In 1992 in Washington DC, Michael co-founded Hope Is Vital, an arts & public health initiative. Over the following eight years, Hope is Vital stood up theatre-based public engagement/HIV prevention programs in over 80 communities around the US. Michael wrote the book Theatre for Community, Conflict and Dialogue (Heinemann Press, 1998) based on that work.
In 1999, Michael co-founded Sojourn Theatre and served as artistic director for 20 years, co-creating, writing & directing nearly 30 devised, often site-specific and participatory theatre works. These include Cities on a Hill, 7 Great Loves, Witness Our Schools, GOOD, One Day, BUILT, The Race and How to End Poverty in 90 Minutes.
In 2012, he co-founded the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, a collective of nine artist/facilitators who worked for a dozen years with organizations and agencies around the country on community research, transformational process and system change.
He has been a consistent speaker, workshop leader and presenter at universities, conferences, theatres, local government agencies and community sites for over thirty years.
His theatre and installation work has been commissioned by/produced at sites which include: Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (DC), Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Alliance Theater (Atlanta),La Mama, Etc (NYC), Boise Contemporary Theatre, Haus of World Kultur (Berlin), ASU Gammage, Flint Youth Theatre (Michigan), The House Theater (Chicago), The Pacific Edge Festival (Australia), Ping Chong & Company, TBA Festival (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art), Cleveland Public Theater, ASU Art Museum, Goodman Theater, Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans).
He has held faculty/leadership positions at Northwestern University and Arizona State University, and is now based at University of Montana, where he founded the Co-Lab for Civic Imagination in 2022.
From 2020-2025, he served as Civic Collaborations Director for One Nation One Project, a national arts & health initiative in partnership with National League of Cities; from 2020- 2024, he co-designed and co-led (alongside Jun-Li Wang) Art-Train, a virtual national technical assistance program (with Springboard for the Arts) that helped hundreds of government agencies, arts organizations and individual artists identify funding and design cross-sector projects during and after the Covid pandemic; from 2022-2024,he co-designed and co-led (alongside Willa Taylor) American Library Association’s Civic Imagination Station Initiative.
He has led or engaged in collaborations with, among others- ArtPlace America, Catholic Charities USA, Goodman Theater, Lookingglass Theatre, Georgetown University, Steppenwolf Theatre, Cook Inlet Housing Authority (AK), National League of Cities, Children’s National Medical Center (DC), Nashville’s Metro Arts, Chicago Parks & Recreation, Douglas County Health Department (NE), The State of Kansas Department of Commerce, Ensemble Studio Theater (NY), National Endowment of the Arts, The City of Portland, OR, Nike, New River Valley Planning Commission (VA), The Old Globe Theatre, Alliance Theatre, Americans for the Arts, Oregon Department of Education, Planned Parenthood New Orleans, Chicago Public Schools, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Recent work includes: State of Mind, a touring theatre and public dialogue project about behavioral health that’s performed and conducted residencies in over 30 rural Montana communities and is currently launching a national initiative; facilitation trainings across the US including for New York City Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement; and directing Off The Record, a world premiere play (written by James Scruggs) at HERE Arts Center in NYC in Spring 2026.
