Site-Specific Performance · Civic Engagement · Facilitation · Youth & Community Co-Creation

In 2023, I was hired to produce and direct the Memphis visit of A Walk With Amal, the international public art project centered around Little Amal, a 12-foot puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian refugee girl. Historic Clayborn Temple, the Orpheum Theatre, and Memphis River Parks Partnership served as anchor partners for a citywide experience that ultimately engaged more than 1,000 Memphis young people.

How could Memphis welcome Amal in a way that didn't simply present the city to her, but invited young people across Memphis to help create the story of her arrival?

Our starting point came from Historic Clayborn Temple Executive Director Anasa Troutman and her philosophy of moving “from justice to joy.” Together, we began imagining Amal's arrival not simply as a performance, but as an opportunity to explore welcome, belonging, courage, history, and what young people make possible in their communities.

Over eight months, I worked with artists, educators, community organizations, and young people across Memphis to develop the experience.

Working alongside Vahisha Hasan, I facilitated workshops reaching 1,000 young people across multiple Memphis ZIP codes. Participants explored Amal's story, shared stories about their own communities, and created small puppets representing themselves. Each young person was invited to consider what they wanted Amal to know about Memphis—and what they wanted the city to recognize about them.

We commissioned nationally acclaimed puppeteer Jeghetto to create an eight-foot puppet, Memphis Girl, who would meet Amal and become her guide through the city. Memphis Girl embodied a message shared by the young people throughout the project: Don't forget about us. We bring possibility to our communities.

The workshops didn't simply prepare children to participate in the final event. Their ideas, stories, artwork, and questions helped shape its narrative.

On October 4, 2023, approximately 300 Memphis young people, carrying the puppets they had created, joined Little Amal and Memphis Girl for a site-specific procession through downtown Memphis.

The journey began at Historic Clayborn Temple, where Memphis Girl introduced Amal to the history of the 1968 Sanitation Workers' Strike and the people who fought for dignity there.

From Clayborn, Amal, Memphis Girl, a marching band, and hundreds of young people traveled through the city to The Orpheum Theatre. There, youth from the Refugee Empowerment Program offered Amal a letter of welcome and solidarity and invited reflection on courage, migration, and belonging.

The procession continued toward the Mississippi River and Tom Lee Park, where Amal received a final gift: a Culture of Love Blanket, created by artist Tracey Zerwig Ford and students from Hutchison School. During our community workshops, young people across Memphis had written messages of welcome to Amal. Hutchison students stitched those messages together into a single object of collective care.

A thousand individual voices had become one welcome.

The project intentionally placed Amal and Memphis young people in some of the city's most visible civic spaces.

Rather than treating young people—particularly refugee, marginalized, or economically vulnerable young people—as problems to be solved, we asked the city to encounter them as storytellers, culture-makers, neighbors, and sources of possibility.

The experience connected Memphis's civil rights history with contemporary questions of migration and belonging while giving young people agency in determining how those stories would be told.

For me, directing the project meant doing more than staging a procession. It meant creating the conditions for hundreds of people and organizations to build something together—listening across communities, translating ideas into shared experiences, and allowing the people participating in the work to shape what the work ultimately became.

1,000+ young people engaged · 30+ workshops · 20+ community partners · 300+ youth in the final procession about your business here.

THE PROTEST PROJECT: HOW TO STAGE A PROTEST IN 60 MINUTES

Civic Learning · Intergenerational Dialogue · Youth Leadership · Community Storytelling

How do we help young people understand that history is not something that happened before them—but something they are actively inheriting and shaping?

In partnership with the historic Cossitt Library in Memphis, I designed How to Stage a Protest in 60 Minutes, an intergenerational documentary theatre project connecting surviving participants from the 1960 Cossitt Library sit-in with teenage artists from Lionheart Youth Theatre.

The project transformed a historic Civil Rights story into a living civic learning experience, inviting young people and elders to explore questions of activism, belonging, public space, and community responsibility.

On March 23, 1960, 23 students from LeMoyne College attempted to use the segregated Cossitt Library and Brooks Museum of Art. After being denied access and charged with trespassing, the students continued organizing through sit-ins and protests.

Their actions became part of the larger Civil Rights Movement in Memphis and contributed to the eventual desegregation of public facilities.

As Cossitt Library prepared to reopen after a major renovation, the project asked:

How can a historic civic space remember its past while inviting a new generation to shape its future?

Over a year of development, young artists and Civil Rights Movement participants engaged in a series of intergenerational creation intensives.

I facilitated a process using:

• Oral history interviews
• Story circles
• Improvisation
• Ensemble-building exercises
• Documentary theatre techniques
• Archive exploration
• Collective storytelling

Young people did not simply recreate historical events. They built relationships with the people who lived them.

Each youth ensemble partnered with an elder participant, using conversation and shared reflection to explore both the history of the protest and its relevance to contemporary questions facing Memphis.

The process asked young people to move beyond learning about activism and begin considering themselves as participants in civic life.

The heart of the project was the relationship between generations.

Young people encountered elders not as historical figures, but as neighbors and collaborators with wisdom, stories, and lived experience to share.

Elders had the opportunity to see their experiences carried forward by a new generation.

Through facilitated dialogue and artistic creation, participants explored:

• What does it mean to use your voice?
• How do communities create change?
• Who has access to public spaces?
• What responsibilities do we have to one another?

The resulting performance became a living memorial—not a monument frozen in time, but a conversation between Memphis's past, present, and future.

The final immersive performance transformed the Cossitt Library into a landscape of memory, movement, and conversation.

Audiences moved throughout the library, encountering stories of the original protests while engaging with young people's reflections on civic participation today.

The performance invited participants to consider not only what happened in 1960, but what kinds of actions and relationships are necessary to create a more connected Memphis now.

The project:

• Connected Memphis youth with Civil Rights Movement participants
• Preserved community history through oral storytelling
• Created meaningful intergenerational relationships
• Activated a historic public space as a place for dialogue and belonging
• Helped young people explore themselves as civic participants and community stewards

This project reflects my approach to facilitation: creating the conditions where people can learn from one another.

The facilitator's role is not to deliver a predetermined answer. It is to build enough trust, curiosity, and structure for people with different experiences and perspectives to enter into meaningful relationship.

Through storytelling, theatre, and shared creation, The Protest Project transformed history into a conversation—and a conversation into civic possibility.at's a product or service you'd like to show.