I’m Sequoia (she/her/hers), a composer, lyricist, bookwriter and collaborative theater artist based in New York City.

I am passionate about creating work that is accessible, equitable and reimagines the possibilities of what the world could be by challenging traditional storytelling expectations through a feminist and anti-racist lens. As a composer I believe musical motifs have great power and can do big things. I geek out about every note's meaning, and strive to move audiences in unexpected ways.  I write dark, intense, funny, feminist, political, accessible, heart-wrenching radical theater. I am overly empathetic, and roots for human beings, complexity and all! Some themes I explores are climate change,  the female orgasm, complicated families, overlooked women in history, mental illness, injustices, and hope. Theater is a window, a door, or a mirror, and I strive to critique things by understanding every side of every situation. I use comedy as a way into a world, and will flip to tragedy to break your heart. 

I believe collaboration fuels the relationships we need to cultivate. As someone who has always been involved in community organizing and art-making, the theater is a natural home. After all, “everything is beautiful at the ballet, raise your arms and someone’s always there.” 

Community drives me. When I’m not writing musicals I’m working as an organizer at my neighborhood food pantry because I believe in the power of mutual and collective community care. I also teach songwriting and music to English as a Second Language and Special Education classes in various public schools in New York City. Using songwriting and singing to help develop English literacy and creativity, I empower children to feel more confident. I believe my work in community-building echoes in my work as a theater artist because I believe collaboration is practice for living and allows us to create the world we want to live in together. 

I am currently an MFA candidate in NYU Tisch’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (Max Dreyfus Award). My studies in the craft of musical theater writing and collaboration have also been cultivated by opportunities through the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop and the New Dramatists Composer Librettist Studio. I am a member of Maestra and the Dramatists Guild, and was a mentee in the Maestra Mentorship program in 2022.

My music composition foundation is rooted firmly from my study of classical composition and orchestration under Laura Kaminsky and Du Yun at Purchase College, State University of New York’s Conservatory of Music. There I learned the fundamentals of orchestration, instrumentation, advanced music theory and harmony, and improvisation. These skills have given me the confidence to further explore my musical voice. 

I am currently collaborating in the creation of four original musicals - EF! the Musical, Silent Springs, History of Traitors According to Sydney, and Impossible Green. 

Earth First! (EF!), the radical environmental movement, has been at the forefront of direct action to save the planet since 1981. EF! made famous, dramatic, non-violent tactics such as tree-sits, road blockades, and activists chaining themselves to bulldozers. Over the past 40 years, the movement has grown, evolved, and splintered. Some members have “aged out”,  while some  served lengthy prison sentences for “eco-terrorism.” Many former members  became leaders in larger fights for social and environmental justice. EF! (a new musical) brings this movement’s culture, history and present to the stage through an immersive, sung-through musical. Audience members find themselves acting as participants at the “Round River Rendezvous,”the movement’s annual gathering. As always, the gathering will end with a mass action such as a blockade or sit-in and everyone is asked to prepare themselves. The ensemble-based play includes new twists on classic musical tropes. A queer love triangle unfolds between two of the tree-climbing instructors and a prison abolitionist. Microorganisms that break down human excrement get a bombastic kick-line moment. A “primitive skills” practitioner tangos while teaching us all about how to brush your teeth with a stick. Earth First! the musical has been developed at Macdowell. 

Silent Springs, with book and lyrics by Laura Barati, is set in present-day, small-town USA. The show follows Nadia, Bella, and Mary, three students at Silent Springs High who discover that they are all sexual assault survivors whose rapes have been dismissed, ignored, or covered up by their community and local law enforcement. After the justice system fails them, they decide to take justice into their own hands. In the vein of Little Shop of Horrors meets Sweeney Todd (or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend hooks up with Kill Bill), Silent Springs is a darkly comedic, original, feministrevenge-fantasy musical. We are currently workshopping it at the BMI Lehman-Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

Work, with book and lyrics by Parade Stone. When Sydney receives a job offer in politics, she finds herself at a crossroads. Should she stay at her unfulfilling survival job until she finds a new passion, or can she reignite her now-disillusioned passion for politics? As Sydney traverses both fantasy and reality to come to a decision, she finds herself instead searching for the answer to the question that’s always eluded her: in a broken political system, how is she capable of bringing about real change? This show has been workshopped at the Wild Project in New York City in the fall of 2019 and at South Oxford Space in summer of  2018. It is currently being produced by the Shubert Organization’s Artistic Circle. 

Impossible Green, with book and lyrics by Claire-Frances Sullivan, is an environmentalist, anti-capitalist, science-fiction original story that takes place on a future earth where people are forced to live in factories producing their own atmosphere to survive. The bottom (working-class) floor is thrown into turmoil when the protagonist, Birdy, finds a leaf that should not exist. A story of class, revolution, and sacrifice, Impossible Green asks us to dream bigger and taller than we ever have. Impossible Green had a workshop in January of 2021 with the York Theatre in New York City.