an optional focus for theatre students, this program is built to serve only students outside of our department from disciplines like architecture, engineering, interior design, and fashion with opportunities to apply the skills of their disciplines to theatre and live events. Not only has this program increased enrollment in our courses and broadened our department’s visibility, but it has also enriched our classrooms with students from diverse disciplines and backgrounds. As Director, I also led the revision of our B.A. Theatre program, a process shaped by input from our faculty and students, research on peer institutions, and feedback from NAST, the accrediting body for our field.
I also led my disciplinary area for a number of years as Head of Design and Technology. In that role, I continued my focus on curriculum by leading the revision of our M.F.A. Design program. The revision increased opportunities for our students to collaborate, created a more efficient structure and schedule, increased our course enrollments, and built new a curriculum in media design to join our three existing areas of scenery, costumes and lighting.
My leadership in the Design and Technology area has become exponentially more demanding recently as three of my faculty colleagues have retired in the past four years without any new hires to replace them. In addition, our department is shifting to a new facility and we are weeks away from closing our old building for good. On top of advocating for this program’s continuance and maintaining rigor in our curriculum, these considerable changes have placed many additional responsibilities on my shoulders including chairing committees for two national faculty searches and a search for a two-year Post-MFA instructor. I have also been very closely involved with the planning of our new facility, work that is well informed by my research and experience in theatre architecture.
My service at the international level also connects to my work in theatre architecture. As an active member of the architecture commission at OISTAT (the International Organization of Scenographers, Theatre Architects, and Technicians) I have participated in many of their events around the world in the past six years. The Prague Quadrennial (PQ) is the world’s largest event in the field of scenography and I was proud to serve as Assistant Curator of the US National entry to the Architecture Exhibition at the 2019 Quadrennial, a role that deepened my experience in theatre architecture and broadened my network of professionals in the field.
Another consequence of my interest in building interdisciplinary connections has been my mentorship of student organizations. One organization, the Theme Park Engineering Group (TPEG), has been a uniquely successful experience. Founded by engineering students interested in roller coasters, I partnered with TPEG for a number of years, providing material and technical support for their work, participating in their events, making connections to our department, and extending those connections beyond theatre and into the field of themed entertainment. TPEG offers a conference each spring called Students In Themed Entertainment (SITE) which gathers students and professionals from around the country and my participation has had a significant impact on my interdisciplinary work and scholarship. This spring, TPEG earned Ohio State’s Outstanding Program Award for student organizations.
As our department cautiously produced its first live events since the pandemic, I served as Season Producer, establishing Covid‐19 guidelines for live productions in consultation with public health leaders, union and industry directives, and department staff and faculty. I revised our audition process and established a group of on-call students who stepped in if someone had to miss a performance. I also created and administered a survey instrument to gather production feedback from students, staff and faculty to help the department assess our own work and improve on it.
CHARGE
Fundamentally, I am a maker and my charge is to build. In the past six years, I have built new works of theatre by deeply integrating scenography, built new pedagogy and curricula that expands the reach of our students, built new connections that position theatre as central to a larger industry, and built new knowledge that moves our field forward.