Connecting
Connecting has become central to how I understand artistic practice because I do not experience theatre as separate from the conditions in which it is made, taught, or sustained. That understanding did not begin with doctoral study. Long before entering this program, I was observing how institutional structures, power dynamics, and questions of identity and care shaped artistic experience across my work as a performer, educator, and clinician, often in ways that went unnamed. What my doctoral education offered was not the observations themselves but the frameworks to examine them more deliberately and with greater scholarly precision. I have come to understand Connecting as the deliberate examination of how identity, power, care, leadership, and lived experience operate within artistic practice and shape the experiences of those who participate in it.
My coursework in Leadership and Social Transformation at NYU Wagner gave me a broader framework through which to examine many of the dynamics I had already encountered in artistic, educational, and clinical spaces. Through my study of liberatory leadership, systems thinking, power, and collective process, I began to consider more deliberately how environments are structured and whose needs, knowledge, and participation those structures support. In my final reflection for the course, I examined facilitation not as a neutral set of skills, but as a practice shaped by decisions about who sets an agenda, who speaks, whose knowledge is centered, and how conflict is held. I also considered systems not as abstract structures, but as conditions that are lived and felt through experiences of access, burnout, and the expectation that individuals compensate for institutional failures. These ideas resonated most directly within creative and educational spaces, where structures of power can profoundly shape artistic experience while operating beneath the surface of daily practice. [See Appendix: Leadership and Social Transformation Final Reflection]
An earlier critical essay from the same course allowed me to examine these questions through the relationship between service and transformation. Drawing on Paul Kivel's critique of service-centered models and the framework of liberatory leadership offered by Mills Gordon and Stallings, I considered the difference between responding to an immediate need and creating conditions in which people can develop greater agency. I initially explored that tension through my clinical practice, but its implications extended beyond the therapeutic relationship. I recognized the same questions in how I teach, collaborate artistically, and participate in communities: when am I using my position to determine what another person needs, and when am I creating conditions that allow them to exercise voice, choice, and ownership? These questions have become increasingly important to the way I understand leadership within artistic spaces. [See Appendix: Leadership and Social Transformation Unit 1 Essay]
That understanding of how artistic environments can be intentionally shaped is reflected in the Acting Fundamentals course I designed and taught at NYU Steinhardt for the 2025/2026 academic year. The course was grounded in foundational approaches to actor training, including Stanislavski and Uta Hagen, while also introducing students to a broader range of practitioners and traditions. My intention was not simply to teach students a collection of techniques, but to create opportunities for them to examine how those techniques function in relationship to their own developing artistic processes. The course therefore centered observation, ensemble practice, collaboration, student leadership, and ongoing reflection alongside monologue and scene work.
The Actor's Journal became one of the clearest expressions of this approach. Students were asked to document discoveries, struggles, questions, and changes in their understanding of themselves throughout the semester rather than simply report what occurred in class. I described the journal as a private rehearsal room on paper, a place where students could examine how the work was landing on them and trace their own development over time. The journal created a structure through which students could connect artistic practice to their own experiences, questions, and developing sense of themselves as artists. Students could also respond through drawings, collage, poetry, and other artistic forms when those modes more accurately represented their experience. Similarly, student-led warm-ups and Actor Theorist presentations asked students not only to learn artistic approaches, but to investigate why particular practices mattered, teach them to others, and consider how different traditions connected to their own acting processes. [See Appendix: Acting Fundamentals Syllabus]
Designing and teaching this course also required me to consider the external conditions surrounding artistic learning. An acting classroom is not culturally or institutionally neutral. The techniques we privilege, the traditions we introduce, the ways authority is distributed, and the expectations we place on students all communicate something about who and what we value. I therefore placed established Western acting traditions in conversation with texts including Black Acting Methods, Theatre of the Oppressed, and others, while also establishing explicit commitments to accessibility, mental health and wellness, and an inclusive classroom community. I also established consistent communal rituals that gave students a shared understanding of how we would enter, move through, and close our work together, including regular conversations about the demands of the day and individual access needs. One such ritual was our shared practice of offering two collective claps after each artistic offering, one acknowledging the work required to prepare and share and the other the courage required to be witnessed. Because we established a shared understanding of what the ritual represented, it allowed us to recognize each offering without creating hierarchies of audience response. These choices reflect my developing understanding that the teaching of artistic practice cannot be separated from decisions about the environment in which that practice occurs.
The relationship between these artifacts is significant to my emerging scholarship. My study of leadership and social transformation gave me language for examining systems, power, participation, and care, while my teaching required me to make concrete choices about how those values would operate within an actor-training environment. Together, they demonstrate my understanding of artistic practice as something that acquires meaning through its relationship to personal experience and the larger structures in which it takes place. Connecting requires keeping those relationships visible.