About Me

I am a ninth generation South Carolinian living in Sweden via eleven years in Canada and one very special year in Paris. I hold a BA in sociology, a post-graduate diploma in workplace wellness and health promotion, and a diploma in puppet therapy. I have training and experience in theatre, performance, play, and activism (Theatre of the Oppressed, Social Presencing Theater, clown, fool, bouffon, natural voicework, primal play, new games, mask, improvisation, puppetry, and somatic movement and dance), as well as body-based interventions for health (neurodevelopmental movement therapy, trauma repatterning, violence prevention through movement, Feldenkrais, Autism Movement Therapy®, and dance for neurodegenerative disease) and connection to place (applied ecopsychology, eco art therapy, psychogeography, placemaking, and walking as artistic practice).

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I began my career working with vulnerable populations, including wish granting for terminally-ill children, theatre production with street youth, bedside companionship for hospice patients, and life skills support with adults in foster care, as well as authoring a public health theatre program for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada that was performed in thirty secondary schools in Toronto. My artwork has appeared in galleries, numerous print books, juried exhibitions, and retail stores. I am also a published songwriter and have performed in folk groups, gospel and classical choirs, and musical theatre productions. For over a decade, I facilitated expressive arts, led sacred circle and ceremony, offered Akashic Record readings and energetic clearings, taught intuitive development, and coached vocal self-expression in a modality I created called Conscious Voicework®. 

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My current work is informed by social therapeutics and performance activism as developed by the East Side Institute. I use a wide variety of performing arts, improvisation, play, and conversation to help my clients create the conditions for growth, development, and agency beyond the paradigm that modern psychology has to offer us. This means, among other things, a radical break from mainstream concepts of self (as private vs. shared, as discoverable vs. created, as fixed versus changeable).

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Working with me entails taking common divides that keep us in states of suffering, contraction,  rigidity and practicing turning them into dialectical wholes that free us to become, create, and relate in new ways. Some of these divides include: subjective experience/objective reality, inner world/outer world, self/other, oppressor/oppressed, problem/solution, thought/language, and cognition/emotion. 

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I am invested in human development and growth, community and relationship building, and the activity of being human. My work is oriented toward possibility, curiosity, agency, flexibility, creativity, imagination, and the space of shared emotionality. I relate to my clients as more than social beings who exist in fixed identities, shaped by the world around them. I also relate to my clients as historical beings who exist in this particular time, as revolutionaries able to shape the world around them. 

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I believe frameworks based in self-inventory and self-expression (including “authenticity”) place us on roads that lead to rumination, isolation, stuckness, and frustration. I am interested in co-creating environments that support development, that celebrate and appreciate non-knowing growing (doing something before we know how to do it).

We do not need more opportunities to figure out who we are and express that in the world. We need more opportunities to create new performances of self and to meet one another in a space of completion rather than competition and creation rather than presentation.

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Since 2011, I have created and facilitated fifteen different educational courses and more than seventy-five live workshops and trainings, as well as hundreds of private sessions with individuals and couples from around the globe, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Jordan, Kuwait, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States.

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Here is what some of them have said about working with me: