I tell character-driven stories from the margins as a writer and filmmaker. My own experience has given me insight into many different worlds: I am a queer transmasculine survivor of sexual assault. In January 2016, my fiancé died suddenly of a heart attack; following this, I went to inpatient rehab for drug and alcohol recovery, and from there lived in a halfway house for six months. I now have nearly eight years sober and stay in continual community with other addicts and alcoholics.
These experiences have taught me the life-saving power of connection, which now forms the heart of all my work. My work centers around grief, class, queerness, restorative justice, and healing. I explore these topics through community-embedded processes of my own making: I have brought together all-trans readings of my plays and screenplays, and devised workshop processes for my play rain falls special on me that engaged directly with over 150 people experiencing houselessness in Austin, Texas, toured resource centers, and employed community dramaturgs who lived outside. I have recently received institutional support for my community-embedded work around housing security, as the NEA-funded 2023-2024 Resident Artist with Mission First Housing Group and coLAB Arts, and the 2024-2025 Artist-in-Residence with Los Angeles County’s Pathway Home.
In all mediums, I am devoted to crafting stories and characters that offer complexity, nuance, depth, and comfort in gray areas rather than easy answers. I am interested in igniting the deep connections and profound differences that define relationship, community, family, and culture by telling personal, intimate stories about complicated people tasked with forging their own meaning. My intention is to tell messy stories that embrace the darkest parts of ourselves, but through a healing, grounded aesthetic that assures my audience that we can face these things together. Over the past several years, this has manifested as storytelling about queer and trans people, returned citizens coming home from life sentences in prison, people in addiction recovery, people discovering the joys of kink and abundant sexuality, and more.
Above all, I am inspired by stories of authenticity and people who are radically defining themselves and their worlds.