My Work

My classes cover a wide range of subjects: voice, speech, accents and dialects, text and verse, embodied anatomy, vocal health, vocal extremity, developing an autonomous practice, and applying all of these concepts to professional work along the way. For several years, my class load has included co-teaching a first year acting class for exactly this last purpose. In addition, I also teach Laban/Bartenieff Movement Concepts.

My classroom strives to acknowledge the artist as a human being as well as a professional in training. Therefore, I try to examine content critically and in historical context — including the students when it would not be burdensome to them. The human body is celebrated whenever possible in all potential forms and configurations, as is the human voice. I use descriptive models of speech training and try to frame voice work as a life-long practice, not one of “quick fixes.”

Reflection, autonomy, and sustainability are key words in my classroom, no matter the content. My goal as a teacher is for my students to outgrow me… or at least to save themselves as much money and as many doctor’s visits as they can once they are out of school.

Announcement: Winner of inaugural adjunct excellence in teaching award at UNCSA

With private clients, I address their concerns from clarity of speech to public speaking to preparing for an audition — whatever the client is looking for.

I regularly serve as the coach multiple productions in a year, providing whatever support is required. This can range from: overall vocal work for clarity and variety; text work for greater depth of connection and understanding; accent, dialect, or even foreign language coaching for multiple accents or languages in a single production; or sometimes I even provide movement coaching as well to help portray impediments or create character differentiation when an actor has multiple roles to play.

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During the pandemic, we all found new ways of engaging in our artforms. We performed some of our productions for film, performed some of them masked, and converted some into radio plays/podcasts. I coached all of these new formats.

Shows would range from student-choreographed dance pieces and student opera scenes concerts to large full-scale operas, dance concerts, and dramas. Teams would range from two students to five, depending on the needs of the show, and I would see the production from pre-production, through tech, all the way to debriefing and reflecting after the show was closed.

When I was both advising and coaching a show, I was able to act in a dual role, especially when serving on a student director’s thesis. I helped both the stage management students and the student directors learn to work with each other through the production process and communicate more effectively.

I focused my own research on comparing how theatrical voice work and LBMA work each approach and teach the use of breath, and whether these different approaches have an impact on how actors use text.

I use LBMA concepts frequently in my coaching when actors have to play multiple characters within a single production and need to transform clearly and efficiently physically as well as vocally. The photos here are from a production of Indecent at UNCSA where the cast, director, and I used LBMA concepts from the beginning to build distinct characters for the cast (or, in the case of Lemml/Lou, to show the character’s journey over the show

I have been exploring other ways to start applying my LBMA knowledge in other ways as well. I am integrating the Bartenieff work into my introductory voice practices, and I am also looking for ways of using Space and Shape theory with other theatre collaborators, such as directors and fight choreographers.

As a stage manager, I have highly developed skills in written communication, scheduling, organization, and working as part of a team. At its essence, mounting an opera is the art of a group of at least a hundred people each doing something individually, but in near-perfect coordination, with live music, all while being stared at — and we must get the whole job done in under a month. My job as stage manager is not to create any of it, but to coordinate all pieces so that we can get the job done safely and on time.

My stage management career has focused on the world of opera and some events work. My entire life has included musical training of one form or another, and while I never became a performer, as a stage manager of opera, I certainly put my musical skills to good use. I have worked with companies across the country including: Santa Fe Opera, San Diego Opera, Des Moines Metro Opera, and Cincinnati Opera. I have a long-standing relationship with Piedmont Opera, the company in my home town, and work with them whenever I can.

Community includes the immediate community of my campus. I have served on internal committees that don’t sound very exciting, but are hugely impactful to our day-to day lives.

I volunteered to be part of both the attendance policy committee and the scheduling committee for the UNCSA School of Drama. I was also part of the the internal Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging — a voluntary mixed student and faculty committee. I headed a sub-group on paperwork, and at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, we launched a form for students to voluntarily disclose any aspects of their identities that they wanted taken into consideration during season selection and casting. I maintained and updated that form every year until I left the program in 2024.

As public service coordinator for the UNCSA School of Drama, I supported student projects that come up as well. Some projects of note include: a benefit concert for children’s cancer quality of life programs at Brenner Children’s Hospital and an original devised production of The Lost Boys Present: Peter Pan for local Title-1 third grade classes, coordinated specifically for their curriculum.

During my service with ArtistCorps, beginning in the fall of 2016, I served across a wide variety of sites in Forsyth county, largely in arts instruction and in arts integration, which is the craft of teaching standard curriculum through high-quality arts education. The Wolf Method is by far my largest project, but other projects of note include: a drama residency in Title-1 second grade classrooms, a semester-long project where each of six third-grade classrooms collaboratively wrote and performed a hero’s journey as a puppet show, a dual-language production of Horton Hears a Who! filmed over Zoom for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Read-In, weekly arts sessions at the battered women’s shelter, and a year’s integration classes for two kindergarten classes at Ashely Elementary School — at the time ranked the lowest performing elementary school in the state.