Training & Lineage

My work is shaped by more than two decades of facilitation, study, and practice across applied performing arts, somatic inquiry, developmental theory, and relational work. Deep Puppetry™, School of the Small and Imperfect, and the Relational Field Sessions and Labs grow out of these foundations, but are not reducible to any one of them.

Rather than understanding lineage as inheritance, I understand lineage as relationship: an evolving conversation with the teachers, methods, communities, and fields that have shaped my orientation toward shared agency, ethical contact, and non-dominating ways of working.

What follows is an overview of the influences that most inform the practice.

Relational & Developmental Inquiry

  • Social therapeutics: performance-based development, ensemble process, and collective world-making

  • Relational praxis and collective inquiry across artistic, somatic, and community contexts, with attention to horizontal process, distributed agency, and ethical participation

These approaches inform how I work with groups and institutions to notice how participation, responsibility, and power organize themselves in real time.

Applied Performing Arts & Aesthetic Practices

  • Theatre of the Oppressed (Jiwon Chung)

  • Social Presencing Theater (Arawana Hayashi)

  • Mask, clown, fool, and bouffon (Eric Davis, David Bridel, Misha Usov, Robyn Hambrook, Deborah Antoinette Ward)

  • Improvisation and ensemble process

  • Natural voicework (Frankie Armstrong)

These practices shape how I work with attention, presence, timing, materiality, and collective creation.

Somatic & Movement-Based Study

  • Neurodevelopmental movement and reflex integration (RMTi, MNRI®)

  • Autism Movement Therapy® (Joanne Lara)

  • Neuroscience of embodied collaboration (WiseMotion)

  • Feldenkrais and Linklater

  • Trauma-informed somatic coursework and Safe and Sound Protocol training

  • Violence prevention through movement (Kornblum)

  • Expressive movement and dance (Centre for Creative Arts Therapy)

These studies inform my orientation toward developmental pacing, embodied attention, and the relationship between sensation, safety, and ethics.

Ecological & Place-Based Study

  • Applied ecopsychology and eco-art therapy (Project NatureConnect / Michael J. Cohen)

  • Psychogeography and place-based practices

This work shapes how environment, materiality, and other-than-human presence participate in development, and how ecological interdependence becomes lived rather than conceptual.

Object-Based and Material Practices

  • Diploma in Puppet Therapy (Muñecoterapia Chile)

  • Therapeutic puppetry training (Children’s Therapy Centre)

  • Object theatre and puppetry (Gary Friedman)

These approaches inform but do not define Deep Puppetry™, which has moved into its own relational, developmental, and ethical terrain.

Earlier Professional Contexts

Before developing these practices, I worked across expressive arts, somatic education, applied theatre, community-based learning, voicework, ritual and ceremony, trauma-informed movement, hospice and health-related theatre, and programs serving at-risk populations.

These contexts shaped my commitment to practices that build capacity, widen relational imagination, and make room for more forms of life and experience to participate.

I hold a BA in Sociology from the University of Georgia and a postgraduate diploma in Health Promotion.

Why I Share This

This list is not a claim to authority or a credentialing argument. It is a map of relationships and disciplines that have influenced the clarity, rigor, and ethics of the work.

Deep Puppetry™, the School of the Small and Imperfect, and the Relational Field Sessions and Labs are living practices, continually shaped by the people in the room, the materials we meet, and the relational conditions we co-create together.