 I had always been very interested and passionate about social justice and theater and performing, of course, but I didn't realize that I was until I was in a place where it wasn't. I grew up in the LA area, Riverside County, didn't realize how different it was from the rest of the world until I got to the Pacific Northwest, and I went to grad school at the University of Oregon. So I got out of California and realized, oh, things aren't as diverse, and issues around social justice were part of my daily life growing up, and it was just there. You talked about things, you were open about questions, and there were actually diverse people there to talk to about certain issues, and I didn't realize how privileged I was to have that at the time, and issues around all the things that social justice could be around, gender, race, religion even, and so it became a focus of study for me. My master's degree, my emphasis concentration was on multicultural theater. Theater for Youth was also a concentration of mine, and social justice and kids go together really well, and theater and social justice and kids is an awesome mix, and so I got really turned on and passionate, and when I was pursuing my doctorate that was a huge time for me to learn all about the theater theory side of things that you don't cover in your undergraduate, where you're having a good time, and I got really interested in Freire, Freire's work, the pedagogy of the oppressed, and then turned on to Augusto Boal, who actually came for a visit to my university, and it was one of those life-changing couple of days. Lots of other practitioners, bell hooks, huge influence on this marriage of pedagogy and social justice and the arts, integrating the arts, and I just happened to specifically be in theater, which is great because to be a theater person, you actually have to have some proficiency in each of the arts, so I've really enjoyed doing arts integration with the social justice themes and working with young people of all ages from kindergarten through college, so that's kind of how it started. I spent five years between the masters and the PhD touring the country with the Missoula Children's Theater and seeing different parts of this country that I didn't know existed. We would be in a Salt Lake suburb one week that just really pouring money into this project and then we would be at the reservation the next week, and so it was an incredible learning curve for how theater is such a powerful tool with young people to get them actually thinking about things outside themselves, and that's really the first step in social justice work.