Bio

I combine text, music, movement, video and visual art in solo and collaborative performance projects in order to re-imagine and transform socially-constructed conflict narratives operating just beneath the surface of familiar stories, metaphors, images and archetypes.

My recent work has examined the complex relationship between art and war in a series of solo and collaborative music-theater-visual art projects about the US Marine Corps, including Command Voice, which premiered at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in 2010; Bazm-o-Razm, commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonic for the Music Off the Walls series at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008; and IED: Improvised Experimental Diva, which premiered at the inaugural Capitol Fringe Fest in Washington, DC in 2007 and was hailed by The Washington Post as “a perfect fringe experience.”

In 2011, I premiered a music-dance-theater collaboration entitled The Chemistry of Lime Trees, which re-interprets the story of Bosko Brkic and Admira Ismic, a real life Romeo and Juliet during the 1992 siege of Sarajevo, in an attempt to understand what drives our attempts to physically and emotionally cross restrictive borders.

As part of my creative practice, I also design and facilitate workshops and dialogues on the interdisciplinary social utility of the performing arts.  In my workshops on the Theories of Change concept, as drawn from the field of conflict resolution and peacebuilding, I propose a new framework for performing artists to adapt in order to apply powerful social science methodology to their work as social change artists.

Born and raised in Washington, DC, I earned a Master of Music in Vocal Performance from Catholic University of America and a Graduate Certificate in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University.  I studied composition with David Lang at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2008 and with Randy Woolf during her 2007-2008 fellowship with the Brooklyn Philharmonic.  I received a 2007 Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant and a 2010 Meet the Composer Creative Connections Grant, and have been a resident artist at Tribeca Performing Arts Center since 2009.