I was raised on Blair Mountain, in the Southern coalfields of West Virginia.(the literal MTN where the word “redneck” came from! look it up!) As a coal-miner's daughter, I have experienced first-hand the importance of community, tenderness, and fair labor conditions. These values are the basis of my practice.

As a Director, I get to show humanity in the beautiful and ferocious way in which I understand it. I get to create work which is bold, and romantic, and challenging. I get to provide the freedom and reward of discipline for my team, while creating experiences which reconnect audiences to their bodies.

My driving question at this stage of my career is:

“How can I use the resonant capacity of bodies on stage to reconnect audiences to their own physical presence, disrupting the meta-induced digital trance?”

A specific application of this occurs in my close work with the performance and perception of femininity on stage. How can the female presenting body be specifically utilized as a tool to disrupt not only a digital trance, but a trancelike positional viewership and objectification of actors? In my exploration of this charge, I find myself heavily drawn to horror plays, plays featuring female characters in combat, or plays which otherwise require intense physical components (like sports). I am fascinated by the capacity of staged violence to disrupt the distance which streaming and screens have allowed people to assume exists between art and themselves. With high imagination, every aspect of staged performance can contribute to disruption this way. Using Artaud’s ideas of Cruelty and Bogart’s philosophies of resonance, the theatre I make forces audiences back into their bodies, using make-believe to reconnect with what is real.

Montani means Mountaineer, and Mountaineers are Always Free. So, for me, MONTANI means freedom, through art and expression.