ABOUT
Maizy Windham is a Director, Writer, Performer & multi-hyphenate artist, currently based in Cleveland, OH. Her primary creative interests involve combining athleticism and artistry, finding humor in unconventional characters, and exchanging perspectives to investigate complex curiosities and challenging questions.
Maizy is originally from the south, born in Chattanooga, TN, and raised in Greenville, SC where she grew up playing sports and running around in the sun with her two younger brothers. Maizy is a proud alumna of Greenville’s Fine Arts Center, SC’s first public arts high school, where she studied Theatre Performance and was a member of the Advanced Acting Ensem& the Advanced Topics in Performance Cohort.
In May 2024, Maizy graduated from Case Western Reserve University with Bachelor of Arts (BA) Degrees in Dance, English, & Theater Arts with concentrations in film and dramatic writing. While at CWRU, she received the Ann Barger Nemet Scholarship for Excellence in Creative Writing from the Department of English in her sophomore year. In her senior year, she was honored to receive both the Ron Wilson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance, Direction, or Dramatic Writing from the Department of Theater and the Outstanding Member Award from University Media Board, for her three years as Executive Director of Studio 300, CWRU’s student filmmaking collective.
Maizy is thrilled to return to the CWRU Department of Dance in August 2024 to pursue a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Contemporary Dance with a focus on choreography and performance.
Whether it be a goofy short film, a play from Ancient Greece, or a poem about a dead rat, Maizy enjoys using intersecting mediums to explore human idiosyncrasies & continually seeks ways to collaborate with others to create wacky, unique art.
ORIGIN STORY
I have always had an intrinsic inclination toward art. As a little girl, I danced through grocery store aisles while singing to myself so my mom put me in ballet class. I dressed my little brothers and next-door neighbors in costumes and filmed them in improvised stories, feeding them lines from behind the camera. I did a brief theatrical stint as a musical plumber where I moonwalked with a plunger in my elementary school play. Art pumped through my veins and kept my heart beating.
It wasn’t until 6th grade, however, that I decided to pursue a career as an artist. In my middle school theatre elective class, we were given an assignment to memorize and present a monologue. Our teacher gave us options for monologues that we could pick from, but I decided to look for my own and chose to do a piece from Roahl Dahl’s The Witches. Now you may be thinking, “Oh, cute! She did a monologue as the little ingenue who defeats the bad guys! Aw!” Nope. I played the balding Head Witch.
I spent weeks rehearsing my monologue, watching the scene from the 1990 film adaptation about a million times over. On the day of the presentation, I nervously tugged on my hair as I watched my classmates go up individually before me. We went alphabetically by last name, so I was set to go last (Windham). When it was my turn, I stood up and made the trek from the auditorium seats, up the stairs, and walked to center stage. My teacher had not taught us how to slate yet, so I did not introduce the piece. I inhaled and snapped right into the opening lines: “Vitches of Inkland! Miserable vitches! Useless, lazy vitches! You are a heap of idle good-for-nothing vurms!” I heard chuckles and gasps, as I transformed. The entire world shifted around me so that I was no longer in a stuffy South Carolina middle school auditorium in front of my 12-year-old peers. I was breathing, speaking, and living as the Head Witch.
So what if my version of the character wore pigtail braids and a Justice polo shirt?
When I finished the monologue, I re-entered reality to hear screeching laughter and applause from my teacher and my classmates. I was beaming. Upon re-entering the auditorium seating, I quickly learned that the positive reaction to my piece was not solely based on my performance, but also the shocked response to what my classmates assumed to be my rampant use of expletives on stage.
You see, I had not introduced the monologue. I played the role in my best attempt at a German accent to align with the script, and when I said “vitches” over and over again in the piece, my classmates did not hear “witches” but rather a certain rhyming curse word. Oops.
After receiving this constructive criticism from my colleagues, I walked over to my teacher who was holding my graded rubric in her right hand. To my relief, she was smiling as she handed me the piece of paper. In bright red pen, she had written “100” at the bottom of the rubric and at the top of the paper, she left a single word: “UNINHIBITED.”
I walked out of class that day and said to myself “Yeah, this is totally going to be my job!”
I share this story because I think it’s an amusing anecdote that illustrates many of the things that I love about theatre, dance and film. I love the opportunity to affect an audience. I love juxtaposing unlikely pairings to deliver the unexpected. I love creating with joy at the forefront. I firmly believe that what I accomplished on that 6th-grade stage was a work of magic, not because I was a witch, but because that’s what art is - art is magic.
As a Director-Writer-Performer multi-hyphenate artist, I am continually searching for new stories to share, both my own and others, and new ways to tell them. My objective is to continue to be uninhibited. Art can and does change the world every day, making it more inclusive, ardent, and compassionate. I hope that my art continues to affect change, and I would love to work with you so that we can make the world a little bit more magical.
