community engagement

We Reckon is a community story telling initiative rooted in our collective experiences of the global pandemic, the movement for racial justice, and our “new normal”.  The project aims to collect stories from individuals throughout the southeast, analyze how these stories are similar and how they are unique, devise performative pieces from the narratives, and present them to the community and the region. Through this work we will demonstrate how our struggles are in many ways different, but they are also in many ways the same; and how while we are going through these times separately, we are in this together.

Higher Ground is a community arts organization based in Harlan County, Kentucky. Higher Ground has worked with community members and visiting artists to create photography exhibits, tile mosaics, and plays. Each of these projects rely heavily on oral histories collected by Harlan Countians and about Harlan Countians. Higher Ground is a project of the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College.

By a serendipitous sequence of events (as sequences of events are wont to be) in the spring of 2013 as I was preparing to graduate from college, I found myself interviewing for an assistant position with Community Performance International (CPI), a group of artists committed to pairing with communities and helping foster conversation, transformation, and healing through the sharing of personal stories. CPI was hired by Higher Ground, an arts activist organization in Harlan County, KY, to co-produce a show about the effects of coal companies, unemployment, and drug abuse in Southeastern Kentucky: Higher Ground 4: Foglights.

For the past seven years, I have continued working alongside Higher Ground on a number of their productions. On Higher Ground 4: Foglights I worked as an Assistant Lighting Designer, Stage Manager, and Assistant Director, working from casting through closing on every aspect of the production. In 2015 I returned as a technical mentor and media designer for Higher Ground 5: Find a Way working with local students and young adults to craft a representation of what they were facing as Appalachian youth. Later in 2017 I provided lighting design and support for Higher Ground 7: Needlework, a commissioned piece asking audiences to evaluate the benefits and difficulties of clean needle exchanges.

Most recently we produced Higher Ground 8: Perfect Buckets in partnership with the Southern Foodways Alliance. Working as a Lighting Designer and Directing Consultant alongside Higher Ground Creative Director, Kate Handzlik, we helped tell the stories of striking coal miners, political partisan division, and the dissolution of social media through the lens of southern food culture.

During the 2018/2019 academic year, I worked as a guest lecturer and resident lighting designer with the Converse College Theatre Department in Spartanburg, SC.

During my tenure at Converse, one of the shows we produced was Growing Old: Food and Oral History in Performance. A group of students committed to working within their community both with the elderly population of Spartanburg and with local food charities to further the betterment of the community and to collect stories which were then adapted into a full-scale production of individual vignettes representing the intersection of aging and food culture in our society.

In my capacity as a lighting designer and a technical theatre/design mentor, I was able to help bring the world of the performances to life as the stories and the script unfolded while working with a student sound designer, stage manager, and crew.

K2 is a traditionally scripted play written by Patrick Meyers. The production organization, Catalyst Arts Atlanta, is committed to community engagement and betterment through contemporary and immersive storytelling.

For this production, we were able to utilize a found warehouse space on the southwest side of Atlanta to present a harrowing tale of shared humanity and the human need to push boundaries.

Our partners included Catalyst Climbers, an organization which helps differently-abled bodies learn to rock climb, and the Atlanta chapter of the ManKind Project, a group which helps men overcome stereotypical portrayals of masculinity to reach their full compassionate and empathetic potential.

As a co-producer on this project, I was part of the team dedicated to fundraising and facilitating this production. We were thoroughly invested in creating a quality emotional and aesthetic product utilizing our found resources and limited budget.