Artist Bio

Maia Morgan’s critically acclaimed plays and monologues have been produced throughout Chicago. Her work has been featured numerous times in Live Bait Theatre’s perennial Filet of Solo Fest and was selected Critic’s Choice in the Chicago Reader back to back in 2006 and 2007. A founding member of Running with Scissors, Maia appeared in their award-winning production, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon and wrote and performed in Breathing Underwater. Other work for the stage includes "Sister, Sister", a collaboration with choreographer Ann Boyd which was nominated for a Ruth Page award, and an adaptation of The Twelve Dancing Princesses for Evanston Children’s Theater. Maia has worked with About Face, Collaboraction, Redmoon, Tellin’ Tales and Powertap Productions. Recent writing projects include Chivalry and Cowboys and Invalids, for which she was awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and Ragdale.

Maia has taught poetry, creative writing, dance and theater to students from kindergarten through twelfth grade throughout the Chicago area. She has worked with special needs, autistic and deaf students, as well as in bilingual classrooms. She has designed and led professional development workshops for teachers at Lisle Junior High; with Urban Gateways at the Terra Museum in Chicago, Cleveland State University and the Project for After School Education in New York City. She has taught creative writing at a shelter for homeless women, for senior citizens, and has served as a youth mentor with Steppenwolf Theatre’s Crosstown Exchange Program and Tellin’ Tales Theater. She was selected by Urban Gateways and the Chicago Board of Education to train Chicago public school teachers in Urban Gateways’ approach to arts education. She has developed and taught classes and workshops for the Office of Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College Chicago, Evanston’s Young Artist Program, Gallery 37 and Steppenwolf and Lookingglass Theatres. Maia also spent two years as full time faculty at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. She currently leads writing and theatre workshops for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women with The Persephone Project, a program of Stillpoint Theatre Collective.

Maia graduated with a B.A. in English, cum laude, from Carleton College. 
 

Artist Statement

I teach a weekly writing and theatre workshop for women in Lake County Jail. After my students’ most recent performance, one of the jail’s ubiquitous missionaries, an apple-cheeked woman with fluffy white hair and a touch of fuchsia lipstick on her teeth, gently pulled me aside and said, “You have a wonderful calling.”

I hadn’t thought about my work that way, but her words resonated with me. They talked about that when I was growing up in Catholic school - mostly in terms of nuns and priests. A vocation, a calling, was a little voice inside; it was supposed to be the Holy Spirit guiding you to what God wanted you to do with your life.

My impulse to write does feel that way - like a small voice inside urging me to make stories and share them. Like people did a long time ago sitting around a fire, like we did a few weeks ago at Lake County Jail.

There is a wonderful quote by Martha Graham. She says, "There is a vitality, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."

I love that she says it is not our business to determine how good our own form of expression is. Rather, it is our job to find and develop our unique voice. I really do believe that is my calling: to continue to develop my own voice and inspire others to find theirs.
 

Educational Philosophy

Artmaking is worldmaking. As a child, I wrote new worlds and imagined stepping into them. I tried characters and voices and roles on for size. In my own work I continue to re-vision, imagine and dream. I believe when students, teachers, community members learn to explore their worlds in writing and performance, they become able to re-envision the worlds they inhabit and, ultimately, to recreate them.

A key component of my work with students and teachers is collaboration. Collaboration encourages students not only to draw on their own creativity, but also to share and nurture one another’s creative impulses and ideas, to negotiate and compromise. As a result of this process, students begin to explore their personal stories, to imagine and unfold new selves and to experience both the rewards and demands of working together to make art.