“I am what I am not yet.”

—Maxine Greene

Born in a working-class suburb of Detroit and raised in the tiny town of Hell, Michigan by a dad and grandmother displaced from Poland and a mom with roots in Quebec, I grew up exposed to a range of cultural contexts and had the good fortune of regular engagement with music, dance, theater, and visual art. Arts and culture were a multigenerational priority, and we spent our weekends visiting the region’s grand institutions and our local community performances. My siblings and I filled our home with improvised dance shows and musical acts; I covered scrap paper with sketches, poems, and eventually plays. The arts became for me a constant source of expression and refuge.

As I pursued training as a playwright, I reflected on those early moments of creative joy, and it became clear to me that sharing that excitement was intrinsic to my work. Engagement became the driving force in my artistic pursuits and in my career as an educator and designer of arts experiences and programming. As my career developed and I landed in New York City, my growing awareness of systemic injustice and inequity intensified my mission to strive for access to the arts for all people.

My plays have been produced in NYC and around the country and have been featured in several anthologies (details here). I oversaw the literary departments of a regional theater company in New Jersey and an off-off-Broadway company in the city, as well as co-directed the theatrical arm of an experimental interaction art collective.

I currently serve as the Director of Strategic Partnerships and Network Relations at Young Audiences Arts for Learning. In this role I lead the strategy and implementation of national initiatives across the Young Audiences network of 30 arts organizations around the country. Prior to this, I oversaw the school programming team at Lincoln Center, where I created a program that measured the impact of infusing the arts in underfunded New York City middle schools that had limited arts previously. As an adjunct professor at NYU, I teach a graduate course for teachers called Drama with Special Populations, which centers disability justice and creating accessible, inclusive arts classrooms for all learners. My doctoral dissertation, an arts-based narrative inquiry on the intersections between the experiences of the first teaching artists in New York City and contemporary issues in arts education and community engagement, embodies the multiple facets that make up my life and career, as an art-maker, educator, and leader in driving social change through the arts in collaboration with others.