When I was a little kid, my mom used to say, “Why does everything have to be such a production?!” So naturally I grew up to transform my love of performatively approaching my everyday life into a diverse practice of producing/creating. As an artist and teacher, I make drag shows, musicals, films, classrooms and containers for learning; broadly writ, I make time-based media and experiences that live out their meaning-making lives in community and through relationship. I am deeply curious about relationships between identity, ideology, community and performance, driven by the question “How do we become ourselves?” — partly because as an autistic & trans person, I’ve been forced to ask “how” and “why” by every encounter with the world. Oriented to not just the challenge of those encounters, but also their pleasure, I approach this question for individuals, as communities, even as a question to pose to an art object itself — how does drag become drag, how does film become film?


These explorations have ranged from nonfiction drag numbers dissecting the performativity of gay masculinities from a trans POV; a film cycle about the intersection of eating disorders with race, queerness, and gender; and video & performance art engaged in queering and transing dominant cultural texts like classic musical theater and pop music. My deep interest in processes of becoming, as content and form for my own artistic practice, and as the fractal layers of social movements that move us towards more liberated presents/futures, is also a huge reason why I love getting the honor of holding containers for others’ learning and creation, as a teacher and mentor. Student learning and creative growth is one of the processes of becoming that is at the heart of my work in the world.