Vital Matters  is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, community- and arts-based laboratory for change, based in Baltimore, MD. Our work is motivated by the climate crisis, and related social and environmental forms of injustice, and grounded in performance and somatic practices. Vital Matters events and projects bring together artists, scientists, educators, small business owners, activists and others to heal, build community, and connect diverse groups of creative problem solvers. We work locally and globally, connecting Baltimore artists and audiences to larger movements that are working towards climate and environmental justice, and sustainable ways of living on the planet. 

Events and artistic productions range from very small, intimate exchanges to large scale performances, and from direct engagement with the challenges of everyday reality, to the collaborative creation of fantastic landscapes of the imagination. Through these grounded, embodied, connected lenses, we can help envision and create a just, green, and equitable future for all. 

I am the primary organizer, curator, and artistic and executive director of all activities and projects, and assemble teams for each group or large-scale project. Several collaborators have been working with Vital Matters since 2022 or 2023. Because of my interest in bringing other artists into the conversation, I have shifted the focus of my artistry to more curatorial and educational programming during the past five years. As a producer and director, it is also important to me to pay my collaborators for their work. This has meant that one day events such as Climate Change Theatre Action, Global Water Dances, and Queer Climate Cabaret, which require minimal rehearsal time, have been more within our capacity than ensemble projects that would require a longer time commitment. I have played small artistic roles in these events, usually performing in or directing something. But I also consider that my role as curator involves the artistry of bringing artists together for a single evening of performance and shaping that evening in such a way that crafts a thought-provoking, joyful experience.

You can see the most complete representation of Vital Matters' work on our website, www.vitalmatters.net. Here is a sample of some of the kinds of things we have done, and what we are working on now.

SAMPLE EVENTS AND PROJECTS:

2021: Winter Seeds, a Climate Change Theatre Action Event: The Voxel. Baltimore actors and directors prepared readings of 6 plays by playwrights from Kenya, the U.K., New Zealand, the U.S., and Canada, interspersed with live original music by Deletta Gillespie and Jamie Gansell, tabling by The Ivy Bookshop and Gourds by Fafa. This was part of the global festival Climate Change Theatre Action, which between 2015 and 2025 commissioned 50 short plays about Climate Change from playwrights from around the world, inviting companies and individuals to share those plays as readings, productions, always with a view to taking action around climate. We had youth activists from Baltimore Beyond Plastic and Nadia Nazar, an artist and contributor to Zero Hour speak to us about their experience, and offer the audience advice. In 2023 we did a CCTA event called All Good Things Must Begin at Creative Alliance (see video in media, below).

2022: Whose Earth (Day)?, A Day of Reckoning, Celebration, and Digging in the Dirt: The Ivy Bookshop (Whose Earth (Day)? became an annual event at The Ivy Bookshop, and in subsequent years has focused on kids and families, offering musical performance and music and movement workshops). The focal point of this event was a conversation about Harriet Washington's book, A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the American Mind, with members of Baltimore Beyond Plastic, Racial Equity Scientist and author of The Black Butterfly, Dr. Lawrence Brown, and the audience. Attendees of all ages also decorated reusable shopping bags using stencils and a cyanotype process, led by Maura Dwyer. Tables were set up with information about recent environmental legislation that had and had not passed the session in Maryland, with postcards for folks to write to their representatives in state and local government thanking them for their support of climate and environment bills.  Finally, Jordan Bethea helped to launch the Ivy's plans to plant a community garden by instructing people on the collection of soil samples from the property.

2023: Global Water Dances: City Arts 2 & Surrounding neighborhood, Baltimore
Global Water Dances (www.globalwaterdances.org) is another global festival that takes place every two years. A global dance is composed with input from participants around the world, and local choreographers, dancers, and companies create original dances reflecting their relationship to their local bodies of water and watersheds. Ideally, the artistic work is tied to local activism for clean water, water rights, or similar issues. For this project, I worked with collaborators Sanahara Ama Chandra, Valeska Populoh, and Rejjia Camphor to create a participatory ritual, a procession (as our local dance), to perform the Global Dance, and invite the audience to join us for the participatory dance, which connects people to the water cycle through the universal language of dance/movement. Because of the smoke from wildfires in Canada, we had to move the event from our original location along the Patapsco River, and do most of it indoors. In 2025, we participated with a smaller GWD event in Herring Run Park.

