About me
I earned an MFA in interdisciplinary studio arts from UC Irvine in 1997, where they took a perfectly respectable writer and photographer and turned her out as a performance artist. Since then I have written and performed six full length solo shows: My Lunch with Sophia Loren & Other Stories; Starting from the Wrong Place; THREE: a risky, irreverent and curious look at the things that keep us awake at night; OUTTAKES; On Being Cool and Other Digressions; and Two Truths and a Lie. I have also co-created and performed in numerous group and collaborative projects, e.g., Lineage: Matchmaking in the Archives; Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking art as Social Practice; Hark & Woe.
As a monologist, I have performed at Highways, LACE, and UCLA, in Los Angeles; the Marsh, Luna Sea, Z Space Theatre, Venue 9, and the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as other performance venues in northern and southern California. Stepping back from the stage, for the last six years I have taken performance to the page, creating an ongoing epistolary project, Little Rambles. This is now soon to be published as a book of my prose poems and photographs entitled, Difficult Beauty: Rambles, Rants, and Intimate Digressions.
My photography, poetry and prose have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. Most recently: Kosmos, Brevity, Fourth Quarter, the Colorado Review, Rappahannock Review, Ruminate, Trivia, the Scribbler.
My lifelong practice as a psychotherapist informs my practice as a writer and artist and my practice as an artist informs my work as a psychotherapist. I have deep respect for the everyday details as an opening to the bigness of life. In both fields, psychotherapy and art, I am drawn to the importance of stories—how we tell them, what we tell, what we leave out, how we connect or disconnect, with ourselves, with others, with nature, the cosmos. As hard as it is, I am dedicated to a practice of "intimacy with all things."
Photo by Courtnay Perry