Questions of identity and meaning-making within the push and pull of our fraught contemporary realities is an important theme for me. In addition to being a playwright and librettist, I’m a scholar and an educator and my artistic ideas are always inspired by and/or in conversation with sociological and psychocultural inquiry. As a PhD Candidate in Comparative Human Development I wrote my dissertation, titled "Theatre as Therapy for Impression Management Distress in the Contemporary United States: A Dramaturgical Model and Toolkit for Everyday Coping," on distress around contemporary American identity processes, particularly in terms of anxieties around everyday life interaction and being accepted on for who we are on a moment-to-moment basis. Especially in an image-oriented society like the US where I conducted my research, it's hard to feel comfortable in our own skin these days. Who we are gets hidden, erased from view, altered in some way just to “fit in” into some perfect image projected to others. This obsession with image-making represents a fear of being stigmatized for the tiniest thing that could make one seem undesirable to others. I see theatre as a way forward, to engage local audiences and communities in reimagining the stigmas, boundaries, cultural limitations, and stagnant narratives that keep us trapped. I'm interested in creating original work that provokes productive questioning and perspective shifts in audiences as well as working with communities and individuals to discover how theatre, art, and social practice can work together as a forms of engagement and intervention across a range of psychocultural issues.