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I am theatre and film developer and scholar - I direct, write, produce, cast, dramaturg and research. I hold PhD and MA from the University of Kansas, and a BA from Yale in Theatre and Performance Studies. I am the former Associate Artistic Director, Director in Residence, and School for the Arts Director at the Trinidad Theater Workshop (the longest-running theatre company in the Caribbean), and a founder of Trinidad and Tobago’s PRIDE Arts Festival. I have also worked on numerous films and commercials, and served as the Marketing Manager for CaribbeanTales International Film Festival and Media Group. I currently work as an Assistant Professor of Social Justice and Directing at the University of California, Berkeley.

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I'm passionate about social justice story-telling that leads us question ourselves and the social structures around us. I work in the mediums of theatre and film to ask complex questions and create spaces in which to contribute to building inclusive, just and equitable ways of being.

 

I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, part of a little transplant family from the Caribbean and Middle East, where I searched for stories that made me feel like I made sense. I was reminded often by my mother that I come from a mixed family - part African, part Chinese, part European, and half Israeli-Jewish. I remember learning that some of my ancestors had been enslaved, while others were plantation foreman, and struggling to understand how people of my dad's heritage, who were once hunted and exterminated like parasites, now systematically oppress others. I felt different, displaced, and confused about my identity.

 

Theater and the arts was the place where I was able to explore my own complex realities. It was the place where I learned to identify as a woman of color, where I came to terms with passing for white, but knowing I could never be white. I learned that the gatekeepers of success and cultural creation here in the United States were largely uninterested in the complex narratives of women of color, so I determined to devote myself to spotlighting our many-fold stories and perspectives. 

 

I co-founded Three-Faced Productions after a decade and a half of working with social justice theatre organizations.