After being unschooled for most of my childhood, when I was 14 I started interning with Theatre de la Jeune Lune, a European theatre company based in Minneapolis…the core artists from that ensemble ended up being my mentors for the next ten years. As an undergrad doing a self-designed degree at the UofM I ended up traveling to Europe several times to train with their teachers in clowning and tragedy. I’ve also always been a creative writer who loves to write poetry and stories, and a voraciously curious researcher, and so for grad school I’ve ended up doing another self-designed degree, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College where I could weave together all my curiosities about the energetic presence created by performance and the way that poetic texts were capable of moving an audience and expanding their imagination of what is possible.
Goddard is in VT, but it’s a low residency program, so I just go out there twice a year and spend the rest of my time living in MN or traveling. Since I started doing that program, a whole world has opened up for me around deep ecology, decolonization, indigenous ways of knowing, and reconnective healing for folks disconnected from their European ancestral lineage. I’ve always be intensely fascinated by “culture” and the ways that invisible power and knowledge structures collectively determine the limits of our imaginations. This curiosity has led me on an expansive exploration of different philosophies of how humans make meaning, how we see our relationship to the more-than-human world, and how the culture we live in so intensely shapes our inner lives emotionally, socially, and in the way we relate to the sacred.
Over the last few years, as part of my MFA I ended up spending a couple months doing short courses at Schumacher College in Devon, England, a deep ecology/holistic science/permaculture school which is a global hub for folks engaged in similar explorations. My time at Schumacher has hugely impacted who I am as a human, inviting me into a deep witnessing of the wounds I carry on a personal and collective level and creating an invitation for healing through re-membering the parts that have been exiled…all this brought me into intensive research about this culture’s anesthetized relationship to grief and led me to search for elders who have created ritual practices for tending grief in a collective way. I’ve since studied with Francis Weller (who wrote the book The Wild Edge of Sorrow) and Azul-Valerie Thome (from whom I'm learning how to facilitate a grief ritual practice called the Grief Composting Circle). For my MFA capstone project, I’m currently creating a clown show called Earth Grief that is a pedagogical tool for introducing people to ideas around cultural transformation, climate change, and grief rituals.
This August I’ll be entering into my final semester of my MFA and will be writing my portfolio/thesis. Because the portfolio is pretty flexible in form, I’m thinking what I will do is weave together an experiential curriculum of “poetic interventions” out of all the research I’ve been doing, because what I’d love to do is some form of facilitation around cultural transformation through decolonizing the imagination, and also weave in grief rituals, and clowning… I’m also going to be apprenticing for a Permaculture Design Certificate and studying for a certification in a practice called Soul-Based Coaching, which is a practice of mentoring people as they becoming conscious of their inner landscapes and find metaphors for the ways they are called to live in the world.
Goddard is in VT, but it’s a low residency program, so I just go out there twice a year and spend the rest of my time living in MN or traveling. Since I started doing that program, a whole world has opened up for me around deep ecology, decolonization, indigenous ways of knowing, and reconnective healing for folks disconnected from their European ancestral lineage. I’ve always be intensely fascinated by “culture” and the ways that invisible power and knowledge structures collectively determine the limits of our imaginations. This curiosity has led me on an expansive exploration of different philosophies of how humans make meaning, how we see our relationship to the more-than-human world, and how the culture we live in so intensely shapes our inner lives emotionally, socially, and in the way we relate to the sacred.
Over the last few years, as part of my MFA I ended up spending a couple months doing short courses at Schumacher College in Devon, England, a deep ecology/holistic science/permaculture school which is a global hub for folks engaged in similar explorations. My time at Schumacher has hugely impacted who I am as a human, inviting me into a deep witnessing of the wounds I carry on a personal and collective level and creating an invitation for healing through re-membering the parts that have been exiled…all this brought me into intensive research about this culture’s anesthetized relationship to grief and led me to search for elders who have created ritual practices for tending grief in a collective way. I’ve since studied with Francis Weller (who wrote the book The Wild Edge of Sorrow) and Azul-Valerie Thome (from whom I'm learning how to facilitate a grief ritual practice called the Grief Composting Circle). For my MFA capstone project, I’m currently creating a clown show called Earth Grief that is a pedagogical tool for introducing people to ideas around cultural transformation, climate change, and grief rituals.
This August I’ll be entering into my final semester of my MFA and will be writing my portfolio/thesis. Because the portfolio is pretty flexible in form, I’m thinking what I will do is weave together an experiential curriculum of “poetic interventions” out of all the research I’ve been doing, because what I’d love to do is some form of facilitation around cultural transformation through decolonizing the imagination, and also weave in grief rituals, and clowning… I’m also going to be apprenticing for a Permaculture Design Certificate and studying for a certification in a practice called Soul-Based Coaching, which is a practice of mentoring people as they becoming conscious of their inner landscapes and find metaphors for the ways they are called to live in the world.
