Women aren’t funny. Just ask William Congreve or any man on Reddit. And while a lot has changed in the last few hundred years, stereotypes about women and comedy persist. I discovered the power of comedy when I was four years old. I was rushed to the emergency room after running into the sharp corner of a Victorian buffet table during an indoor game of Wiffle ball. At the hospital, strapped to a papoose board, high out of my mind on a local anesthetic, my blue jumper covered in blood, I began telling the doctor and nurses about my dad's flatulence—low brow comedy at its finest. The room burst into laughter, and I learned a new skill. As I got older, I cultivated my own brand of humor. The desire for change through comedic storytelling propels me. Just like in Charlie Chaplin’s "The Great Dictator," Václav Havel’s "The Memorandum," or Edgar Wright’s "Shaun of the Dead," comedy is an important means of protest. Now, I pen plays and musicals with empathetic humor and coax audiences into confronting their own complicity in society’s pervasive problems.

My work interrogates gender dynamics and draws from pop culture, current events, and philosophy, weaving influences from both “high” and “low” art and interrogating that very distinction – itself gendered. The age-old aesthetic hierarchy privileges certain art forms, genres, and even subject matters over others based on gender and class associations, ultimately devaluing feminine styles, structures, and storytelling. My plays destabilize that binary by embracing the works of both Aphra Behn and Mindy Kaling, Franz Schubert and Selena Gomez, phenomenology and Twitter. I pen cross-genre works that utilize camp, irony, and satire to challenge audience expectations and disrupt value structures. And I am to prove William Congreve wrong.