Baker Artist Portfolios

"I write stories that don't behave: stories that sometimes start as memoir, and then become monologue, and then swell into music, and sometimes end up onstage as theater. I’m drawn to the places where performance becomes a way to tell the truth. PERIOD. My creative practice lives in the overlap:  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. I perform in spaces built for spectacle and in spaces built for listening. You can find me in big groups, in small groups, in community rooms, at festivals, on big and small stages, and inside conversations that are praise and worship and group therapy at the same time.  Sometimes I direct and produce because vision requires infrastructure, and because I care about what the audience experiences. 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 interdisciplinary artist (writer, playwright, performer, and director) creating narrative performance that blends theater, spoken storytelling, music-driven spectacle, and civic memory. Her work uses humor, intimacy, and cultural critique to explore Black women’s interior lives, the nature of survival in difficult conditions, and the emotional architecture of Baltimore itself. Rooted in literary craft and expanded through embodied performance, Caesar’s practice moves between page and stage: from award winning memoir and journalism to live storytelling and fully produced theatrical works. She has performed at Artscape, Stoop Storytelling, and the Baltimore Book Festival, and has served as a creative producer and director  for large-scale performance arts experiences including Funktopia and Rock Opera 101, a series selected for The Kennedy Center’s Arts Across America virtual stage. Across mediums, she creates art that uses narrative as both cultural record and communal repair.