Meet Red Hot Annie
I thought I was becoming a showgirl. I was learning how to direct attention.
For a long time, the easiest way to explain me was to say that I was a burlesque performer.
It was true. It was also the part you could see.
The feathers. The rhinestones. The woman under the light asking a room full of strangers to look exactly where she wanted them to look.
What I couldn’t see yet was that I was learning something much larger.
How long a silence can last before it becomes electric.
How one person can change the temperature of a room simply by entering it differently.
How anticipation can be more powerful than spectacle.
How an audience tells you what it needs if you learn how to listen.
I thought I was becoming a showgirl.
I was learning how to direct.
And almost everything I make now grew from that education.
Before the feathers, there was theater.
I came to burlesque through theater.
I loved the invisible machinery of performance almost as much as performance itself: why someone enters when they do, what happens when an actor waits one second longer, how an audience can understand something before anyone explains it.
I performed. I directed.
Then, in 2007, I found burlesque and suddenly the walls came off.
I could invent the character.
Choose the music.
Build the costume.
Write the joke.
Control the reveal.
I didn’t have to wait for someone else to decide what role I was allowed to play.
I could make the thing.
That freedom changed my life.
Burlesque eventually took me across seven countries, but the most important thing I brought home was not a collection of costumes or credits.
It was an education in attention.
ABC7 Chicago / Localish later told part of that story →
Then I started building the room around the performer.
In 2008, I co-founded Vaudezilla.
Suddenly I wasn’t responsible only for my own few minutes under the lights.
I was thinking about the whole night.
Who belongs in this cast?
What should happen first?
What changes the energy?
What makes the audience lean forward?
What makes a performer look extraordinary?
What makes twelve different elements feel like they all belong to the same world?
The Chicago Sun-Times was already documenting Vaudezilla productions in 2009, and Northwestern University’s Medill Reports later placed my work with Vaudezilla inside the larger story of Chicago burlesque.
Hundreds of productions followed.
So did teaching, touring, and the Windy City Burlesque Fest.
Somewhere in all of that, my question changed from:
What should happen onstage?
to:
How should this room feel?
Explore the larger Vaudezilla story →
Teaching taught me how to see.
Students and performers began bringing me things that were almost working.
A song.
A character.
An act.
A tiny strange idea they couldn’t quite explain.
And I discovered that I loved the moment before the thing became clear.
People rarely need to become more generic.
Usually they need to become more specific.
One performer needs to get bigger. Another needs to stop moving. One needs a better entrance. Another needs eight counts removed so the audience finally has time to come toward her.
Sometimes the most interesting thing is already there.
It is simply buried.
Eventually I realized I do this with much more than performers.
I do it with events.
Rooms.
Characters.
Private experiences.
Brands.
Stories.
I look for the thing underneath the thing and ask:
What is this actually trying to become?
If you’re a performer, show me what you’re creating →
If you’re curious about stepping into burlesque yourself, come take a Chicago class →
Then the audience stepped inside the story.
Eventually even the stage started to feel too small.
I became interested in everything around it.
What happens before the audience sits down?
Who greets them?
What if the person at the door is already a character?
What if something happens in a hallway that only three guests ever see?
What if the room itself seems to know something?
That curiosity became my immersive work and eventually The Pink Hotel, a fictional world of rooms, residents, secrets and stories that sometimes, for a few hours, becomes almost real.
It is where worlds like The Velvet Key, The Shadow Room and Midnight Confession began to overlap.
What interests me isn’t making people forget that something is fiction.
It is the moment when they know perfectly well that it is invented and choose to step inside anyway.
And then I finally saw the whole story.
For years, I thought theater, burlesque, teaching, producing, Vaudezilla and immersive work were different chapters.
They weren’t.
They were different scales of the same obsession.
First I learned to direct attention toward my own body.
Then another performer.
Then a cast.
Then a show.
Then a room.
Then an audience.
Then an entire world.
Burlesque made me a performer.
Producing made me a builder.
Vaudezilla taught me how to build the machine around an idea.
Teaching taught me how to see what another person might become.
Eventually I realized:
I had been directing all along.
The feathers were never separate from the directing.
They were part of the education.
The rooms are getting bigger.
That same eye is now being invited into very different kinds of spaces.
In 2026, my booked work has included projects for National Safety Council through Arrow Events, Tetra Pak, Illinois Wesleyan University and Longue Vue Club, alongside private clients and ongoing productions through Vaudezilla.
The assignments do not look alike.
That is exactly what I like about them.
One asks how to make a formal gala feel like an elegant modern interpretation of another era, using live music, performers, characters and audience interaction.
Another brings together jazz, vocals, magic, dance, illustration, hosting and environmental entertainment and asks how all of it can feel like one evening rather than a list of attractions.
Another asks how to shift the energy of a large group and invite participation without making anyone feel forced into it.
Different rooms.
Different people.
Different answers.
I’m not interested in selling everybody the same show.
I want to know:
Who is coming?
What already exists here?
What is missing?
What should these people feel?
Then we build from there.
See selected creative direction work →
Tell me what you’re building →
Across the longer life of the work, clients, collaborators and institutions have also included Harley-Davidson, Templeton Rye, 900 North Michigan Avenue Shops, Curatrix, House of Dubai, Burlesque Hall of Fame and London Burlesque Games.
And through Vaudezilla and the Windy City Burlesque Fest, I have had the privilege of working alongside an enormous number of performers, musicians, choreographers, designers, producers and strange, wonderful creative people.
Every room teaches you something.
There are receipts.
I’m glad pieces of this life survived outside my own telling of it.
ABC7 Chicago / Localish documented the performer and teacher.
Northwestern / Medill documented Vaudezilla and Chicago burlesque.
The Chicago Sun-Times caught us early.
21st Century Burlesque preserved some of my early thinking about professionalism, compensation and building a sustainable artistic life.
And the Great Burlesque Exposition archive remembers the performances, teaching, festivals and international work that accumulated before I ever needed a neat title for all of it.
Sometimes archives let you turn around and recognize the person you were becoming before you knew how to name her.
So what do I do now?
I still perform.
I still teach.
I still love an unreasonable quantity of rhinestones.
But most of my work now happens between disciplines.
I direct performances and coach performers.
I teach Chicago burlesque classes.
I create private experiences around the actual humans in the room.
I build immersive worlds.
I provide creative direction for live events and experiences.
And when a project needs multiple performers, musicians, specialty artists or a full entertainment production, that work lives through Vaudezilla.
I don’t particularly want to make more things.
I want to make the right thing.
Sometimes that means adding something nobody else imagined.
Sometimes it means taking half of it away.
Maybe the feathers were the clue.
For a long time, I thought the feathers meant:
Look at me.
Now I understand them differently.
They taught me how people look.
How anticipation works.
How entrances work.
How silence works.
How little you sometimes need to do when the idea is clear enough.
They taught me how to make something visible.
That is still the work.
Only now the thing I am helping make visible might be a performer.
Or an idea.
Or a ballroom.
Or an entire imaginary hotel.
If something brought you here because you wanted to know who was behind all of this, now you know a little more.
And if you have something you can’t quite see yet: