Artist Manifesto

I believe acting is the art of embodied storytelling and reminds us what it means to be human. We spend much of our lives forgetting to pay attention—to ourselves, to one another, and to the strange experience of being alive in a body, conscious and separate from every other human being. Acting brings me back to that place of attention. It asks me to listen with the possibility of being changed, to enter another person’s circumstances through imagination and empathy, and to reveal something of what it means to live through a particular moment.

I love the possibility of surprise in acting. Good acting, to me, isn’t performed; it’s discovered. The actor releases rather than demonstrates. The craft gives us the tools to listen, imagine, embody, and reveal.  Acting requires courage—the willingness to be seen, including parts of ourselves we might ordinarily protect. We can never completely know another person’s experience, but through imagination and empathy, we can attempt to cross that distance. That hunger to connect across our separateness is at the heart of my acting.

I became a teacher because I want to create the conditions for that kind of discovery in other actors. I am standing on the shoulders of my teachers, bringing together what they gave me with my professional experience as an actor and my curiosity about how people learn and come alive. I want my students to experience the room as a place of patience, rigor, generosity, and grace—a place where failure becomes information and where they can take risks and discover what they do not yet know.

My work as an actor and teacher continually enrich each other. Teaching keeps me curious about my own practice; articulating why something works often reveals something new about my process. Watching a student discover something I could not have anticipated reminds me to remain open in my own work. And being an actor keeps me honest as a teacher. I am struggling with the same questions, taking risks, failing, discovering, and beginning again. I don't teach from a place of having arrived; I teach from a place of continuing to investigate and learn.

I believe actors need play. Before we learned to judge ourselves, many of us simply imagined, played, and followed our curiosity. Part of my work is helping actors recover that openness through consciousness, craft, and choice. I want to help actors become more attentive, curious, generous, and courageous human beings. The craft is the means; the work is the practice. The goal is not simply to make a better performance, but to become more alive.  That is what keeps me acting. And it is what keeps me teaching.