Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation

The biggest conservation and climate-related challenges of our times require unprecedented coordination, communication, and collaboration on local, regional, and global scales. These challenges rely on a fundamental shift in values away from extraction-based systems and toward systems rooted in reciprocity and regeneration. My overall mission is to drive social action toward conservation, climate resilience, and social justice by using the performing arts to engage communities with ocean conservation issues and identify calls to action that are informed by science, policy, economics, collective action, and Indigenous wisdom and leadership. For my capstone project, I produced an immersive performance event called ResilienSEA at the Birch Aquarium on May 18, 2022. This event highlighted how climate change impacts coral reefs and the roles that we play in building climate resilience. Through a collaboration with the Birch Aquarium, EventAVision, UCSD Department of Theatre and Dance, the 100 Island Challenge team, the Sandin Lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and many more artists, scientists, and scholars, we created and engaged the local community through immersive theatre, which featured dance, music, interactive performance, spoken word, projection mapping, and audience participation. In addition to writing, producing, and directing the featured performance, I designed and implemented a community-dialogue performance model to facilitate small-group collaborative discussions around four key topics, or pillars of resilience. These pillars of resilience provided a conceptual framework through which to orient the discussions and create an opportunity for the audience to collaborate in real time to identify climate-based solutions and calls to action. Testimonials reflected the high level of engagement that guests experienced, and they demonstrated how the ResilienSEA model was effective in 1) connecting and engaging communities 2) inspiring hope, and 3) galvanizing conservation and climate action and commitments to personal actions and/or lifestyle changes. While there is still much work to be done to substantively reduce carbon emissions, this ResilienSEA event has shown that these kinds of theatrically-based community events do have the potential to inspire the ripple effects of change and collective actions that we need to build systems based in climate resilience, sustainability, environmental justice, and social responsibility. With this work as a foundation, my next steps are to build a 501 c(3) non-profit organization, website, and social media campaigns, and I intend to continue to collaborate with scientists, artists, and local communities to devise effective forms of communication, engagement, and action.

A supplemental video is attached to this report.