Dara is a writer and advocate with a background in leadership development and education. She graduated with honors from Columbia University, completing a degree in English and Comparative Literature focused on contemporary drama. While at Columbia, she was selected for the Oxbridge Scholars Program and a theatre education internship with The 52nd Street Project. Teach for America brought her to Oklahoma, where she was a founding member of the inclusion council at CAP Tulsa and co-founded the Gay-Straight Alliance at the high school where she taught English. She also worked in operations at a nonprofit organization that identifies and connects leaders in the greater Tulsa community. Dara currently works at the Good Food Institute, where she plans and writes donor communications to inspire GFI's global community of supporters. She is a member of the Sentient Media Writers' Collective and has mentored with Magnify Mentoring and the Odyssey Mentoring Program. Dara serves on the board of DC Veg Week, an organization working to increase compassion toward animals in Washington DC.
Favorite Stories:
- Review: FUN HOME at Studio Theatre - One of my favorite musicals, performed with extra heart.
- COME FROM AWAY: In Concert at the Lincoln Memorial - A one-night-only unforgettable experience.
- BWW Review: The Orbit Initiative's Hamlet - Shakespeare over Zoom during the early pandemic.
- BWW Interview: Theatre Tulsa's Jarrod Kopp - A conversation with the executive director Tulsa's oldest nonprofit theatre.
- BWW Review: SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE at American Theatre Company - Sondheim in Tulsa.
BWW Review: HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH at Theatre Tulsa
September 16, 2018
September 16, 2018
In Hedwig and the Angry Inch, identity is stubbornly in flux, and yet the show is a testament to the beauty of living outside of and in between categories. Theatre Tulsa's production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a joyous celebration of living beyond boundaries and existing in a theatrical space. The show's metatheatrical frame invites the audience to participate as fans of the titular performer, and Hedwig serves as the narrator for her own story as she shifts between flashback and testimony. She is a self-proclaimed 'internationally ignored song stylist' whose compulsory sex change surgery has left her in a physical state that puts her somewhere in the middle of the gender binary. Hedwig's capacity for inhabiting the space between genders is connected to her skill in linking the onstage world with the world of the audience, and this quality of uncertainty that ultimately reveals authenticity is what makes her the ultimate storyteller.
BWW Review: NEWSIES at Theatre Tulsa
August 28, 2018
August 28, 2018
The musical Newsies has a score and book begging to be experienced as big, heartfelt, and lovable, with each anthem about the triumph over adversity more emphatic than the next. This demands a kind of relentless energy from the cast that could easily be lacking in a local production, but Theatre Tulsa comes through with a high-caliber performance of this exhaustingly peppy and upbeat show.
BWW Review: HEISENBERG/LUNGS at American Theatre Company
August 21, 2018
August 21, 2018
'Do you find me exhausting but captivating?' This line, from American Theatre Company's production of Heisenberg/Lungs, encapsulates the experience of seeing two striking one-act masterpieces of modern drama back-to-back. With the production of this two-part two-hander, directors Meghan Hurley and Timothy Hunter have demonstrated that Tulsa is equipped with the dramatic chops to do justice to some truly intense pieces of theatre. The plays Heisenberg and Lungs, while separated by only a brief intermission in this production, are entirely discrete works and even have different casts and directors. However, both are by written by contemporary English playwrights and tell the stories of a man and a woman who explore the nature of their relationships and their own place in the world.
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