My agonizing (and relieving) decision to leave DC theater

i. surreal

There may be a few days in your life when you get everything you want. Those days feel immediately bittersweet; a new dream blossoms, but an older dream has to wilt and perish. 

This past March, I had one of those days. It was an overcast Tuesday. I’d gotten up early to take an Amtrak from NYC to DC, and on my taxi ride back to Virginia, I saw I’d missed a call from a Connecticut phone number. This was a promising sign. In February, the David Geffen School of Drama (DGSD) at Yale had flown me up to New Haven, where the staff of the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism M.F.A. program interviewed me.

When I got home, I called the Connecticut phone number, my hands trembling. On the other end of the line, I heard from Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism program chair Catherine Sheehy, who informed me I was accepted into their 2029 class. I hadn’t let myself imagine I’d get into the program. Yale is regarded as one of the premier graduate schools in the world for theater, and the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism program typically admits six students per year. Suddenly, I was one of them.

There was no time to celebrate. That same day, I attended a recruitment visit at the University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance, & Performance Studies; I was accepted into its M.A. program. I drove to College Park in a daze and was given a tour of their impressive venue, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. I walked through the building wistfully. After leaving my job at the Kennedy Center in March of 2025, I missed a DMV space that celebrated all kinds of performing arts — only to realize the Clarice provided this space. That evening, I spoke with professors whose scholarship I admired. One had assigned my DC Theater Arts essay on The Inheritance to her Ph.D. students. 

This all seemed like a surreal reversal of fortune, until I remembered how hard I’d worked to achieve this day. Since leaving the Kennedy Center, I’d toiled in a frustrating job market. I worked arts administration gigs, submitted for (and got rejected from) fellowships, published articles, and applied to 11 graduate programs. A year later, there was proof this isolating work was worth it. I hadn’t made much money, but I had gained the respect of academia. 

Ultimately, I chose to attend DGSD. Their program gives me opportunities to explore scholarship, dramaturgy, and publishing. Crucially, due to a gift by billionaire David Geffen, the school no longer requires students to pay tuition. Admission there is a rare offer that’s too good for me to pass.

Still, I’ve been thinking about what it means to leave my hometown of Washington, DC. I’m one of many people leaving the city due to the effects of the Trump administration — from Kennedy Center workers and Smithsonian curators moving to Baltimore, to the NEA and CPB administrators who watched their organizations gutted, to the journalists laid off by NPR and The Washington Post, to the more than 260,000 workers who left federal service due to DOGE.

Some days it feels like I should rebuild this city’s arts and journalism communities. Staying might be the most revolutionary act. Some days I want to flee as far from this city as possible, to start my life over away from the difficult memories of my hometown.

Most days I feel an agonizing guilt over my choice to leave. That choice, when replicated by thousands of former Washingtonians, means DC suffers. Maybe the dreams of DC wilt and perish, too.

ii. redemption

When considering why I’m leaving DC, I must consider why I stayed in the city at all. 

The conditions that made me live here won’t be replicated again. The COVID-19 pandemic hit when I was midway through undergrad at Wesleyan University. So when I graduated with a theater degree in the summer of 2021, I was entering an industry where no in-person theater was happening, much less hiring entry-level employees. Disillusioned, I moved back to my family’s Virginia home. During the pandemic, I’d run my college’s newspaper, and I parlayed that experience into an NPR internship.

When the Kennedy Center needed more local employees again, I was hired in 2022 as a copywriter on their marketing team, where I worked for more than two and a half years. In addition to my full-time job, I maintained my career as a freelance arts journalist and critic. Honestly, I was just lucky that my hometown had theater and journalism scenes at all. 

But I could’ve moved to Brooklyn like most of my college friends. Staying in DC had a deeper purpose for me. As I’ve written about previously, at Wesleyan I’d grown wary of the NYC bubble of theater makers. My college was a world where leftist, Bernie bro artists would make experimental shows for leftist, Bernie bro audiences. Afterward, audiences would deem merely watching the show as “activism,” and never speak to people with different ideologies. 

