My current work explores storytelling as an act of memory, failure, and survival, how narratives are shaped not by mastery, but by what resists control, resolution, or certainty.
I am developing a new body of research grounded in archival exploration at the Harry Ransom Center, where I examine how filmmakers, screenwriters, and producers have used cinema as a tool for personal mythmaking and self-interrogation. Drawing from production archives, drafts, correspondence, and ephemera, this work considers how stories evolve through revision, constraint, and collapse and how failure itself becomes a generative creative force.
Running parallel to this archival research is my ongoing project on failure as form. Through teaching, essays, and performance, I investigate failure with my class "The Kobayashi Maru, or The Art of Failing" at St. Edward's Univeristy, and my lab "Fail Better: The Theatre of Failure at a2ru’s Creative Futures Conference" not as an endpoint, but as a methodology: a way of making space for vulnerability, ethical risk, and emotional truth. This inquiry shapes both my pedagogy and my creative practice, informing new theatrical structures, fractured narratives, and experimental modes of audience engagement.
The Theatre of Failure Lab: Speculative Performance and the Art of the Possible at a2ru’s Creative Futures Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2025.
In my recent essays on contemporary cinema, including work on violence as rhetoric in the John Wick films, the work of John Williams as the Unseen Narrator of Modern Cinema, and Aca-Feminism: Why Pitch Perfect Is An Important Feminist Story of a Generation I examine how popular genres carry unexpected emotional weight, moral codes, and rhetorical power. These pieces treat film not simply as entertainment, but as modern myth: a place where grief, devotion, violence, faith, and love are staged in heightened, often surprising ways.
My latest play, Aftercare, or The Holistic Phenomenology In The Heart of The Hotel Chelsea, centers on a couple navigating life in the shadow of ALS. The work resists sentimentality, focusing instead on intimacy, time, and the quiet negotiations of care, humor, and fear. My short screenplay Teenagers Laying on the Floor of the IKEA Showroom is, well, what it sounds like. As with much of my writing, these two works ask how people love one another when the future is uncertain, and how storytelling can hold space for what cannot be fixed.
Across mediums archival research, criticism, teaching, and performance, my work is driven by a belief that stories matter most when they admit fragility, embrace imperfection, and allow failure to remain visible. I am interested in forms that bend, crack, and adapt, creating room for audiences to recognize themselves inside the unfinished.