sophia SKILES
Photo Credit: Teresa Horgan
In my career of over twenty five years as an actor-teacher, I have taught across a broad spectrum of institutions: private and public, urban, suburban and rural, K-12 to college, within conservatory-style environments and in the context of the liberal arts.
As an acting teacher, I bring forth my own various adaptations in my practice. These adaptations and negotiations include not just the creative and technical choices I make as a theatre artist, but also the political challenges of insisting on legitimacy and belonging in spaces that too rarely reflect the makeup of my many identities -- and those of so many others. The push and pull of assimilation towards what is perceived and coded as more legitimate work in predominantly white and resourced theater spaces versus that of legacy and emerging culturally-specific theaters yield powerful and messy complications. This messiness evokes questions of creative sovereignty and worth that I have sought to surface and reconcile throughout my entire career. I am engaged in an ongoing search for alternative spaces, or at minimum, to access existing spaces with dignity. I leverage this hard-won -- and continually evolving -- insight into the classroom, bending the profession towards much-needed systemic transformation and inclusion on behalf of both students and the field.