This charade frustrated me. I’d grown up in a right-leaning family in DC, and I’d navigated conservative Catholic organizations in my upbringing. Retreating into the theater world’s leftist NYC echo chamber seemed ridiculous, especially after the first Trump presidency. I believed staging theater in DC was more impactful. Sure, DC is an echo chamber, a maddening swamp. Yet people of different politics, identities, and backgrounds must interact with each other here because of the federal government. DC’s status as the battleground for America’s culture wars made the city enticing to me. Creating theater here felt like it actually mattered.

Staying in DC also felt personally meaningful. As a teenager, I struggled with my queer identity alongside depression and self-harm. DC theater helped me process these parts of my life. Seeing Shakespeare’s R&J at Signature Theatre in 2013 made sexuality feel tangible to me. Seeing Fun Home at the National Theatre in 2017 helped me understand how my family was impacted by my queerness and depression. And seeing Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Kennedy Center in 2017 was the first time I saw a live drag show, giving me new language for identity. 

Part of the impact of these shows was watching them within DC’s buttoned-up culture. In the same city where I felt repressed, through theater I could experience intimacy, love, sex, and joy. I couldn’t erase my difficult adolescence in DC. Yet as an adult, I wanted to help the future generations of queer teens growing up around the city. Covering artwork by DC’s queer artists of color felt like redemption for my painful past.

iii. virus

For years, I saw the positive effects of my DC theater and journalism careers. In 2021, I reviewed Mosaic Theater Company’s Birds of North America, and afterward the Filipino actor Regina Aquino shared that my article was the first time a Filipino critic had reviewed her work. In 2022, I reviewed the world premiere of John Proctor Is the Villain at Studio Theatre, a show speaking directly to my high school experiences. The play eventually traveled to Broadway, but I’m proud to be one of the first Gen Z critics to publicly analyze the work. 

Reviewing shows before they go to Broadway isn’t all that DC theater critics offer. Because of DC’s many Equity theaters, it’s usually one of the first American cities to stage new productions of plays that previously premiered in NYC. I firmly believe that these DC premieres are some of the most fascinating productions in the country. Outside of Manhattan, playwrights edit their scripts with more perspective. Directors and actors deliver fresh interpretations of those scripts, and critics consider plays’ new meanings when staged across America.

I’ve been one of those critics. In 2024, I reviewed the DC premieres of Dave Harris’ Exception to the Rule, and David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s Soft Power. Although I gave both productions mixed reviews, DC stagings let me consider the plays within cultural trends — and those reviews helped me later interview Harris and Hwang. This is the power of local journalism. NYC-based publications often don’t have the impetus to review DC shows, but DC publications provide necessary reinterpretations of these works.

I saw my job within the Kennedy Center as equally necessary. I knew the organization could have a negative reputation: for many, the Kennedy Center was a domineering building, with an elderly audience base averse to change. While the Kennedy Center was traditional, the genres I promoted were in a new wave of programming meant to diversify performers and audiences. I worked with Thérèse LaGamma to promote the free events at Millennium Stage, such as performances, film screenings, and book readings. I worked with Kate Villa to promote comedy programming, including improvisers, sketch comedians, playwright-performers, and humor writers. 

Although the Center’s Social Impact initiative is now dismantled, I promoted their programs supporting local artists — like the Culture Caucus, Social Practice Residency, and Local Theatre Residency. Even dance programmers diversified their seasons. With that team, I promoted one of the best shows I’ve seen at the Kennedy Center: 10,000 Dreams: A Celebration of Asian Choreography. My Filipina mom and I watched 10,000 Dreams together, and we were overwhelmed by the show’s beauty and resonance to our community. 

Working at the Kennedy Center might’ve seemed conventional to many. But using that organization’s vast resources to support my communities — making that organization more inclusive — seemed radical to me. 

I was inspired by the radicalism I saw across DC. In 2024, I interviewed the Smithsonian curators of “Always to Return,” an exhibition of works by artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The curators referenced a 1993 quote from the artist: “I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution.” Gonzalez-Torres died of AIDS-related causes, so viruses were literal for him. But his art also acts like a virus, infecting viewers’ imaginations and physical spaces. His most famous work, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), initially appears as a pile of candies in variously colored wrappers. That is, until the viewer realizes that Ross was Gonzalez-Torres’ lover who also died of AIDS-related causes.

