ogden shakespeare festival

I have spent much of my career moving between the worlds of performance, directing, education, and production. Founding the Ogden Shakespeare Festival gave me the opportunity to bring those experiences together and create the kind of theatre I believe in: ambitious, collaborative, accessible, and unafraid to challenge convention.

My journey began in Southern California, where I worked professionally as an actor, singer, and dancer. After making Northern Utah my home, I continued directing, performing, teaching, and producing, eventually building a theatre company of my own.

What began as Beehive Theatre Company in 2009 evolved through Junction City Theatre Company into the Ogden Shakespeare Festival, formally incorporated as a nonprofit in 2023.

Throughout that evolution, my artistic purpose has remained consistent: to create excellent theatre that invites fresh perspectives, celebrates the complexity of human experience, and makes room for voices and stories too often overlooked.

As Founder and Artistic Director, I shape OSF's artistic vision while working alongside directors, actors, designers, musicians, technicians, and educators to bring that vision to life.

My work includes season development, directing, producing, casting, creative team development, artistic mentorship, and the cultivation of community partnerships.

Building a theatre company has also demanded a willingness to work across disciplines. I understand the rehearsal room from the actor's perspective, the production from the director's chair, and the practical realities of bringing a theatrical vision to the stage.

That breadth of experience informs how I lead. I value rigorous preparation, creative risk-taking, honest collaboration, and the conviction that the strongest work emerges when artists feel both challenged and supported.

One of my deepest interests as a theatre artist is the creation of what I think of as a third space: a place beyond home and work where people come together through shared artistic purpose.

I believe the process of creating theatre should be as meaningful as the production itself.

A rehearsal room should be a place of discovery, discipline, curiosity, and trust. Artists should have permission to experiment, fail, reconsider, and surprise themselves. Excellence and inclusion are not competing values; each makes the other possible.

Through OSF, I have worked to cultivate that environment for seasoned professionals, emerging artists, students, and community participants alike.

Shakespeare remains central to my work not because his plays are untouchable monuments, but because they are extraordinarily alive.

His writing invites reinvention, interrogation, and new interpretations. I am particularly drawn to productions that challenge inherited conventions, illuminate overlooked perspectives, and bring classical language into immediate conversation with contemporary audiences.

At OSF, this philosophy has helped shape a repertoire that moves between outdoor Shakespeare, intimate theatrical productions, interdisciplinary performances, and educational programming.

 Education has always been inseparable from my artistic practice.

Through Arden Academy, OSF's educational division, I have extended my work as a director and teacher into an environment where young performers can develop their craft through classical text, movement, voice, ensemble work, and performance.

My years teaching theatre in a small private high school taught me that developing young artists requires more than teaching technique. It means building confidence, discipline, imagination, empathy, and the courage to take risks.

I bring that same philosophy to my work with adult artists.

 Founding OSF has been one of the most demanding and rewarding creative undertakings of my career. It has challenged me to think not only about individual productions, but about artistic culture, creative sustainability, and the opportunities a theatre company can create for an entire community.

Above all, it has deepened my belief that theatre is a profoundly collaborative art.

The work is never simply about what happens onstage. It is about what we make possible together.