Baker Artist Portfolios

"I make work where the personal becomes civic. I write stories that don't behave: stories that start as memoir, become monologue, swell into music, and land onstage as theater. I’m drawn to the places where voice becomes evidence, where humor becomes a survival skill, and 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: on stages, in community rooms, at festivals, inside conversations that feel like 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. In a moment like that laughter can cut through denial, or silence can become an agreement to stay present in a tough or a tender moment. 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 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 for large-scale live 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.