I wanted to be a virus that belonged to DC’s institutions. I wanted Kennedy Center audiences to engage with shows as they would “Untitled”: within a familiar structure they’d discover new ideas. I wanted my criticism to infect the theater industry, for my reviews to twist perceptions of shows and surprise readers. I wanted to queer DC. I wanted queer teenagers here to know they didn’t need to move away; they could exist like me. I wanted to harness institutional power to create a better world. I wanted to transform these institutions from the inside. 

iv. fire

Besides “virus,” there’s another word that describes the instinct to transform institutions internally: “neoliberalism.” While neoliberalism has many definitions, I often reference scholar Donatella Galella’s definition of “racial liberalism” in her 2019 book about Arena Stage, America in the Round:

In the twentieth-century United States, racial liberalism entails the enfranchisement of people of color to gain civil rights, integration, and equal opportunities. It endorses reform rather than revolution or even reparations to create a society without prejudice. Trusting the educated elite and their technocratic solutions, adherents to this ideology look optimistically to the U.S. government to enforce compliance with nondiscrimination laws as a principal way to address racial inequality.

Neoliberalism and racial liberalism were the defining policies of the Obama administration. Many Americans looked optimistically toward the President, the Supreme Court, and the entire U.S. government for societal progress. My work to diversify government-affiliated organizations — NPR, the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institution — evinces a kind of neoliberalism, too. 

But for me, neoliberal politics are tainted by the Trump presidencies. Especially after 2016, political writers have argued that America is living “in the ruins” of neoliberalism, and that the failures of neoliberal politics (and the failures of Obama) paved the way for Trump’s destruction of the “educated elite and their technocratic solutions.” In his 2026 book Liberal Fascisms, philosopher Slavoj Žižek posits that “what we are getting with Trump today is not fascism with a liberal mask, but liberalism brought to its (fascist) conclusion, to the actualization of its hidden immanent potentials.”

I’m inclined to agree with Žižek. All the government-affiliated organizations I’ve worked for have been overhauled by Trump. I worked for years to make these institutions more inclusive, only to watch that work erased in days. Maybe reforming these organizations was never truly possible. 

In 2019, Galella wrote, “Rather than overturning tables, [racial liberalism] offers more seats at the table for people deemed worthy.” Although I’ve gotten a seat at the table of DC theater, the entire table is now on fire. Having a seat doesn’t matter. You can’t be a virus that belongs to the institution if that institution practically doesn’t exist anymore.

What’s frustrating to me is that many DC artists are clinging to neoliberal politics within this destruction. During the first Trump administration, the theater industry at least tried to confront the present moment. Black dramatists provocatively staged American history; playwrights wrote shows set in 2017, rigorously attempting to understand conservatism. But DC theater hasn’t directly confronted Trump’s second presidency. Productions are still staging history, but far fewer are tackling current politics. 

I suspect this is out of fear. The Trump administration has eliminated funding for DEI initiatives and proposed NEA guidelines prohibiting works that “promote gender ideology.” No theater wants to lose funding. The industry is precarious enough, with Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis recently stating, “I think the American nonprofit theater movement is over.” 

The result is a DC theater culture that routinely plays it safe. Escapist musical comedies are plentiful, but fewer shows embody DC’s feelings of doom and gloom. For example, during the Biden administration, Arena Stage staged two funny-but-searing dramas about undocumented Americans: Sanctuary City and Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. It’s hard to imagine Arena Stage staging those works now. Signature Theatre has produced musicals with one-off zingers directed at Trump. But it’s hard to imagine them restaging a work like Soft Power right now, a work that boldly satirizes the MAGA movement.

In fact, many theater companies have tried to recapture a time when neoliberal politics ruled DC. This spring, I saw two DC musicals modeling themselves after Hamilton (the definitive Obama-era, neoliberal artwork). Mosaic Theatre’s Young John Lewis: Prodigy of Protest retold the story of its titular protagonist through rap music, staging a character who channels revolutionary energy into the U.S. government. 44: The Musical, whose tour rented a Shakespeare Theatre Company venue, was more blatantly nostalgic, restaging Obama’s first term. Obama was characterized as a misunderstood hero tested by kooky Republicans.

