Greg

Written and Directed with Nicole Costantini, with Sound Design by Hunter Moody.

Watch AJ's imagination come to life — from quality cartoon time to space battles in the produce aisle! — in this short film originally produced for XPT: Experimental Puppet Theater festival at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, Georgia. Co-Directed and -Written with Nicole Costantini, with collaborators Lisa Pringle, Dewey McGeoch, Chloe Fields, Saisha Hillery, Chris Chaffee, Alex Morgan, Britnay Ferguson, Kameron Lewis, and Hunter Moody.

Co-directed with Carla Corona and Norma Jones at the 2nd Annual Futures Summit Conference, hosted by the California Community Colleges Digital Center for Innovation, Transformation and Equity.

Introducing student performers for AI: Friend or Foe?, a short one-act play about grappling with the realities and applications of generative artificial intelligence in higher education:

“In the context of college, where we ask students to aspire to their own higher learning, we can [only] ethically and effectively use such a profoundly disruptive tool to the extent we are willing to question and challenge ourselves first . . . We all have an opportune responsibility to expand our thinking, to find more room to grow as a class; to ask of, and witness, more potential and greatness from the students whose learning we aspire to serve together.”

Published in Communication Activities for the Classroom: Embodied Pedagogy Across the Communication Curriculum, Edited by Ariel Gratch, Lyndsay Michalik Gratch, and Andrea Baldwin.

“Practicing stylized, poetic expression doesn’t exactly require learning a new skill. By responding to our own experiences when writing and rehearsing, we’re instead building on approaches to live public performance we’ve been nurturing and maturing most of our lives . . . Because every peer is also a performer-participant, every peer-observed performance is also an example of expressive variety and quality others enjoy learning to emulate.”

After Co-Authors Naomi P. Bennet and N. Eda Erçin, with Co-Authors Irina Kruchinina, Johanna Middleton and Cynthia Sampson.

“The work requires us to push the boundaries . . . of communication and connection, while at once challenging us to experiment with and discover new possibilities for finding and co-creating shared meaning . . . We often did not know what to do, which was predictably productive. If we already knew, what would be the point of the show, and our process? Things like glitches and disrupted connections would occur, but we learned early on they were clearly going to be a part of any digital ecosystem in this era, and so [also] a part of the virtual environment we were creating, or outlining, for this show.”

Part of the Panel, “Body as Landscape” for the 34th Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference.

“This work identifies across the human experience the increasingly relevant trend of animated cartoons ‘escaping’ the technologically two-dimensional film, television, and tablet screens which have prominently defined the medium for generations, appearing beyond — in corporeal form — to occupy and share our same physical space in materially impactful ways, which are impossible to ignore . . . with each weekday watching I found in just 30 minutes allowed a vibrant, and visceral, and unsubdued sense of self clinging playfully but desperately to the endless expressivity of each cartoon’s perfect plasticities and possibilities; their unique and fantastical capacities to capture, create, and satiate the basic human freedoms of thought and expression.”