30 Ways to Get Free

by Candice D'Meza

CANDICE D'MEZA is a mother of three, actor, writer, filmmaker, and multi-disciplinary artist whose writing and acting work has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, The Acentos Review, The Houston Chronicle, HoustoniaMag, and  the Houston Press. As an actor, Candice is a proud member of the Actor’s Equity Union and has acted with The Catastrophic Theatre, The Ensemble Theatre, Rec Room, and The Alley Theatre. She has been called a “Houston Theater Actor To Watch” and awarded four awards, including the 2018 Best Utility Player Award, by the Houston Press. Her writing-- using forms of memoir, prose, and playwriting--focuses on topics of grief and joy, restorative justice, abolition, and liberation as viewed through the Black Imagination--the mixing of science fiction, African and African Diasporic folklore, and afrofuturism. Her one-woman show FATHERLAND combines Haitian Vodou spirituality and personal memoir with experimental film and ritual theater into a multimedia layered performance that is a deeply vulnerable exploration into the grief that comes from disconnection: disconnection from family, from culture, from homelands. Her ongoing work 30 WAYS TO GET FREE is a series of micro-plays that explore, via sci-fi, African folklore, afrofuturism, magical surrealism, and speculative fiction, the unlimited ways that Black people across the African Diaspora may triumphantly enter into a free world of our own imagining. To date, selected pieces have been published in The Acentos Review, produced as commissioned plays by the Latinx Playwrights Circle in New York, and produced as short films by The Catastrophic Theatre. Her newest project, a commission by DiverseWorks in Houston, TX is a community created multi-disciplinary public performance to honor the legacy of the Sugarland 95--the 95 bodies of Black convict leased inmates who died between 1897-1907, found in unmarked graves in Sugarland, Texas. To discover more about her work, visit www.candicedmeza.com