Although both musicals gestured at camp, both shows fell flat for me. An authoritarian leader is bulldozing and militarizing DC, but both musicals don’t reconcile this fact. These shows instead satirize older racists by making them rap. Watching Young John Lewis and 44 felt like attending a Kamala Harris rally: there was a “joyful warrior” mentality, a hopeful faith in the government. But attending something like a Kamala Harris rally feels pointless in 2026.

I can acknowledge I wasn’t these musicals’ target demographic. The audience for 44 resembled those of Chitlin’ Circuit shows: it was majority Black and middle-aged, enthusiastically engaging in call-and-response. Reaching audiences like that, with different identities and politics from my own, was why I came to DC in the first place. Plus, many people move to DC specifically because they are neoliberal and want to improve society through the government.

At the same time, these shows reminded me of the dynamics I faced in college. In DC, I’m often in a world where neoliberal, Obama-voting artists create conventional works for neoliberal, Obama-voting audiences. Everyone congratulates themselves for being “political” without explicitly talking about 2026 politics.

It’s just another charade.

v. incentive

The nonprofit theater movement is over. The table’s on fire. Institutions are demolished. Where do institutional workers go from here?

Some of my former Kennedy Center colleagues stayed in DC theater, working new positions at the National Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Shakespeare Theatre Company, and the Washington National Opera. Former dance programmer Mallory Miller co-founded Hands Off the Arts, an organization dedicated to keeping DC arts “free from government control, censorship, and the erasure of whole cultures from view.”

But many of my colleagues have left the arts industry. They’ve taken positions at DC organizations like the American Alliance of Museums, Moore, The Atlantic, WAMU, and National Geographic.

In fact, many of my former managers who still work in the arts industry have left DC. Thérèse LaGamma has curated arts programs across the country. Kate Villa and Trés McMichael have helped with programming at NYC’s Lincoln Center. On LinkedIn, former Kennedy Center director of marketing Steven Dawson discussed staying in the DMV by working at Baltimore’s France-Merrick Performing Arts Center. However, he admitted that “spending around 4 hours each day commuting has affected my family life,” and he ultimately relocated to work at Milwaukee’s Marcus Performing Arts Center.

I think many of DC’s arts administrators will relocate to wherever they can find the best work. This isn’t unique in the theater industry. Most actors send out hundreds of audition tapes, traveling across America to wherever they land a gig. Now, this mercurial lifestyle is shared by marketers, programmers, publicists, copywriters, designers, fundraisers, and more. With DC theaters producing fewer shows, and with organizations like Arena Stage struggling, there’s less incentive for arts workers to live permanently in DC. 

Arts administration is far from the first industry forced into perpetual freelancing. Many journalists work this way exclusively. Gone are the days when print publications would hire talented writers, give them beats, and keep them on staff for decades. Nowadays journalists pitch to online outlets, self-publish Substacks, and optimize writing for algorithms. Especially for arts journalists, staff positions are an industry exception, not a norm.

Just look at The Washington Post’s contracted theater coverage. Former chief theater critic Peter Marks is a product of the old journalism model. In his 2023 farewell article, Marks admitted he got into criticism simply because an editor gave him that assignment, writing, “Drama critic is an occupation that just sort of happens to a person. At least, that’s how it happened to me.” That quote rings painfully false for new theater critics: we must actively seek out criticism opportunities. Criticism doesn’t just sort of happen to us.

Marks’ successor, Naveen Kumar, is a product of the new journalism model, freelancing for many outlets before The Post. Kumar wrote insightful reviews on Broadway and DC productions. This past January, I taught his review of Studio Theatre’s The Heart Sellers to undergraduate students at the American College Theater Festival. Students were impressed that Kumar could write a negative review that was still constructive, connecting The Heart Sellers to immigrant families and theater’s systemic challenges. 

But in February of this year, The Washington Post laid off about 30 percent of its journalists, which included Kumar, the staff of their books and sports sections, and more. This development was disappointing to me, but not shocking. For years, The Post has chipped away at its newsroom —laying off dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman and ending its Sunday magazine in 2022, laying off 20 newsroom employees and discontinuing sections in 2023, and putting editorial pressure on its opinion section in 2025, leading editors to leave. I may currently “depend on the kindness” of billionaire David Geffen, but DC journalists can’t depend on the kindness of billionaire and Post owner Jeff Bezos.

