I am a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and storyteller whose creative practice spans acting, directing, writing, visual art, and immersive performance. Across different mediums, I grapple with two central questions:

How does my art bear witness to the moment I’m creating in?
Whose voices — and which narratives — is my art in service of?

Performing artists serve as cultural investigators and archivists. Our research, though often ephemeral, captures the social, political, and emotional landscapes of our time. As a performer and generative artist, my work draws on classical actor training, experimental theatre methodologies, and transmedia practices as it documents how performance traditions evolve across mediums and how the role of the actor is shifting in an era of multimedia storytelling.

Whether performing contemporary drama, Shakespeare or experimenting with immersive audio, my practice is grounded in detailed inquiry, embodied knowledge, and a commitment to pushing the edge of theatricality. Since joining UT, I’ve performed in 4 staged or virtual productions, appeared in 4 screen roles, directed 3 theatrical productions, narrated 15 audiobooks and conceived/executed an interdisciplinary arts installation in New York City.

Acting as Research | The Methodology of Performance

My acting approach is rooted in The Stanislavski Method, a system that emphasizes emotional authenticity and psychological realism. I seek to ground myself in the interior logic, lived experience, and emotional stakes of my characters. Much of my career has centered on classical acting, namely performing the works of Shakespeare, where I developed a rigorous approach to text analysis, diction, rhetoric, and physical embodiment. The demands of heightened text trained me in structure, breath control, and precision, building a technical foundation that undergirds my work in all its forms.

Performing in productions of The Oresteia, Twelfth Night, Henry V, and Othello at esteemed regional theaters like The Utah Shakespearean Festival, Denver Center and Shakespeare Theatre offered a solid framework for my research into how actors personalize and embody historical and cultural narratives across time. Subsequent work in devised theatre, voice acting and transmedia built upon this foundation, broadening my practice and deepening my inquiry into experimental forms and the role of performer across mediums.

I am a creative chameleon, an actor driven by the pursuit of total transformation. Across work in theatre, television, film, and voiceover, I remain curious about how my performance practice transforms across mediums, how the performer’s technique must adapt while maintaining its fundamental goal: creating engaging storytelling that is intellectually rigorous, emotionally resonant and responsive to the demands of a given medium.

Invisible Labor | Auditioning as an Artistic Practice

Much like lab work for the scientist, auditioning is the actor’s testing ground—our forum to experiment with and refine our craft. This research process, though often misunderstood, is integral to our practice. Each audition offers a controlled environment to test interpretations, explore emotional responses, and calibrate technique under high-pressure, time-sensitive conditions—often carried out in isolation. A “Callback” is our equivalent of advancing from the lab to Phase I clinical trials, where input is gathered from stakeholders (writers, directors, producers, etc.) and integrated into the work. Each subsequent callback moves us closer to public consumption or back to the drawing board. It is rigorous and unglamorous labor, but essential.

This research is not peripheral to our work; it is the work.

As an actor I must analyze a script, craft a character, and prepare multiple variations of a scene—often with little or no context—before presenting this labor in the hopes of scoring the opportunity to do the work. In the era of self-taped auditions—where actors record themselves and submit their work electronically—this process has become even more demanding. We are now expected to be our own directors, cinematographers, and editors, developing an entirely new technical skillset while navigating a deeply competitive field.

In my time at UT, my screen work has been seen on numerous network television and streaming platforms. My roles on Netflix’s Mindhunter, Starz’s P-Valley, and NBC’s The Blacklist were all booked from auditions filmed in my living room. Each required a delicate balance of technical precision and deep emotional vulnerability. This industry-wide shift, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has permanently altered how actors train, prepare, and create. As a result, my personal artistic practice has had to evolve, pushing me to study cinematography, Film Theory and editing to better understand how screen performances are translated to an audience. Not only has this focus on self-taping, media literacy, and digital performance techniques deepened my research, but it has strengthened my pedagogy. I’ve integrated these lessons into my teaching to ensure students are prepared for an ever-evolving industry.

Beyond Acting | Writing, Direction, and Visual Art

While performance remains central to my research, I have also written, directed and devised projects across mediums. As a dramatist, my work often interrogates concepts of identity, history and theatrical forms. Pieces like The Respectful Whore, Negrosis, and Polly, a Dumbshow for Smart People Desperate to Survive the Fallout navigate psychological fragmentation, trauma recovery and the price of ambition through a sharply theatrical lens. In 2021, I was granted a residency at Nancy Manocherian’s The Cell Theater, a new work incubator.

