Baker Artist Portfolios

I am an earthling, and a lover of Earth

I am an artist

I am an educator

I am a researcher and writer

I am a healer, who goes into the dark with joy, humor, creativity, and light

I am a curator of experiences of belonging, connection, and possibility

I am a changemaker

All of these are forms of activism

All of these are expressions of my unique vitality, which is to say, that sacred energy that moves through me and motivates my unique expression in the world.

It has taken 54 years of life to begin to integrate these parts of myself, and I have spent years at a time burying one or another identity, or just sidelining it so I could focus on developing the skills of another. My resume doesn’t make sense to some people, because I have not pursued a single career, but multiple interrelated ones. Finally, I no longer feel that I have to make sense of myself or my work in other people’s terms.
 

PERFORMANCE, THE GREAT INTEGRATOR
I identify as both a performance-focused and interdisciplinary artist not only in the sense of using diverse aesthetic and artistic languages within a single project, but in the broader sense of “disciplines” – my art work is a social project, my social projects are artistically shaped and oriented, and all of them are driven by an urge to heal - myself, others, our relationships to each other, to Earth and more-than-human life. Because my own work usually involves embodiment in some way, and is grounded in the body as a revolutionary mechanism of energetic flows, and because since gaining a PhD in performance studies I can't seem to cure myself of viewing everything "as performance," performance is my home, and primary artistic identity.
 

ORIGINS
I began my professional life as both a traditional and experimental theatre-maker, performing, directing, devising and occasionally translating plays. I worked for more than 10 years in New York with Richard Schechner and his company, East Coast Artists. In the process I became a senior teacher of The Performance Workshop and Rasaboxes, which I taught for 17 years at New York University, and internationally, particularly in Brazil, where since 2002 I have developed, experimented, and built relationships personally, artistically, and professionally. In 2024, 2 colleagues and I published the first book about this work, Inside The Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises. In Baltimore, where I have lived since 2008, I have worked with Director/Choreographer Naoko Maeshiba, was a member of the original Iron Crow Theatre Company, with whom I performed in and directed various productions, and was a core artist with Submersive Productions from 2015 to 2022. The art-making I have been originating since 2012 at times embraces these theatrical traditions, and at times goes far afield into performance art, or something more difficult to categorize.  My work takes place in fields and forests, on beaches, on the street, in studios, bars, and theatres, and in your home. It uses images, words, music, puppetry, movement, and objects to engage histories of madness, the ooze of oil, the smells of Earth and ancestral memory, the tastes of home, beauty, danger, a lot of humor, and futuristic fabulations to vitalize, and to offer alternative ways of seeing, of being, and of co-creating our interdependent life on this planet.
 

MISSION, MATERIAL, AND WORK
The artistic work I originate often begins with something that is bothering me - my discomfort being in a female body in public places, the limiting definitions of "mental Illness" and the difficulty of "telling the story" of my own experiences of "madness," or the fact that people don't want to talk about climate change, when it is to me, the one universalising reality of our time. My mission as an artist is to awaken senses, broaden and deepen awareness, shift perceptions, build bridges and transform relationships. I create and perform original solo and ensemble works, direct and devise and curate theatrical performances, and bring the tools of performance into everyday life. I am dedicated to crossing disciplinary and cultural boundaries, and to engaging social and environmental justice in my life and work. Sometimes, I start with just a lot of questions. Some works, like House Calls, are built around questions. My ongoing interdisciplinary process engages ritual, theatre, interviews, performance art, contemplative practice and the social and physical sciences in order to investigate realities we take for granted, and to heal and build community around subject matter that can be alienating and divisive. Each project’s form is shaped according to its content, its place, and the skills and interests of its creators. 

Trauma and healing are at the heart of what I do, as an artist, a leader of an arts-based initiative, and a somatic movement therapist. My current and ongoing project, Vital Matters, focuses on our relationship to the natural world and climate change, approaching these complex realities through both intimate one-on-one engagement and community-oriented performances, rituals, events, and educational programming. This work has brought me into more grounded, intimate relationship with Baltimore City, and a sense of rootedness with this place and its people that I had not felt before. With my practice, The Vital Body, I am grounding myself increasingly in the body as a gorgeous locus of memory, creativity and possibility. In treating individual clients dealing with trauma, anxiety, physical injury, pain, and discomfort as a somatic movement therapist with tools informed by both science and art, it too becomes a creative and joyful process. I like to think of myself as someone who invites the light in people to shine with my own light into the dark and difficult places. There is nothing we cannot approach with joy, with humor, and with love.

As a curator and collaborator across disciplines, I bring my artistry also to weaving and welding collaborative relationships between people of diverse disciplines, points of view, capacity, and skills. The final result of what we "make" may or may not be the most important thing that happens in our collaboration. I see myself, as a multi-focused artistic force in the world, an "instigator" who zooms in and out between working with the collective, gathering as many people in to a project or a performance as possible, and working intimately one on one, exploring the ways the "self" is intersected by culture, politics, climate, and how we as individuals can intervene and "shape change" to use Octavia Butler's term, in big and small ways. Fractaling in and fractaling out.