While The Washington Post publishes some theater criticism, skilled writers like Kumar have no financial (or institutional) incentive to continue covering DC. I don’t have those incentives, either. I’m not sure I’d write for The Washington Post now; I’d rather freelance for smaller publications that better align with my values. I definitely wouldn’t work for the Kennedy Center unless the employees’ unionization effort is made official — and unless Congress passed laws revising the original 1958 National Cultural Center Act to protect the Kennedy Center from partisan interference.

Lately, I’ve considered the reason why my family lives in DC at all: job opportunities. On my dad’s side, my grandparents moved from West Virginia to DC so that my grandfather could work at Woodward & Lothrop, the city’s first department store. On my mom’s side, my lola and lolo immigrated from the Philippines to Connecticut for medical degrees. When the Marcos dictatorship forced them to stay in America, my lolo and lola relocated to Virginia because that’s where they found the best medical residency. 

All four of my grandparents left their hometowns, moving to DC for their careers. Now I’m leaving my DC hometown for my career.

vi. failure

There’s one play that captures the nihilism coursing through today’s arts and journalism industries. It’s Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2015 drama Gloria (DC’s Woolly Mammoth staged the show in 2018, and a new production is heading to Broadway next spring). The satire follows millennial culture writers at a magazine, each competing for attention in a collapsing journalism ecosystem. The office culture is toxic, leading to an act of shocking violence. In its aftermath, the writers see an opportunity to monetize their trauma.

When Gloria premiered in 2015, its characters’ “we’re totally fucked” energy might’ve seemed exaggerated. The frustrated writer Kendra says about her bosses, “You’d think they’d garnish a figure off of their ridiculous salaries before they went after our shitty free coffee. Why does it feel like we’re on the freaking Titanic?” The mournful writer Dean states, “You wake up one day and the thing that you thought was just going to be a fun thing you do after college turns into your career — your life. And then you just have to live with that.” In 2026, all the characters in the blockbuster The Devil Wears Prada 2 echo these depressed thoughts. Even Miranda Priestly knows the arts journalism ship is sinking.

Rereading Gloria in 2026, I’ve found solace in the character of Lorin. He’s an overworked fact-checker who thinks his job and life are meaningless. But after the act of violence, Lorin doesn’t capitalize on his pain. He leaves the arts journalism industry, works temp jobs as he applies for law school, and slowly faces his fears. 

When I read Gloria as a teenager, I saw Lorin as a tragic figure: the journalism industry chewed and spit him out. Now that I’m older, I view Lorin with kinder eyes. Instead of trying to survive in a toxic industry, he excused himself from it, knowing that his identity was flexible. Lorin had the courage to start over.

I hope I have the same courage to start over at Yale. Working in DC theater may be the fun thing I did after college that turned into my career — but I don’t “just have to live with that” as Dean says. Maybe I can remake myself in New Haven.

Yet I have more in common with Kendra and Dean than I’d like to admit: I turned my exit from the Kennedy Center into a magazine story, and only ambitious people apply to Yale. Attending drama school isn’t leaving the theater and journalism industries; it’s doubling down on them. It’s not a safe bet. Amauta Firmino, an alum of my Yale program, admitted that “dramaturgical work in theater does not pay a living wage.” DC theater also hasn’t often supported dramaturgs. Lauren Halvorsen has been upfront about being laid off from her associate literary director position at Studio Theatre in 2020. When Otis Ramsey-Zöe left his dramaturg and literary manager position at Arena Stage in 2025, the theater didn’t hire a replacement.

I’m also wary about Yale’s Ivy League echo chamber. Up there, maybe Mamdani-voting artists will just make avant-garde shows for Mamdani-voting audiences. Writer Quiara Alegría Hudes has spoken beautifully about using her presence in Yale to disrupt the university, but I’m still scared that any “virus” I create there will be neutralized by the institution. And no matter where in the world I go, I’ll feel the effects of the Trump administration, especially in academic institutions like Yale. There’s no escape from the influence of my DC hometown.

As I’ve been packing boxes and getting ready for my move, I’ve found myself unexpectedly crying. I have an incredible opportunity through Yale to explore my theater passion — shouldn’t I be happy? 

