About the Artist
Ski Gozo is a Theatrical Storyteller & Educator based in San Diego, California. As a Polish-Filipino American who grew up apart from their family, connection to identity is estranged. As a second and third generation American, they find their connection and call to action to engage with ancestral identity contradictory to the steps of assimilation it took for their family to immigrate to this country and how to give a voice to that in the current state of American Theater. Amongst their peers they found an exhaustion of representation onstage that only pointed to high points of trauma when connecting to identity rather than offering any semblance of the celebration of ancestral cultures.
As a Miranda Family Fellow, their training spans across different theatrical disciplines. As a performer, they trained at the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts and as a BFA Acting candidate at the California Institute of the Arts. In pursuit of backstage knowledge they continued at Grossmont College and received an AA in Theater Arts with an emphasis in performance and AA in Humanities and Fine Arts. Grossmont College continuous outreach led them in their next pursuit of a university that had a self driven undergraduate program and specialized in probing what the American Theater currently functioned as today. This led them to the California State University Long Beach where they got a BA in Technical Theatre Arts (Scenery/Costume/Lighting Design) while acting as the Artistic Director of the undergraduate theater company (Fall 2021 through Spring 2022), Theatre Threshold, and directing at the graduate level theater, California Repertory Company (Cal Rep). In addition to directing at the Cal Rep, it also led to the pursuit of pedagogy offered by other companies such as the Cornerstone Theater Company. Ski would then find their way to the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center for directing and would continue to dip into playwriting.
They have their niche in helping people develop anthologies and works surrounding identity. Gozo’s process has been heavily influenced by practices based on community outreach and helping theater practitioners of all levels find their way in to express themselves. While Ski likes to work in poetics, they have also helped devise in various other mediums such as Film, Tik Tok, Musicals and prose. Their initial offering stems from interview based poetry followed by a pursuit of their personal and their collaborator’s exposure to artistic forms to find the healthiest vessel for their art to take shape in.​
Their largest pursuit has been the anthology of works titled American Distortion acting as a political fantasia for their collaborators to explore their connection with American nationalism in the state of their relationship to their identity.
Ski is intrigued by the idea of transmedia and immersive theater. How do we engage the audience before the show? Do we have interactive installations that change their meaning before and after the show? Is there a virtual call to action or a pool of resources? What can the theater offer in conjunction to the accessibility that was created amidst that pandemic that we can implore now?
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Create. Tinker. Push Forward.
