Baker Artist Portfolios

"I write stories that don't behave.  They might start as memoir, and then become monologue, and then swell into music, and often end up onstage as theater. I’m drawn to the places where performance becomes a way to tell the truth. My creative practice lives in intersections just like me:  journalism and folklore, confession and critique, Black women’s interior lives and the public myths built around our bodies, our cities, our families. I work across forms because life does. I write plays, memoir, essays, and narrative fragments. You can find me in spaces built for spectacle and in spaces built for listening, looking for the answers and usually finding 10,000 new questions. You can find me in big groups, in small groups, in community rooms, at festivals, on big and small stages, and inside conversations. I live for the moment when people in a room shift together. Ultimately, I’m interested in capturing what people do when their story changes and their narratives refuse to be neatly contained."  

--Petula Caesar

Petula Caesar is a Baltimore-based writer and performance storyteller whose work transforms intimate moments into expansive conversations about Black life, memory, identity, and the emotional architecture of how we live together. Working across memoir, theater, poetry, and spoken performance, her practice asks audiences to look more closely until ordinary life becomes impossible to ignore.