Since I was just an oddball kid in the smalltown Midwest, I have had an inescapable fascination with Russia, much to the bewilderment of my mothers and an entire town of down home folks more interested in the outcome of the Bears' game than that of the Romanov Dynasty. 
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But it was not until I left Lombard's meager library for the eye-opening splendor of Princeton that I finally had the opportunity to dive deep into my passion for Russian history. My freshman year introduced me to the topic that would come to shape the next decade of my life. In a course on the Soviet Gulag taught by my soon-to-be advisor-for-life Professor Deborah Kaple, I discovered within a thousand-page tome on Gulag history a single sentence that would emblazon itself on my mind. The prisoners performed a play. 
 
Since I read that line I have been hellbent on digging into the complex world that lay below the surface of those words. The world of Gulag Theater. My journey of discovery has taken me to Russia's Subarctic, where I heard the tales and met the descendants of the incredible professional Gulag theaters of the Komi Republic. 
 
I returned to Princeton armed with a trove of never-before-studied documents (photos, articles, programs, journals and memoirs), and these sources coalesced into a 200-page thesis that completely dismissed the recommended page count. Though the years after my undergraduate work was complete saw my pursuit of a career as an actor and playwright, never once did the miraculous and still-so-enigmatic story of Gulag Theater stray far from my thoughts. 
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In 2018, after a grueling four-month theater tour across the American South, I decided to dive back into that world that had captivated me for so long. I resolved to translate the most remarkable document I found while in the Russian Far North: a one-of-a-kind memoir detailing the life of one of the most incredible Gulag theaters, the first-ever theater beyond the Arctic Circle: The Music and Drama Theater of Vorkuta. 
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A year later, as a Teaching Assistant for the Princeton Global Seminar in Moscow, fate once again granted me the opportunity to return to Russia and continue my research into these miraculous theaters. In the archives of the Union of Theater Workers and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), I discovered new materials about the artists who had lit up the stage of Vorkuta's polar theater. Then, unforeseen circumstances presented the chance to travel to Siberia's eastern shore, the former Gulag capital of Magadan, and the site of the other most famous Gulag theater. There I realized just how many materials still remain untouched and unread, and how fervently I longed to discover them all!
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Amid a pandemic and catastrophic global upheaval, I completed my translation of Litinsky's memoir, and plan to pursue publication. All of these brushes with Gulag theater convinced me that it was time to devote myself wholly to uncovering the great mystery of these theaters. 
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In October 2021, I began my DPhil (PhD) course at Oxford University in the Department of Medieval & Modern Languages (Slavonic Sub-Faculty), under the supervision of Profs. Polly Jones and Dan Healey. Over the course of the last three years, amid world-altering events in Ukraine and life-altering events in my own family, I have managed to find a much deeper understanding of Stalinist dictatorship and forced labor, Soviet society and culture, and the tremendous power and responsibility of art. I look forward to one day publishing my thesis so I can share my discoveries with the world, but I also plan to create new pieces of theatermaking, narrative nonfiction and other creative works that can tell this very human story from all angles. 

Having ventured deeply into the world of professional theatermaking and the world of professional scholarship, I am even more convinced that the humanities and the performing arts need each other to survive in a world that places both on the chopping block, dismissing them as decorative, superficial, unnecessary. If the story of Gulag theater has taught me anything, it is the inviolability of our deep human need to create, to understand who we are, where we come from, and, perhaps most important of all, where our imaginations can take us from here.