2024: A Queer Climate Cabaret: Creative Alliance, Baltimore
We gathered over 20 artists, from Baltimore, DC, and special guest Eli Nixon from Providence, RI for this event, to perform drag, burlesque, spoken word, performance art, movement theatre, puppetry/object theatre, dance, and more. With funding from Maryland Climate Partners, we put out a call to artists and selected drag artist Hairy Poodini to create an original act based on the Maryland Climate Plan. The event was emceed by Chris Jay and Pretty Rik E, founders of Pretty Boi Drag. Tablers for the event included local climate and environmental groups, and queer craftspeople. We hosted a Drag 101 workshop with Pretty Boi Drag, and a Writing and Climate workshop with Jacob Budenz.

2025-and Current: Crossways, a Public Art Project: The 4 Main Watersheds of Baltimore City
This is our first public art project, the initial planning stage for which was funded by a Planning Grant from Maryland State Arts Council. An ambitious, long term, community-based project, Crossways will engage 4 communities at 4 sites along the 4 main watersheds of Baltimore City. Our core team of 4 artists, Sanahara Ama Chandra, Maura Dwyer, Rejjia Camphor and myself, lead workshops and shape the community engagement process through visual and performing arts practices to explore participants' connection to water, green space, and each other. Each community's process will culminate in the installation of an art work open to the public that reflects that community's identity, needs, and desires. We are currently working with residents of Gwynns Falls, a small neighborhood just west of Lower Gwynns Falls Park (Gwynns Falls Watershed), and are beginning to develop partnerships in Herring Run (Back River Watershed). Once we have completed our work with these communities, as well as those in the Jones Falls Watershed and Patapsco River Watershed, the project will culminate in ritual and performance events activating the connections between these places and their inhabitants, through a citywide celebration of water.



 

BATS!, a solo work which premiered at the Marquee Lounge, Creative Alliance, in Baltimore in 2018, is a multimedia performative contemplation of fear and madness in American culture, structured by personal experiences of psychosis, anxiety and depression. The piece was produced by Submersive Productions (with whom I was a Core Creator from 2014-2022), and features sound and video projection by Glenn Ricci, puppets, object and environment design, and puppetry by Ursula Marcum, original drawings by Chelsea Demitras and original text and songs for accordion and voice by Michele Minnick. Additional puppetry and object performance by Jess Rassp and Caitlin Bouxsein. The piece was performed for audiences of 20-28 people in the intimate space of a small bar. Michele's performance persona, Dr. M., (who, like Michele, is a doctor of philosophy), engaged audience members directly throughout the show about their experiences, moods, and sense of what is real.

Lungs, by Duncan Macmillan, directed by Michele Minnick at The Kitchen Theatre, Ithaca, NY in 2014 (where I have also directed four other plays under the artistic direction of Rachel Lampert: Julie Johnson by Wendy Hammond, Cloud Tectonics by José Rivera, The Gene Pool by Christi Stewart-Brown, and A Body of Water by Lee Blessing, which also played at Geva Theatre in Rochester). This play follows the life of a couple (She and He) from the moment they first start discussing the possibility of having a child to the end of Her life, when He is already gone. It is clear that environmental degradation and climate catastrophe are the backdrop of the lovestory. For this play, which is written without any indication of time or setting, and which involves radical shifts from one life moment to the next-for example from a heartwrenching breakup to their first reunion several years later-the Rasaboxes served as an essential framework for making quick transitions between emotional states and moments in time. There was no set for the production other than a platform. The staging was breath and movement-based, a choreography of intimacy over many years.

I've also included photos from A Body of Water, the original production at the Kitchen Theatre in 2015. This was a more conventially directed show, where the greatest challenge was figuring out how to act in a play in which dramaturgical mysteries remain unsolved by the playwright. 

Kid-Simple: A Radio Play in the Flesh by Jordan Harrison, Directed by Michele Minnick at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), 2013. Set by Greggory Schraven. Lights, sound and projections by Adam Mendelson . Costumes by Rebecca Eastman. Kid-Simple tells the story of Moll, a girl inventor who wins the school science contest with her noise machine, only to have her invention stolen by an evil shape-shifting mercenary. What follows is the fable of her adventures to save sound as we know it. The play requires over 1,000 live Foley sounds, and all actors except those playing Moll and the Narrator, to play multiple roles. We used the first week of rehearsal to do a Rasaboxes workshop, which gave us tools for creating each character, and shaping the mood of each part of the play.