Film & Web

Born in Scotland to a doctor and a theologian, I grew up in Newtown, Sydney, and started writing and putting on plays as soon as I could write. I am drawn to the immediacy of theatre and the fact that all you really need is a good story with a good performer. Being an avid expressionist painter, visual storytelling has also always drawn me in, and I guess that's where all my drives combined into storytelling for the screen. It just tends to be a lot more expensive than the stage and so much easier to stuff up. 

While all of my plays have found a home on a stage, I spent most of my 30s in Los Angeles writing screenplays, some of which got to dizzying heights of years-long international development, only to be re-optioned then shelved by producers. A decade on and I saw the same people who had been in LA a decade longer than me going to the same coffee shop with the same laptop but with a different face - a wounded hope, a tiring belief in "the dream", a thin veneer of being okay. 

Stuff it, I thought. I won't die on the sword of art. I sublet my apartment and took off to Hawaii to become a real estate agent. I remember the exact moment I realised I had given up one game of roulette for another. It was not lost on me either that I was pouring most of my energy into self-producing a podcast about art and culture in Hawaii rather than selling houses. 

Covid conveniently hit while I was pondering the chaos of choice, and I took the last flight back to Sydney. I knew I didn't want to do real estate, and I knew I had 15 years of experience in arts & entertainment in NYC & LA. 

So I began The Performance Workshop, initially touring Australia between lockdowns with onscreen acting workshops and working alongside actors and teachers I admired. I didn't want to work in old church halls and I didn't want to work with anyone bitter. I also didn't want to peddle "the dream". I wanted people making things.

Around the same time, I began collaborating again with artists I admire. Janneke Williamson and I created Two Blue Lines, which premiered to a full house at Sydney's Randwick Ritz in late 2022 and went on to win Best Web Series at festivals in Toronto and Chicago, while I won best comedic writing of a web-series at Webfest New Jersey. 

Then I had a baby, moved to Cronulla and The Performance Workshop changed with me. These days much of my work is with teenagers - teaching acting, filmmaking and visual arts, and creating the sort of room where young people can experiment, make things, get things wrong and discover what they're capable of. I still write, act, make films and paint. Increasingly, I don't see those things as particularly separate. 

Life is short, life is long, life can be a bright sarong. Wear it proud, bring your throng, dance and paint and do it wrong. 

On this website you will find an array of archives of my produced works for stage, screen and radio. In my garage you will find a shelf of the un-produced. The pages may gather dust, but ideas live forever. 

Also please don't look in my garage. Definitely not where the bodies are buried.