DIY✃ MFA

Academia is collapsing! There must be other ways to learn that don’t take us far from our communities and trap us in debt!

This is a self-directed creative practice program focusing on language, embodiment, and experimental education. My curriculum emphasizes the integration of writing, visual arts, somatic practices, and performance over a 2-3 year period.

This endeavor was inspired by the DIY PhD program offered by The School for the Ecocene.

    • Nox — Anne Carson

    • After Lorca - Jack Spicer

    • What Work Is — Philip Levine

    • Staying Alive — Vandana Shiva

    • The Muse Learns to Write — Eric Havelock

    • Towards a Poor Theater — Jerzy Grotowski

    • From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play — Victor Turner

    • On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory — Sylvia Wynter

    • Poetry Is Not a Luxury — Audre Lorde

    • Food of the Gods — Terrence McKenna

    • The Archaic Revival — Terrence McKenna

    • Meeting the Universe Halfway — Karen Barad

    • You Are Not a Gadget — Jaron Lanier

    • Story of Your Life — Ted Chiang

    • Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

    • Now is the Time to Open your Heart — Alice Walker

    • Quantum Listening — Pauline Oliveros

    • Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice — Pauline Oliveros

    • Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins

    • The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley

    • Collected Poems – Robert Lax

    • Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness — CAConrad

    • A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)Tics — CAConrad

    • The Verse for Now — Jacqueline Suskin

    • Hardly War by Don Mee Choi

    • Mercury, A Sand Book – Ariana Reines

    • Mucus in My Pineal Gland – Juliana Huxtable

    • Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light - Joy Harjo

    • Psych Murders – Stephanie Heit

    • Liberated to the Bone – Susan Raffo

    • Rituals for Climate Change – Naomi Ortiz

    • Schizophrene – Bhanu Kapil

    • Always Coming Home – Ursula Le Guin

    • Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology - Albert Goldbarth

    • The Mushroom at the End of the World — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

    • Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

    • Decolonizing Consciousness — Shilpa Ashok Pandit

    • The Psychedelic Future of the Mind — Thomas Roberts

Community Collaboration

A key component of this curriculum is connecting to the local creative eco-systems of Detroit and Northern New Mexico. These two distinct landscapes serve as my primary classrooms, each offering profound and contrasting lessons on what it means to reclaim our labor and relationship to earth. Both Detroit and Northern New Mexico are holy grounds for alternative world-building because they are both zones of intense systemic extraction. Detroit was the birthplace of the assembly line — where the human body was first mechanized for capitalist profit. New Mexico is the crucible of the nuclear age — where the raw elements of the earth were weaponized to invent total annihilation. Like Detroit, weird people building weird things are drawn to New Mexico. These places share a deep, perhaps unexpected kinship: people who do not wait for institutional permission to build new realities and decompose what is not working.

Mentors/Teachers:

Project Collaborations:

  • Acting for Tawd Dorenfeld’s movie SNDS, an autistic horror film

  • Sound tech for the Hinterlands’ performance Sunset, a cyber lamentation

  • Dancing for Quality Cinema Band’s new album

  • Bridget of the AWE Society taught me how to Risograph print so I could gift a dear friend a poster honoring the friendship of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax

My teaching + facilitation:

Archive of Art Experienced

Classes/workshops attended:

  • Pattern Recognition and Creativity with Conner Darling (February 2026)

  • Alexander Technique with Movement Research (February 2026)

  • Klein Technique™ with Movement Research (February 2026)

  • Feldenkrais® with Movement Research (February 2026)

  • Winter 2026 Intensive Training with Shua Group focused on releasing techniques and touch

  • Theatre of the Oppressed Exploration of Carcerality and Abolition with Cydney Heed (March 2026)

  • Poetics (of performance) + Voice, Body, Song with the Hinterlands (April + May 2026)

  • I’M NOT HERE RIGHT NOW - Working group and Investigative Performance Project with Addie Ulrey on the places inside us that technology is changing (Summer 2026)

Why

I’m most interested in how language animates and transforms the body, world around us, and consciousness. How is it that words can be both medicine and prison? A tool for expression and suppression? Why are we the only species on this planet that writes?

The invention of the written word is relatively recent. For tens of thousands of years, words lived only in the body through thought turned to sound. This movement from the body to the page marks a profound shift in how humans relate to reality. Ideas could travel vast distances, but oral traditions were lost.

Now, in the age of artificial intelligence, with the invention of large language models, every word ever written down forms the vast soup from which we’re slurping the future. We’ve created machines that process language without lived experience.

Can we integrate embodied speech, written thought, and computational language? Who knows. But we can explore the responsibility language gives us.

SCRAPBOOK