As a writer, I’ve spent the past ten years publishing in local, regional, and national magazines on topics ranging from coastal land loss, LGBTQ+ issues, art, health, and wellness. Most recently, I was the community reporter at Lafayette’s The Current, and as a freelancer, I’ve contributed to Southerly, Mic, TruthOut, and The Rumpus. I received my M.F.A. in Nonfiction from the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans and was a 2013 Working Writers’ Fellow at the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. Before establishing myself as a writer, however, I earned my BA in Theatre at Louisiana State University, where I graduated Summa Cum Laude with an honors thesis on playwriting. I volunteered for three years afterward as a theatre artist with the nonprofit, ImaginAction, helping to devise community theatre projects in conflict zones in Northern Ireland and Palestine. I've also performed as an aerialist, most recently an original performance, "Free," in a LSU's Movement Theatre Lab in Baton Rouge. Finally, as a pole performer, I’ve mentored with Niki Patino in Syracuse, NY, and Acadiana dance instructor, Rae-Lynn Cazelot, whose experience includes ballet, hip-hop, strip-tease, contemporary, and belly dance. Despite the variety of forms I’ve worked in, I’m always focused on creating emotionally evocative, character-driven artworks that tell intimate stories about love, trauma, gender, and/or sexuality. Pole dance is an unusually well-suited discipline within which to explore these subjects. Conventionally, pole performances assume a male gaze directed at a female body. My work as a transgender dancer, however, exploits this assumption to expose the contradictions inherent to all performances of gender, but especially those that don’t fall so neatly within the binary. My choreography asks audiences to reconsider what makes a body masculine or feminine, graceful or grotesque, soft or strong.