There, I workshopped The Respectful Whore, my adaptation of a Jean-Paul Sartre play. The Cell is considering producing the work in an upcoming season. New play development is where I rigorously test the limits of narrative form and embodied voice, while strengthening my ability to navigate scripts as an actor.

My career-long curiosity about how theatrical tradition and technology intersect has resulted in a growing body of experimental works. I have created mixed-media collage works that combine vocal performance and curated video for online platforms like YouTube (Black Fire and CoreyAllenGinsberg). My rendering of James Baldwin’s short story Sonny’s Blues, part of my Black Fires series, has garnered nearly 40,000 engagements on the platform and was included in the Apple TV+ 2022 award winning documentary Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues. In response to the shutdown of theaters during the global pandemic, I served as a lead artist on the creation of an immersive telephonic theatrical experience (Our Options Have Changed) with my theatre company, Flux Theatre Ensemble. The project grew out of a residency with The Orchard Project and at present has engaged thousands of callers. I wrote, directed, narrated and created video content for the project and while it was less visible than traditional theatre and television/film projects, the experimentation with alternative mediums challenged me to reimagine modes of communicating story and to reconsider how my role as performer/archivist might continue to evolve in the future.

I’ve devoted significant time developing my voice as a director in the past five years. In addition to helming workshops of new works for audio and virtual theatre, I directed an award-winning production of Jose Rivera’s Sonnets for an Old Century for UT, an ambitious production of Macbeth for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, where “…Allen’s compelling vision permeates every corner. I’ve never seen the ISF playing space used more completely” (The Pantograph). For my former creative home, The Great River Shakespeare Festival, I staged a transformative production of Carlyle Brown’s play The African Company Presents Richard III with “…direction that makes the powerful storytelling of the play shine” (Talkin’ Broadway). When directing, I engage with every facet of production, collaborating with designers and actors to shape dynamic stage compositions and sonic landscapes. My practice as a visual artist informs my approach to staging and theatrical composition as much as my work as an actor.

Breaking Methods | Reimagining the Interdisciplinary

The most significant evolution of my research has been experimentation with alternative modes of performance, where I have examined themes of mental health, artistic genius, and the politics of visibility. Funded in part by grants from the College of Fine Arts, I premiered Methods in Madness, an immersive interdisciplinary installation that probed the link between creativity, mental health, and the mythology of the “mad genius”—with a specific focus on Black artists such as Nina Simone, James Baldwin, and Julius Eastman, at the The Brick Theater in Brooklyn in the fall of 2024 where I was an Artist in Residence. Integrating my various practices, I built an interactive, multi-sensory experience that utilized film, audio, and interactive components to reframe “presence” and authorship as a shared act of meaning-making between artist and audience.

This exploration grew organically from my extensive work in audiobook narration, where “presence” is conveyed entirely through voice, pacing, and breath. Across more than 100 titles, my Golden Earphones Award winning narration has brought to life some of the most critically acclaimed audiobooks.

From Chuck Palaniuk of Fight Club fame and Walter Dean Myers to PEN/Jean Stein Award Winner Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah among others, my voice acting spans literary fiction, horror, satire, memoir, and poetic storytelling—all drawing from my classical training in speech, text analysis, and heightened language.

Future Research Trajectory

As cultural and technological shifts continue to transform the ways we make and interface with art, I see potential to deepen my inquiry into how “traditional” performance practices intersect with emerging technologies. In addition to continuing to act onstage, on screen and in voiceover, I intend to:

     • Expand Methods in Madness: Developing new iterations of the installation with national/international collaborators. With additional funding from the College of Fine Arts, I will create additional film and audio content for the archive.

     • Continue collaborations in classical and experimental performance, including a standing invitation to return to direct at the Great River Shakespeare Festival.

     • Further integrate transmedia storytelling into my research, specifically the use of AI in my film and digital theatre-making.

     • Conduct more cross-disciplinary research. There are plans to collaborate with UT faculty including Professor Ya’ke Smith (Filmmaker), Professor Gesel Mason (Dancer/Choreographer) and others.

Conclusion | The Actor as Scholar, Researcher, and Maker

As faculty in Theatre and Dance at UT, my research forms the foundation of my pedagogy, shaping nearly every curricular decision. To be an effective educator, staying immersed in the evolving landscape of performance is essential.

My focus remains centered on how actors, directors, and multidisciplinary artists—the chroniclers of our time—can evolve not just to meet this moment, but to shape what comes next. In the years ahead, my work will continue to explore hybrid forms and the artist’s voice in shaping audience experience across stage, screen, and digital platforms. Whether embodied live, or mediated through technology, my work remains an ongoing act of bearing witness.