Regi Carpenter is a solo performance artist, author, and performance coach. An award winning performer, Regi has toured her solo shows and workshops in theaters, festivals and schools, nationally and internationally. Her writings and blogs about storytelling, ancestry and identity have been published in various print and online publications.
Regi is the youngest daughter in a family that pulsates with contradictions: religious and raucous, tender but terrible, unfortunate yet irrepressible. These tales celebrate the glorious and gut – wrenching lives of four generations of Carpenter’s raised on the Saint Lawrence River in Clayton, New York. Tales of underwater tea parties, drowning lessons and drives to the dump give voice to multi-generations of family life in a small river town with an undercurrent. Swift, unexpected, and powerful as the river itself, Regi’s tales are “an unexpected gift that promises to leave us longing for more empathic vignettes from this comfortable, compelling voice.” Booklist Review of CD Diving and Emerging
Regi is the recipient of the JJ Reneaux Emerging Artist Award, a Leonard Bernstein Teaching Fellowship Award, the Parent’s Choice Gold Award, the Parents’ Guide to Children’s Media Award and the Storytelling World Award. Her performance piece Snap! won the 2012 Boston StorySlam. Snap! is a featured Listen story on The Moth website.
In addition to her work as a performer, coach and writer, Regi is also the founder of Stories with Spirit, a creative initiative dedicated to bringing songs of joy and stories of hope to grieving children and the people who love and care for them in homes, hospices, and hospitals. Her high school storytelling curriculum, “Teens Talking” has been awarded grants from the New York State Council of the Arts.
