Dramatic Writer

I do not shy away from the ways people break each other; with actions, with ignorance, with silence. My first feature-length play, Failing Evolution, takes a run at cycles of addiction and cruelty by examining the lives of two abused girls and the people who hurt them. Juxtaposing black humor against painful drama, I demand answers to questions like, "What happens when you sin to beat a sinner?" and "What happens when you don't?"

I create detailed worlds. In Shadow Puppets, five teens descend into the depths of the Midnight Woods to save their village from a soul-sucking witch. They’re cruelly tested in the trees; their preconceived notions of themselves, and their people, are shattered. Shadow dances and puppetry highlight the uncertainty of faith, free-will, and the forces that influence our lives. A unique dialect removes this story from space and time, letting it live everywhere and always.  

In my pilot episode of Beautiful Sky, Vivienne Devoue, an environmental scientist, attempts to  save the planet after a race of well-meaning aliens destroy what’s left of Earth's oxygen. Through a violet haze, we see the ravaged landscape years after the cataclysm and resulting civil war. Flashbacks, brutal in their crystal-clear hindsight, glitch in and out of the story. Beauty is constant, and irrelevant, in the very real and present struggle to simply keep breathing.

I play with heavy topics and big drama. But drama without comedy is boring. Epics aren't entertaining by default, you have to build it in. This is why Marvel's wiping the floor with DC these days. But this isn't only true of fiction, it's true of life. The world doesn't shy away from cutting sharp tension with crass humor and neither do I. One character may be gifted with biting wit, while another might be cursed with terrible luck, but levels are key, and I use them.

My stories are matters of life or death. This is partly to make the stakes high so the audience cares about the outcome; but it's more than a convenient device to me. I write to shine a light on the way things are and demand that we do better. This world is full of humor, tragedy, and magic. People wield unimaginable strength in impossible situations they should not have to endure. It is not enough to see these things and decry them. I aim to inspire people to act. 

Bold women; Bad women; Naughty, wonderful, weird, wild women. Whether through the stark realism of an upscale house in the suburbs of Chicago, or the stylized fantasy of a matriarchal village on the edge of the Midnight Woods, I write stories for the girl I once was, who would have killed for a heroine like the ones I create. That girl breathes life into the bad-ass, three-dimensional ladies I write, and sets them loose on worlds that hold up a mirror to her own.