I am passionate about transforming my own lived experiences into art that adds meaning to the world and inspiring others to do the same. I don’t have all the answers, but I have found a creative practice that has helped me to gain greater freedom from my inner annihilator and saboteur and meet allies within myself that I never knew existed.

This practice has supported me in creating provocative work, based in physical movement and raw expression, that has healed and transformed myself and others.

In the center of the labyrinth lives the wild beast,
if you look close enough, she has angels’ wings

My life has been a journey of repeatedly returning home to my body and realizing that the very experiences I have fought to escape are, in fact, my portals to freedom. My love for movement and live performance began when I was five-years old in San Diego. My dad, a career mime and solo performer, began incorporating me into his performances as his sidekick Punky the Clown.

While watching my dad, I saw how he would break open people’s hearts with no words at all—just moving his body to tell stories and create emotional connections. As I learned to perform, my dad taught me how follow my instincts, how to improvise to seize a magical moment rather than be submissive to a fixed plan, and how to convey specific ideas with my body. He taught me that the body is a tool for the soul—for letting it out and communicating with others, heart to heart.

But life had other plans. By the time I turned 12, I had developed an eating disorder and an addiction to self-harm. By 13, I was in the throes of a drug addiction. By 17, living on my own. By 18, I had hit bottom.

After getting clean, I worked as an exotic dancer for 10 years supporting myself as an actress. Although drugs were no longer an issue, I continued to find ways to dissociate from my body and my feelings. Self-harm continued; bulimia ramped up to a fever pitch. I was living a split life, and it was taking me down.

Then, one night in a club in L.A. I left my body and the world around me. I was dancing for a customer who would not stop breaking the rules. Rather than keep fending him off or having the confidence to get up and leave, I gave up and dissociated into a fantasy where I was safe. I did not even remember driving myself home.

I quit dancing.

A year later, I performed my very first solo show before a live audience: a vignette on sex work. It was only 15 minutes long, but it was like coming home. I had not ever taken a writing class. The show was not great. Maybe it was not even good. But it was the launching pad I needed to discover the work I am called to do in this world. 

Four years later, I began a two-year journey of co-writing my most personal work: Naked In Alaska: The True Story of Stripping In The Last Frontier. I wanted to tell my own story of hiding—to embody on stage all that I once shoved out of view and take audiences on the journey of how I came upon my own dark night of the soul and eventually reclaimed what has been more beautiful and precious to me than I ever could have imagined.

It was while performing Naked In Alaska for five years across the U.S., UK, and Europe, that I finally began to understand the deeper meanings and unmet longings that had fueled my drug addiction, eating disorder, and the years of compromising my values while stripping.

To date, I have written and performed six movement-based, autobiographical solo shows. I have continued to hone my craft through training in somatic practices, fitness, embodiment, creative arts, and a variety of healing modalities.

Now I realize that, for my whole life, I have been seeking, learning, or teaching others how to crack open the wildness within—that boundless creativity, vitality, and vulnerability—that many of us have frequently forgotten or kept hidden. I surely once did.

Along the way, I have adapted my artistic practice into hundreds of creative arts-based movement classes for the last ten years—mostly in New York City and Los Angeles, but also in Santa Fe, NM, Providence, RI, Valdez, AK, and over Zoom. I have worked with various art education programs teaching movement, acting, artmaking, improvisation, expressive writing, storytelling, puppetry, and more, to K-12, adult professionals, and creative aging communities. No matter the medium, in each of my classes I integrated ritual, movement, writing, and performance—summoning the soul and awakening the body. For this work, I have received teaching artist awards, grants, and magazine profiles intended to showcase my unique approach to teaching and the incredibly creative work my students were making.

When COVID struck in March 2020, however, my life came to a shocking halt. Still grieving my husband’s father and then his mother’s practically back-to-back tragic passing, I was hit with the suicide of a former lover from Alaska with whom I stayed in touch, followed by the dissolution of a project I’d invested my entire life into, and the death of our beloved dogs Marley and Lance––crescendoing into a grief-storm of two miscarriages and one failed IVF.

It was at this point that my own Soulletting began.

I fell into a dark night of the soul I didn’t know how I would escape. A dark world in which I felt trapped. Eventually, I realized that the only way out would be to face, confront, and be stripped of my old identities and ways of being that were no longer working for me, and to start again from emptiness. It was here in this dark muck world, through working deeply with my somatic therapist, a daily writing and drawing practice, embodiment work, meditation, and dream-capturing, that the ground dropped out of my creative process, and I discovered a depth for working with inner experience that I had never known. Slowly, I began to uncover approaches that helped me heal, awaken, and reclaim my creative life.

Now I hope to share this process with you. The word “Soulletting” came to me as a whisper in a dream. I did not know at first what it meant. Over time I realized that to Soullet is to let our Souls express themselves wildly: to breathe, move, create, and roar so that they resonate in our own depths—and in the Soul-depths of others—in this one precious life.

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