Artist Statement

I form participatory poetic enchantments through performing objects/puppetry, site-specific installations, and writing. Whether on the stage, in an endangered forest or on brutalized soils, I invite multi-vocal community participation into my artistic process and vision.

My Russian upbringing informs my sense of animacy of the living world. The Slavic poetry, animated films and fairytales that cradled me shape my perception of how the more-than-human earth speaks, feels, and dreams, even as these languages remain unknowable and immeasurable. Animacy becomes my political refusal of racial-colonial hierarchies of human domination that have rendered the speaking earth mute.

In my practice, all is haunted, enchanted, and interwoven. Rather than solid representations, performing objects become porous invocations that awaken encounters between earth, flesh, memories, histories, and dreamings. 

I refuse disposability of land, people, and material. By deeply researching each layer of a work, I strive to attend to the multiplicities of relationships and histories that are held within each material and place. This includes weaving new relationships that endure over time across communities, boundaries and chasms of trauma. 

My life-long chronically-ill/disabled embodiment grounds my practice in disability culture values and wisdom. Within both people and land, healing does not mean curing. My work ruptures dreams of cures and restoration that pretend that the violence enacted on people and land is erasable. I refuse hierarchies of intelligence and worth, and a pace irreconcilable with embodied life. I embrace the fractures of memory, brokenness, and the courage to be with what is.