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Artist Experience A GRAMMY-nominated performer and freelance touring and teaching artist <br />for forty years, I’ve worked in universities, museums, theaters, schools, <br />libraries, faith communities, residences for mentally challenged adults, and <br />prisons. I am also a published researcher, archivist and scholar of <br />storytelling studies. I have produced several similar projects linking <br />storytelling performance with social justice advocacy: <br />2010: Through Independent Actors Theatre in Columbia MO, I mounted <br />"Changing Skins," interweaving transgender folktales, science, sociology and <br />personal observations about gender fluidity. It received a Catalyst Award <br />from the University of Missouri (MU) LGBTQ Resource Center. My <br />performance of the show at the 2013 National storytelling Festival was <br />reviewed in Storytelling, Self, Society. <br />2012: I premiered "Sometimes I Sing" based on Susan Glaspell’ 1916 one- <br />act play, "Trifles," in a production at MU. I published the script and an essay <br />about its provenance in an anthology about Glaspell’s work. <br />2016: I compiled "Tales from Beyond the Ban," featuring folktales from the <br />seven predominantly-Muslim countries named in the former president’s travel <br />ban, alongside snippets of oral histories from international teaching <br />assistants at MU. I’ve written about the experience in the International <br />Journal of Conflict and Reconciliation. <br />2021: I wrote a successful OCAC Artist Project grant proposal, underwriting <br />several free online events cosponsored by the UNC W omen's Center, the <br />Crisis Unit of the Chapel Hill Police Force and the Compass Center for <br />W omen and Families. The events featured a virtual screening of my <br />domestic-violence related monologue, "Sometimes I Sing." Four of the five <br />events were followed by panels of scholars, survivors and providers of direct <br />services to survivors. Our virtual audiences included the constituents of the <br />UNC W omen's Center, Moxie Scholars at UNC, the NC Department of <br />Justice, the W ake County Domestic Violence Task Force, the <br />Orange/Durham/Chatham County branch of the American Association of <br />University W omen and the general public. Last winter, I spoke about this <br />project at a conference in Toulouse, France, and again at a conference in <br />Portsmouth, NH. I'll do so again at the National Storytelling Conference in <br />July. I am currently revising an essay about that 2021 OCAC grant project for <br />an international publication. <br />2024: Commissioned by UNC Process Series director Joseph Megel, I wrote <br />"Notes from a Pandemic Pothole" for the virtual Remembrance and Renewal <br />Storytelling Festival in 2021. Now called “Lucille Says,” it's an original <br />monologue from the point of view of a white, high-school-educated female <br />café owner in a southern college town. W ritten in first person, it addresses <br />the personal toll of the pandemic, its impact on a small business and its <br />confluence with America’s racial reckoning in 2020-2021. I published the <br />script and an article about the piece in Storytelling, Self, Society. "Lucille <br />Says" makes up the second half of my retrospective show "Myth America," <br />first performed at the 2023 National Storytelling Festival. I have toured the <br />show to more intimate venues in DC, NH and W A since. "Myth America -- <br />Storytelling as Civic Engagement" is the cornerstone of my current <br />application for an Artist Support Grant from the OCAC. <br />Docusign Envelope ID: 4F5C001D-1290-48A7-83E3-BEF874E0C5BE