Baker Artist Portfolios

My collaborative artworks, large and small, intimate and spectacular, are carefully cultivated experiences that take place in fields and forests, on beaches, in studios, bars, and theatres, and in your home. They use images, words, music, puppetry, movement, and objects to engage histories of madness, the ooze of oil, the migrations of animals and humans, the smells of 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.

My mission as a theatre and performance artist is to awaken senses, change perceptions, build bridges and transform relationships. I create and perform original solo and ensemble works, direct and devise theatre, and bring the tools of performance into everyday life. As an artist and educator, researcher of theatre, performance, and somatic practice, I am dedicated to crossing disciplinary and cultural boundaries, and to enaging social and environmental justice in my life and work. Process is as important as product, and many of my original works begin with a personal or a social problem, and a lot of questions. Sometimes questions are a central part of the performance. 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. 
 
My artistic and scholarly practice has addressed historical and individual traumas including the Holocaust, violence against women, and depression, anxiety and psychosis. My current and ongoing project, Vital Matters, focuses on our relationship to the natural world and climate change, appproaching these complex realities through both intimate one-on-one engagement and community-oriented performances, rituals, events, and educational programming. Under Covid restrictions, I became a co-instigator for neighborhood participatory events and art works that bring ritual, play, music, joy and contemplation to my tiny, immediate Baltimore community of Sabina-Mattfeldt during the most isolating period of the pandemic. As a result I have begun to see neighborhood as central to community and to art-making in new ways.

For details about projects and collaborators, my history, background and training, and my work as an educator, please see my attached CV, and/or the project descriptions below.