My artistic work investigates theater’s potential as a civic practice, and over the last twenty years I co-founded and co-directed three public performance ensembles – Culinary Theater, Shakespeare im Park Berlin, and the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization [UCMeP]. Between 2010 and 2014, for instance, Shakespeare im Park’s site-specific performances drew thousands of audience members to Berlin’s Görlitzer Park in order to rethink its dynamic spaces as simultaneous sites of inter-cultural and multi-lingual performance, postdramatic theater, and community-based art. My recent site-specific work in New York has been guided by analogous concerns, reimagining civic environments through contingent social encounters and the use of older and repurposed technologies. I’ve also turned to food as a theatrical medium to investigate community participation, socio-political cohabitation, and collaboration between the demos and the vegetal world. Working between social service organizations and more traditional art and performance venues, I’ve explored sandwich as a site of diasporic community connection and contestation (Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2023), coffee as a cypher for messianic query (Performance Research, 2024), and garlic as a sensory tool for examining ways the physiologies of taste and smell relate to memory, identity, fear, and different forms of bigotry (Harvard’s Mahindra Center, 2024; Invisible Dog Art Center, 2025; ifk Vienna, 2025). These projects have been featured in scholarly forums like Theatre Survey, South Atlantic Quarterly, L.M. Bogad’s Tactical Performance, and Barbara Fuchs’ Theater of Lockdown, as well as in the New York Times, London Guardian, Tagesspiegel, Berliner Zeitung, San Francisco Chronicle, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and Robert Reich’s 2013 film Inequality for All.
