Art/Design

My research asks what education is fundamentally for and how it works; my creative work plays with the answers. I build experiences where people receive something that was made before they arrived and are invited to contribute something that couldn’t have existed without them, where everyone is invited to bring their own steps to our collective dance.

This work lives under the House of Inquiry and Imagination (HII), a laboratory for cultural transmission and innovation working through games, theater, and facilitated experience.

Current Projects

There’s a Dragon Wrapped Around the Honeypot — a play in development, supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council.

As the world falls apart around them, two Queer Jews turn to an old Talmudic story looking for guidance. Rabban Yohanan ben Zaqqai escaped the twice-besieged Jerusalem to keep the flame of Torah alive. Did he do the right thing? Or should he have fought harder? Prayed more? Made allegiances to save lives? Given up? In this play about making impossible choices, the audience is invited to think with Jewish and Christian ancestors who faced quandaries all too similar to our own.

The Homey Talmud — a card-based social game that puts players in conversation with one of humanity’s great archives of argument, humor, and wisdom. In development.

[Untitled TTRPG] — a tabletop role-playing system designed around the encounter between inherited culture and present imagination. The core system is designed to travel; the first game is Jewish.

Past Work (selected)

The Bagel Sisters — as a member of this Yiddish-inflected burlesque duo, produced and hosted a series of cabarets (including for Klezmer on Ice) celebrating contemporary Ashkenazi music and culture in Minneapolis. Also performed at the Twin Cities Jewish Humor Festival and at KlezKanada. An experiment in what it looks like when a living cultural tradition gets playful with itself.

Elijah — the first full production of Martin Buber only play, directed as an undergraduate thesis at Yale. An early experiment in staging the encounter between a text and a community — and, in retrospect, the beginning of this whole shindig.