Candidacy Statement
My doctoral journey in Educational Theatre at NYU Steinhardt began with a question that has been living inside me for decades. As a Tony Award-nominated actress, licensed creative arts therapist, registered drama therapist, and performing arts educator working across higher education and community contexts, I have spent the better part of my career navigating two worlds that rarely speak to one another: the world of high-stakes professional performance and the world of clinical care. From both vantage points, I encountered the same gap. As a performer, training environments taught me how to inhabit a character, sustain a role through eight shows a week, and meet the demands of the craft at the highest level, but never how to care for the person doing all of that work. As a clinician, I sat with artists whose exhaustion, burnout, and disconnection from self were the accumulated cost of systems that had never asked that question either.
That gap, between performance and personhood, is where this doctoral work lives.
I entered the EdD program in Educational Theatre for Colleges and Communities at NYU Steinhardt in 2025. What drew me to Educational Theatre was its capacity to sit at the intersection of artistic practice, pedagogy, and community. It reaches beyond what theatre can produce, toward what theatre can do in service of human development, for learning, for identity, for social transformation, and for the people inside the work. That framing resonated deeply with everything I had already been doing across my career as a performer, clinician, and educator, and it gave me the disciplinary language and scholarly home I had been looking for.
What the EdD program gave me was something I did not fully have before: the scholarly language, the methodological tools, and the institutional positioning to do something about the gap I had been witnessing and personally navigating. Not as an actor saying the industry needs to change. But as a researcher who can demonstrate why, an educator who can embed that change into training environments, and a clinician who can hold the people navigating it in the meantime.
The phenomenon at the center of my work is the relationship between performer well-being and the structures of actor training. Specifically, I am interested in how institutional cultures, pedagogical choices, and rehearsal environments shape how actors understand, narrate, and sustain themselves throughout the arc of training and performance.
My current working research question, which continues to develop as I deepen my engagement with the literature and my own practice, asks: how do actors in higher education training programs describe and make meaning of their well-being across rehearsal and performance processes?
This portfolio traces the scholarly, artistic, and clinical journey that brought me to that question. It represents my developing competency across the six standards outlined in the New York State Learning Standards for the Arts, reflects my engagement with arts-based research and practice-led inquiry, and provides an overview of the culminating study I am preparing to formally propose. More than a collection of work, it is an argument: that the well-being of performing artists is not peripheral to artistic excellence. It is foundational to it.