more than. in between. less than. because.
Based in Rochester, NY, writer/producer/investigator, Lisa earned her chops in Chicago’s late ’90s theatre scene.
While managing her own theatre company (hOstage tHeatre cO. with Samuel Jordan), she booked and promoted productions for the much beloved Café Voltaire, a vegetarian restaurant with a 50-seat performance venue, producing 16 shows a week and promoting 8 theatre companies per month. This venue was responsible for giving an affordable start to hundreds of performers and Jeff-nominated theatre companies still producing today from 1988-96 until the real estate boom forced its very generous founder, Mark Epstein, to close.
In the face of imminent rising property values, she rallied a city-wide town hall meeting to save the theatre from demise in a fervent real estate development boom. She raised $45K in matched foundation funds, individual contributions, small business loans and a benefit produced by Second City and SC producer emeritus Joyce Sloane. She established a non-profit entity, The Voltaire Theatre, built its board of directors, a planning committee for relocation and programming, and an advisory board of Chicago’s top profit and nonprofit theatre executives. Here is where she developed a rapport with city government, working consistently with the Departments of Planning and Development and Cultural Affairs to add board members and navigate the crowded real estate market for relocation.
Her love for producing the unproduced led her to a TV production. She went on to work alongside Gracie Films’ president Richard Sakai (Taxi, Jerry Maguire, The Simpsons) in the production of ABC’s short-lived sitcom What About Joan starring Joan Cusack and Kyle Chandler. She was on the new media team that launched the successful start-up entertainment news website, TMZ.com owned by AOL/Telepictures, negotiating all photo and video footage for a $750K first-year budget. When she was replaced by two blond boys for the TV show, she took her flair for fundraising, producing and photography and moved to Brooklyn.
There, she found a sanitation worker on a hot summer night in Park Slope.
From 2008- 2011, with photographer Liz Ligon, she wrote and produced CHASING SANITATION: Falling In Love With New York’s Strongest. For the 2011 public exhibition THIS IS NEW YORK’S STRONGEST in the historic Noho Arts District, she raised $48K in crowd-funded individual contributions, matching funds and strategic sponsorships. The photo and narrative exhibition was generously covered by the New York Times, NY1 local news, Marie Claire, Glamour and New York Daily News and thoughtfully attended by Oscar-winning screenwriter and director John Patrick Shanley as well as hundreds of passersby.
During that time, award-winning DIY filmmaker Morgan Nichols asked her to co-produce his third and flagship feature, HOW TO MAKE MOVIES AT HOME. This feature film went on premiere with the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival (2013), was selected as Best Film at several film festivals nationwide, toured with the Southern Circuit (2014), and won Best Filmmaker of the Year at Visionfest 2013 in New York City,
A graduate of California Institute of the Arts, Lisa is an awardee of the Dramatists Guild Fund and fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts. While she was pursuing her MA in Forensic Mental Health Counseling at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, she worked a Brooklyn-based insurance investigator for Capital Investigating, as well as a criminal defense investigator for the nation's largest public defender, the Legal Aid Society. Today, she is an investigator for the Monroe County Public Defender and a licensed private investigator in New York State #11000215361.
Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, she’s firmly rooted in Rochester, New York, where she follows those the mighty lives lived under the radar and below the line.
... more than, in between, less than, because.
