Creative

Theater - Directorial





The Yes-Sayer / The No-Sayer (2023)
by Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill 

With Rebecca Stewart; Holden Chapel, Harvard University

Methusalem: oder der ewige Bürger (2023)
 by Yvan Goll 

Deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik, Portland State University

















Hurricane Season(2022)
by Elaine Chen & Team 

Collab24 Devised Theater Festival, online

















Emilia Galotti (2019) 
by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 

Theatre Threshold, California State University, Long Beach







Der zerbrochne Krug
  (2022)
by Heinrich von Kleist 

Deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik, Portland State University

Dantons Tod (2019) 
by Georg Büchner
adapted by Elaine Chen and Jeffery L. High

With Jeffrey L. High;Players Theater, California State University, Long Beach



Criminal Lost3 (2017)
by Elaine Chen and Jeffrey L. High 

With Jeffrey L. High; Players Theatre, California State University, Long Beach













Outlaw Brecht (2016)
by Elaine Chen and Rebecca Stewart
with music by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Multicultural Center, California State University, Long Beach



Creative

Theater - Dramaturgical




Internship - Sommergäste by Maxim Gorki  (2019)
Director: Evgeny Titov, Dramaturg: Janine Ortiz
Salzburger Festspiele; Salzburg, Austria

Internship - Dramaturgy (2019)
Head Dramaturg: Theresa Taudes
Schauspielhaus Salzburg; Salzburg, Austria

Internship - The Shakespeare Institute (2018)
Director: Louis Fantasia
The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles; Los Angeles, California

Dramaturgy - Deutsche Hörer! Radio Addresses by Thomas Mann (2018)
Performed by Eric Braeden 
Translation & Adaptation  with Jeffrey L. High
Villa Aurora; Pacific Palisades, California

Creative Director - New Play Festival - Event A (2018)
Theatre Threshold; California State University, Long Beach

Post-Show Symposium - We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915 by Jackie Sibblies Drury (2018)
Directed by Chris Anthony 
California Repertory Company & the CSULB German Club; California State University, Long Beach

Assistantship - Dramatic Reading of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (2018)
Director: Louis Fantasia
The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles; City Hall, Los Angeles, California

Seminar Participant- Schillertage Festival (2017)
“Lügen (Oder So)” with Tobias Rausch & “Ist alle Kunst politisch?” with Akin Sipal 
Nationaltheater Mannheim; Mannheim, FRG

Assistant Director to Robert Pienz (2017)
On Der Theatermacher by Thomas Bernhard 
Schauspielhaus Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

Internship -Dramaturgy(2017)
Head Dramaturg: Theresa Taudes 
Schauspielhaus Salzburg; Salzburg, Austria 

Internship: Dramaturgy, PR & Marketing (2015 – 2016)
Dramaturgy: Eva Wagner, PR & Marketing: Caroline Auchter
Kevin O’Day Ballet, Nationaltheater Mannheim; Mannheim, FRG

Creative

Poetry




Red Dress

“A yearning for ofness / A flutter of wants / A plea for downcast eyes / for squirrelish glances / fingerling affections...”
Clarity - Bliss

“Not sandalwood or candle wax / Hotmolded to your palms / But embers in the spine / And resting on your brow...”




Kleist in Bed

“He smoked in bed and wrote on a wooden slate / brown blue coffee ink tobacco, / His spirit flew faster than his broken hands / And formed stone towers on the banks of cognition...”


Siegfried in Flight

“Dream of swiftness / Of flashing across the vault above like any heavenly body / Of shaming the oaks below with the spectacle of a hazy, black train / Of sensing the lifetimes passing each time I, blinking, form the world anew...”

Creative

Audio / Visual


tiny love (short film, with Anna Hennigan)



I created this film with the help of a good friend. Inspired by my dissertation topic and recent work I had been doing observing freshwater polyps, we spent an evening capturing video of items (and body parts) in my room with a USB microscope. I stitched the video together and composed some music for it. tiny love is a love letter to the microscopic world that sustains our own.




Methusalem (2023) - Dream Sequence



For a production of  Yvan Goll’s Methusalem: oder der ewige Bürger, I worked with students to record a dream sequence that occurs near the beginning of the play.




A Sonic Stroll through the Avian Umwelten of Massachusetts (work in progress)
https://sonicmaps.xyz/player/?p=1081



This project consists of five imaginative interventions, inspired by  Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll’s concept of animal Umwelten (environments), into the lives of the birds who live on the Harvard Campus. For each text, I take the unique sensoria of a specific bird into consideration and develop narratives intended to interface between human and animal worlds of perception.





Hurricane Season (2022)



This is a short film co-produced in 24 hours with the Summer Squall team for the Collab24 Devised Theater Festival (2022).

Creative

Mixed Media


Design for a Multi-Media, Multi-Species Theater of the Future
[Images & script forthcoming]

For a seminar on immersive experiences, I developed a plan for a theater designed to bring human and animal “spectators” into a single space through a variety of virtual interfaces. Touch screens, interactive audio / visual installations, and sensors in public and natural spaces, as well as inside of the theater, would allow human and animal actors not only to engage with live performances on their own sensorial terms, but also to shape certain pre-determined variables of spectacle. I also composed a part of a libretto for an opera entitled Anguilla Anguilla, about a woman who falls in love with an eel; this piece was designed to be unperformable except on a stage outfitted with the virtual interfaces described above.




Obituaries for Dead Insects
[Images & prose forthcoming[]

Over two years or more, in an attempt to cultivate attention to and empathy for the small souls around me, I photographed dead insects that I happened to find and composed short prose texts in commemoration of their lives. The forms varied, from obituaries to online dating profiles to murder mysteries, but all approached the insect from an grotesquely anthropomorphic perspective that (I hoped) cast the uniqueness of insect life into relief through its very inappropriateness. 




Website for Alexander von Humboldt’s “Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse”
https://physiognomikdergewaechse.wordpress.com/


While reading “Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse,” I created a website that paired images of the 16 plant forms that Humboldt argued could be found in all of nature with his explanations.