Major(s): Classical Civilization, Theater
What is your current role? What was your journey in arriving there?
I am currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre & New Dance at Cal Poly Pomona. After Wesleyan, I moved to New York and pursued a career in theatrical design. When I felt I had hit the limit of what I could achieve there with my skill set and network, I moved to California to attend grad school at CalArts. There I earned my M.F.A. in Scenic Design, dove deeper into the vibrant community attached to the puppetry work I had begun to explore at Wesleyan, and continued to develop my creative portfolio as a designer, object artist, prop and puppet maker for theatre, film and opera. I stayed in Los Angeles to work in these fields from 2008 until 2015, when I lucked into a Visiting Professor role in the Theatre Arts department at Duke. This position launched my second career as an educator. I retuned to California and have been at Cal Poly Pomona since 2016, starting a tenure track position there in 2018.
What do you enjoy about your work? What challenges does your industry currently face?
Whether referring to my career in theatrical design or as a professor, the part I enjoy most about my work is that it is far from monotonous. I am constantly switching modes of thinking and doing. In a given day I might be doing historical or visual research, having creative conversations with collaborators, making something with my hands, writing a grant or proposal, or doing long-term strategic thinking and leadership. The variety is itself the joy. I also enjoy some aspects of the education field that I was very much unaware of as a student, such as getting to learn about so many other fields and practices through the service work I do at my university.
Both of my fields face significant challenges at this time. Arts and Education are both constantly at risk and in need of defending in our particular capitalist society. Strains on engagement/enrollment and funding in these areas currently pose the biggest challenges. But, my colleagues in these fields also happen to be particularly self-reflective and enterprising, meaning that even in the absence of external threats, we are always seeking to improve our fields, which can be in turns thrilling and exhausting. But I do not regret joining fields where I get to hang with intensely smart, creative people pretty much all the time. That might be the most bestest part.
How did your time at Wesleyan influence your career choice/journey?
If you had told me in college that I would become a professor someday, I would have been incredulous, and maybe kind of angry. Incredulous because I was not a good student– and how could a bad student be a good professor?– and angry because there was nothing I could imagine more crushing than the idea of having to do more writing after college. I sincerely believed that the pretty awful final paper I wrote for Carla Antonaccio (whom I now wish I had reached out to when I was at Duke!) in Spring of my senior year would represent the last complete sentence I ever wrote. But the faculty in the Classical Studies department– Andy, Carla, Chris, Jim, Michael– were incredibly patient, and I hobbled through.
I think Andrew Szegedy-Maszak was an inspiration to me that I couldn’t quite comprehend at the time. I knew I would never be a scholar in the way he was, but I saw the way he integrated art with scholarship to create a beautiful life, and offered me a model to seek a career that was more interdisciplinary, bound less by category and defined more by constantly seeking enrichment and moments of beauty. In my senior year, I added a Theatre major to my Classical Civ major. By then I had spent three years deeply engrossed in the ’92 and the student theater group known then as Second Stage (this constituting a good chunk of the reason my grades in my classics courses were not so great), and I had developed enough connections to the Theater department that adding the second major seemed easy and natural.
The theater experience I gained, both formal and informal, ended up being what most directly propelled the first part of my career. The students I met and worked with were wildly creative, influenced and inspired by all parts of life and knowledge. This was where I was headed. But truly, one cannot design a play or crazy weird experimental puppet thing without knowing how to read and research that play or thing, and despite my acknowledged weaknesses in those areas at the time, I believe it was my Classics major that built up my skills of careful analysis and interpretation, which underpin my work in both design and education.
I must also acknowledge the freshman year I spent in the College of Letters as foundational (shout out to Howard Bernstein and the Educational Thought class), and the influence of the Theatre faculty (in particular Mark Sussman) who gave me reason to believe that I myself could turn my wildest dreams into physical reality on stage. I now teach my own students how to do that, too. I also write a lot, and I don’t mind it so much.
Do you have any advice for students thinking about entering your industry?
Lead the way.
Updated March 21, 2025
