COA Alumni

15

Austin, TX

Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Texas at Austin

Currently I spend my days teaching undergraduate students various forms of theatre history/theory/practice, grading essays and preparing guest lectures for classes. I mostly teach students from rural Texas (UT has a system where the top 10% of their high school automatically get in) so trust me when I tell you it’s a culture shock compared to the students at COA.

It’s definitely a challenge to work with students that are so incredibly focused on the marks they get that they don’t really care about their learning. The students I TAd for at COA definitely cared about their grades, but they really had an investment in learning for their own development. We have also had some really complicated conversations about diversity, and what it means to be exposed to views that you don’t agree with. In the current political climate, this is no easy task. But so far the feedback has been really positive from the lectures I have given (on Hispanic Theatre, Theatre & War and Indian & Sanskrit Performance.) Several of them had never seen a play before, let alone think about theatre outside of the U.S. So it feels very much worthwhile.

I also really, really enjoy learning from my fellow grad students–They’re brilliant.  

My actual Master’s research is very much a product of my time at COA: inspired by the brilliant Jodi Baker, but also nurtured by classes with so, so many other faculty members I am looking at the connections between theory and practice in comedic performance. I’m using a rather rigorous study of representation, historical memory and trauma studies and then creating solo performances that consider these complicated, painful and personal subjects through comedic performance. It all started with a class called The Science of Comedy, and the realization that to do fine comedy work you really need to get your audience to trust you. If you work hard at your craft, and if you’re not bigoted, there’s tons of places you can go to from that place of trust. My case study is the Guatemalan Internal Armed Conflict and Genocide, which is rooted in my family and contemporary Guatemalan society.

Also, on the side, I tutor high school students online in Environmental Systems and Societies. So I get to use the few science classes I took at COA as well.

I’m involved with a few student organizations on campus, on Human Rights and Justice, and I’m helping organize a theatre workshop with a Guatemalan Theatre of the Oppressed troupe for a Latin American Students conference that’s happening here in march.

A lot of my work is really focused on others, and my research.

Because I spend so much time with other people, a lot of the projects I end up being involved with are personal—I’ve been knitting a pretty intensely large woolen scarf because I miss Maine (though often it’s quite literally too hot to knit) and I cook more than I ever did at COA, I miss TAB food!

I´m in my first year at The University of Texas at Austin.

Expected 2019

Masters of Fine Arts in Performance as Public Practice

“The United Nations: A Creative Investigation” I was one of the UN-Environmental Policy obsessed students when I was at COA. But I also spent a lot of time considering how I could combine environmental policy with other things I was passionate about. The first significant result of those experiments was my internship: see below. The second, my senior project. Grounded on attending four different UN negotiation sessions, months of research and interviews and interning at the UN, I decided to write a play that explored my own frustrations with the mechanics of the conversations at these conferences. What they include, exclude, and where they fail. I presented it at two staged readings on campus, and I’m still working on pitching it to theatres to see where it may premiere.

Graphic Design and Civil Society Liaison Intern – Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), Rome, Italy. From the moment I was offered a position as an intern at the FAO on May 137h, 2013, I’ve always said I would have never gotten quite literally my dream internship at the time had I not gone to COA. Long story short, I was trying hard to combine graphic design and environmental policy. I designed four infographics (using content that my peers and I wrote) on various treaties and structures of the United Nations. I hung them up on my website, and sent them to a PhD student that I thought might be interested in it. She made some suggestions for edits and then sent them to people she knew (Nora McKeon, Olivier de Schutter’s team, and people at the FAO.) After she sent that e-mail and copied me, I was offered a position at the FAO. When they realized that I wasn’t a college graduate (this was towards the end of my second year) they offered to bring me in as an intern, and I immediately said yes! Those were likely the most stressful, rewarding and exciting five months of my life up until then. I learnt loads (and my friends got to visit with a class that was being taught at COA that same trimester.) And it was after that internship that I realized my place was not in political activism, but in seriously crafted and engaged art.

I don’t know that I think with phrases like ‘the human ecology of’ nowadays, but the four years I spent as a student, and my year working for Admissions as staff have really changed the way I do quite about everything. Intellectually, human ecology lets you ask really interesting (“What if we staged the UN on a stage and messed with its configuration scene by scene?”) or practical (“What if the way we currently think art and activism should be is just bad art?”) questions. Emotionally, it gives you space to consider the human elements in the work you do (be it biases, emotional attachments, indignation at the state of the world.) In practical terms, it really just becomes the way you look at yourself, what you do, and the world around you. And that changes everything. 

I spent all four winters of my time as a student in Maine. The main reason for this was that winter was when Dru Colbert taught Graphic Design 1, and after I took in her first year, I had the opportunity to be her TA every winter. Part of me sort of dreaded repeating the same assignments over and over again, but I was always really intrigued at the many different ways each student came to the same assignments. It drove a lot of points home for me in terms of artistic practice and humility, and I learned a lot from working for Dru in addition to my studies.

My absolute favorite class at COA was Printmaking Studio during the Spring of my third year. Catherine Clinger sure knows how to introduce you to the world of Printmaking without squishing your own artistic sensibility, how to carefully consider the alchemy of a group of printmakers in a small space, and how to trace some of the possibilities that your work can take in the most inspiring way.

I also loved how during my last meeting as a student with my advisor, Karen Waldron, she reminded me of how worried I was when I started out about making everything fit together. I was so worried about how to combine everything I was interested in that I didn’t even know where to start! But with guidance, patience, a little bit of confusion, and lots of hard work, I think I was able to bring my interests together quite well. 

I worked in Admissions for a year after graduating from COA. In fact, I turned down a position at the FAO for that job, so I really wanted to be there! Which is to say, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. My one recommendation for prospective students is ask the questions you may have, and trust your gut. So, so many people ‘click’ with COA because I think they find that COA embodies and fosters so many of the values, attitudes and practices that are in line with them that it almost feels like ‘they get it’ or ‘you get it.’ It’s such a peculiar school, though, that it’s a good idea to ask the questions you might have (especially if, like me, you don’t get to visit before you apply.) And I don’t mean to say you should ask what colors are the walls in the rooms—my favorite playwright said once that only mystery makes us feel alive—but make sure you ask the questions that are fundamentally important to you in terms of your education.