Creating
Throughout my career as a performer and theatre-maker, my creative work has consistently emerged from questions I could not answer any other way. Creating has never been decoration for me. It has always been a method of knowing. I have been drawn to questions about whose stories are preserved, what structures surround the people telling them, and what happens to the artist when the work is done and the room has moved on. These questions did not begin in a classroom. They began in rehearsal rooms, dressing rooms, and the spaces in between, where I noticed, again and again, that the systems surrounding a production were rarely designed with the actor at the center.
The work that emerges from my creative practice is rooted in years of lived experience, careful observation, and ongoing reflection. Whether creating an archival performance or designing a performer wellness curriculum, I have come to understand artistic creation as a form of inquiry, one that generates knowledge through making.
One Last Pearl, an original solo performance commissioned by National Black Theatre for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture's centennial celebration in May 2026, taught me something essential about what it means to create as a scholar-artist. The piece, which I wrote and performed, drew on verified archival materials from the personal papers of the legendary artist, activist, and public figure Pearl Bailey to construct an embodied encounter with a largely unexamined chapter of Black artistic history. What the process revealed was a kind of ethical accountability I had not encountered before. I could not simply make choices based on what felt dramatically right. Every artistic decision had to answer to the archive. Every interpretation had to remain in conversation with evidence. And yet the evidence alone could not perform. It needed a body. It needed breath. It needed presence.
Rather than portraying Pearl Bailey as a traditional biographical character, I chose to enter the performance as myself. That decision fundamentally changed my relationship to the archive. Instead of attempting to recreate another person's experience, I allowed the work to become a conversation between a contemporary artist and a historical record. My body did not stand in for hers. It stood beside her, asking what it means to inherit, interpret, and carry forward an artistic legacy. Through One Last Pearl I came to understand that artistic creation was not simply a way of expressing research. It was itself a way of producing knowledge. That realization continues to shape both my creative practice and my emerging scholarly identity. It is included in this portfolio as evidence of my capacity to conceive and develop original artistic work that operates at the intersection of performance and practice-as-research. [See Appendix: One Last Pearl]
Performing with Care is my original performer wellness curriculum, within which The Ritual of the Run serves as the first curricular framework. The curriculum is designed to help actors intentionally cultivate sustainable practices of care before, during, and after the rehearsal and performance process. Through structured reflection and drama therapy-informed practices, it provides performers with opportunities to examine their relationship to their work, cultivate language for their own experience of the process, and build practices that can support them across training and professional performance contexts.
Designing it taught me something I had not fully articulated before: that the performing arts already has elaborate systems of support, but almost none of them are organized around the actor's interior experience. Directors have dramaturgical teams. Designers have production meetings that begin weeks before actors are even cast. Stage managers coordinate the entire company. And yet the actor, whose instrument is their own body, psyche, and emotional life, is largely expected to self-manage. The stage manager belongs to the production. No one belongs to the actor.
What I came to understand through the design of Performing with Care is that actors need a care vocabulary that is portable, personal, and not dependent on any particular creative team to activate. Not a single system that works for everyone, but a menu of tools and rituals that an artist can select from, adapt, and carry across productions, roles, and circumstances. Because everything around an actor shifts throughout a production, from rehearsal to tech, from previews to the run, from closing notice to extension, the one thing that can remain constant is an internal practice of care. Something they own. Something they carry. Performing with Care is not an attempt to replace institutional responsibility. It is an attempt to ensure that an actor's capacity for care is no longer entirely dependent upon it. That is the anchor.
Although the curriculum has not yet undergone formal implementation or evaluation, its design represents an original synthesis of professional observation, clinical knowledge, and artistic experience. It is included here both as a creative artifact and as the practice-based intervention that my culminating study will inform, refine, and extend. In many ways, the curriculum marks the moment the question that had lived in my professional practice became something I could finally investigate. [See Appendix: Performing with Care]