By viewing my departure from DC through the lens of grief, my mood makes more sense. I’m grieving for all the kids growing up in DC who will never see Kennedy Center shows, read consistent theater coverage in The Washington Post, or consider the arts as a viable career path. I’m grieving for the alternate life I could’ve lived if Americans had voted differently in the 2024 election. I’m grieving the fact that I couldn’t reform government institutions, and now these institutions might never be rebuilt.

I leave DC feeling not like a success, but like a failure. I couldn’t achieve my redemption.

vii. always

The only way to move through grief is by connecting with other people. So I’ve been inspired by the wonderful DC artists and writers who are staying in the area, making the most of opportunities here. 

Take my friend Katie Lewis. We grew up together, running the tech boards of middle school drama productions, collaborating on shows in high school, and watching DC theater side-by-side. Even though Lewis now works a full-time job during the day, she also works full-time jobs during the evenings within the theater industry — recently serving as co-stage manager for Keegan Theatre’s The Minutes, and a run crew member for Signature Theatre’s Pippin. For Lewis to juggle these jobs, she must sacrifice so much time and energy. But she works this way because she’s genuinely passionate about theater. It’s DC arts workers like Lewis who make this industry possible.

I see this dedication to the arts in the writing world, too. The University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance, & Performance Studies fosters academic research that’s read by scholars across the country. Local publications like DC Theater Arts and Washington City Paper have deep benches of observant theater writers. Podcasts like OnStage DMV and Theater District spotlight DC artists. And I’ll continue to provide editorial support to Daniella Ignacio’s Substack newsletter affiliated with HEART DMV AAPI Theater Alliance, an organization supporting the DMV’s Asian American theater artists.

One of the hardest parts about leaving DC is that I’ll be leaving the dramaturgs living in the area, people who have become my colleagues and friends. Shana Laski and I collaborated on productions at Wesleyan, and we both moved to DC after college. Laski was recently a resident dramaturg for Perisphere Theatre, and is currently the literary director for Theatre Prometheus. It’s been beautiful to see her growth as an artist, and I’m eager to see what work she continues to develop in DC.

Dramaturg Alissa Rose Gentry and I met while working at the 2024 TheatreWeek Kickoff Fest, and we’ve since become good friends. I trust her thoughts on playwriting and criticism, and I really appreciate the work she’s done to support the community through Theatre Washington’s Mentorship Program. It’s through that program that I was mentored by dramaturg Michelle Lynch, who taught me about new work development, Helen Hayes Awards evaluation, and more. After seeing Lynch’s dramaturgy for DC productions (Octet at Studio Theatre) and staged readings (North Wind at Round House Theatre), I’m excited to see what she does next.

I may have failed in transforming DC into a place that supports people from my communities. But the attempt to diversify theater and government institutions is honorable. This attempt also isn’t just on me. As the Broadway play Liberation recently pointed out, changing the world shouldn’t fall squarely on the shoulders of people from marginalized communities. Perhaps it’s not any one person’s responsibility to achieve redemption for a painful past; it’s a collective responsibility. Everyone must play a role in slowly transforming DC, the government, and the theater industry into better, more inclusive places.

I’d also encourage DC artists, myself included, to reframe how we consider working within institutions. DC workplaces like NPR, the Kennedy Center, The Washington Post, and the Smithsonian Institution certainly provided the largest resources, funding, and platforms for arts workers. But they’re not the only platforms. Arts workers like myself, Katie Lewis, Alissa Rose Gentry, Mallory Miller, and more support our arts communities however we can. Institutions are simply the resources we use to speed up the important work we already do independently. 

Ultimately, Yale is another resource for me. I’m still dedicated to writing about DC theater — whether through academic research papers, theater reviews, or long-form nonfiction essays like this. Yale will certainly provide me with the largest resources possible to achieve this goal, and living outside of the DC bubble will give me greater perspective in my writing. But I’ll be doing this important work beyond Yale, too. Writing about theater may be my life’s work, so I’m not bound to any one university, institution, publication, job, or city.

I’m not sure I’ll move back to DC after I graduate. Like most arts workers now, I’ll probably just go where I can get the best job. Still, for most of my life and for the first five years of my professional career, DC helped make me who I am. 

Even if it’s just through my writing, or just in my mind, I will always return.