Trainings & Workshops
Effective practice for practical skills
This moment has tasked our communities with tough, urgent questions—prodding us into conversations many of us don’t know how to have...conversations many of us don’t want to have. Expert facilitation opens up spaces and provides tools to change that.
Well Played Creative trainings and workshops combine skills developed in the performing and expressive arts with deep understanding of belief systems and systems change. The result is interactive experiences that engage not only the intellects gathered in the room, but also felt experiences, and the creative solutions and transformation that can arise between us when we open ourselves to collaboration and experimentation.
Workshop/Training Offerings
I prefer to customize each experience to the needs and context of a particular group, but here is a menu of common themes we could use as springboards.
Team Building
Skills of Repair
Workplace Culture
Move past boring old icebreakers and into functional trust and relationship.
Rehearse concrete steps of true apologies and self regulation to be ready to handle inevitable mistakes.
Take time to assess and shape the climate of your collective environment.
Collaboration
Practice creating together and reflect on what the barriers are to doing this all the time.
Conflict Navigation
Explore the gifts and opportunities available in facing moments of interpersonal struggle.
Custom
What goals do you have for your group? What topics or challenges are you unsure of how to broach?
My Story
My facilitation work started in the classroom, when, in 2010, I temporarily stepped away from my endeavors as a theatre artist to teach in an adult literacy program at a rural community college. This work dovetailed into a position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I co-led Interactive Theatre Carolina and trained and facilitated intensively across a range of issues. In the years since, I've facilitated with UCLA's AMP! project, Cultivate Leadership, and I continue to partner with Theater Delta as a facilitator, program designer, and trainer of other facilitators.
I hold a Master of Arts in Social Change from the Graduate Theological Union’s multireligious seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry, and I'm an ordained interfaith chaplain. Pairing this study with Clinical Pastoral Education has further expanded my comprehension of systems at a macro level as well as the ways our lives can transform through engaging the spirit of big questions one-on-one. To me, change invites creativity, and creativity invites play; the work I am most interested in these days has a healthy blend of those three elements.
Recent Projects
• Improving Mentorship in the Sciences
This multi-stage project was a collaboration between UNC Chapel Hill's Biology and Biomedical Sciences Program and theatre for social change company Theater Delta to fulfill a grant from the NIH. Based on interview data, I designed a series of three two-and-a-half hour workshops to be facilitated by and delivered to faculty. Each workshop consisted of two scripted scenarios shown on video and multiple interactive elements to engage with the topics of giving and receiving feedback, navigating conflict, and creating intentional culture. After facilitating tests of the workshops myself, I trained faculty facilitators to be able to present the programs on their own.
• Conversations about Mental Health in the Military
Developed in collaboration with Moth + Flame VR, participants are immersed in an experience in which they get to practice having conversations with fellow Service members about mental health topics. I provided branching scripts for VR headsets and facilitation guides for in-person discussions to follow the headset experience.
• Community Care in the Helping Professions
This workshop was part of an annual collaboration between Theater Delta and the NC Community Transitions Institute, a retreat that provides continuing education and training for professionals involved in the complicated processes of transitioning patients from care facilities back into homes in the community. After writing and revising an original, multi-part interactive script depicting various participants and challenges within the process, I had the opportunity to facilitate the workshop in person in 2022. Participants got to interact with the characters in the scenario, practice skills, solve problems, and reflect on how to better take care of those they serve, those they work with, and themselves in the midst of demanding systems.