Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

I am a theater artist and educator and mom to two young kids. I love bringing communities together and believe the arts are the perfect vehicle to facilitate connection. My training is as an actor, but more recently I’ve embraced writing and directing/producing. Four years ago, I created Valley Performance Playground with Felicia Sloin. We provide creative arts classes, workshops, and vacation/summer programs for young artists where they can create their own original pieces. I also run the Play Reading Co-Op with Rachel Hirsch, which organizes monthly readings of new plays for local actors and writers. Since the quarantine began, we’ve moved our gatherings to weekly meetings via zoom. I also co-directed Northampton’s first Youth Performance Festival (YPF) this past February with Kelly Silliman at the Center for the Arts. As you can tell, I love collaborating and helping to produce new work!

Tell us about some other jobs you have had other than being an artist.

I moved to Brooklyn right after I graduated college and while I was pursuing acting, I had so many side jobs. In addition to being a drama teaching artist I was, for varying lengths of time, a caterer, an academic and S.A.T. tutor, a legal temp, babysitter, and online bookstore worker. It was a lot to juggle, but looking back, it was actually good training for the multi-faceted-project-to-project-nature of a career in the arts.

Tell us about some projects you have worked on. Which one was your favorite and why?

My most recent project directing the Youth Performance Festival (YPF) was definitely one of my all time favorites. Over the course of 6 weekends, 35 young artists (8-18 yrs old) created their own dance, theater, music, and video pieces under the guidance of mentor artists. I loved getting to connect with a greater community of artists from a range of disciplines, and it was incredibly inspiring to see the projects the youth artists created and the relationships that developed between the mentors and youth. Some other highlights have been writing and performing my own solo show, “The Company of Myself,” for the Emerging Artists Theatre in NYC, and performing multiple characters based on real people in the premiere of “Goldstar Ohio” at the Cleveland Public Theater.

Has anything surprised you about adjusting to this quarantine?

Something that’s really surprised me is that despite the challenging nature of this time, I’ve had many moments of feeling more expansive and creative than ever before. Because I’ve been hanging out with my kids all day, I spend so much time in this playful-pretend space—reading stories, doing art projects, making up fairy characters as we walk through the woods, and that has made me feel more curious and driven to create my own work and set aside creative time for myself (something that I haven’t always been good at doing).

What are you currently working on?

Even though so much is unknown about the future, Kelly and I still intend to run the Youth Performance Festival in 2021 so we’re in the planning stages for that. Valley Performance Playground’s summer programs are up in the air, but as soon as it’s safe to gather, we hope to offer some sort of creative experience for our families. I’m very slowly working on a movie project written by and starring my kids called “The Tiger Claw” and I am really excited about making a foray into the totally new territory of podcast writing. I’ve written the first episode of a fictional podcast and hope to share that with the world in the coming year. You can stay in touch with my projects here: www.valleyperformanceplayground.com, www.facebook.com/valleyperformanceplayground,

And here’s more info about the Play Reading Co-Op: