Public Engagement
The Daughter’s Department of Dementia Care
An exploration of the experience unpaid family dementia caregiving, The Daughter’s Department of Dementia Care is an online exhibit made up of four distinct works that audiences can engage with at home or on-the-go. The exhibit includes photography, a gaming video, and a solo show, asking the audience (caregivers, policy makers, and the medical community alike) to newly see this unique type of caregiving. Click below to visit the exhibit!
Creative Health @ University of Huddersfield
Solo Shows
My work as a solo performer explores female subjectivity. Often situated within elements of magical realism, my performances combine first-person narrative, character, humor, song, movement, and poetry to create new expressive pathways into questions of identity, embodiment, and belonging . Below is a collection of my solo shows and recorded monologues.
The Feminist Daughter Dementia Dilemma
what do you do when you finally figure out who you are right as your Mom totally forgets who she is?
This solo show is the personal experience of caregiving for someone who doesn't remember and what happens to the caregiver when all social support and services disappear. Spoiler alert: Craziness...craziness is what happens.
Using comedy, poetry, and storytelling, (possibly song?), The Feminist Daughter Dementia Dilemma highlights the need for caretaking for those with dementia handled as a public, social issue as opposed to a private one.
This piece was developed through workshops with Luna Stages, one-on-one with Lauren Weedman, and was part of Santa Monica Rep's 4th Annual Playreading Festival. As a work-in-progress, this piece is a part of the online exhibit, The Daughter’s Department of Dementia Care.
An Extremely Ordinary Girl
if given the opportunity, what would you turn yourself into?
8 female characters explore themes of beauty, redemption, death, mental illness and a new religion known as "Star Magic".
This "work in progress" has been developed through workshops at The Writing Pad in LA and as part of an artist in residence program at WildAcres in North Carolina. This project has been listed on Creative Capital's "On Our Radar" series.
Sexy Maus
From Seven Layers to a Bikini Top in Less Than Five Hours
how do we balance the need to be perfect with the need to be a fully self-expressed woman?
Seven Layers was developed through workshops at The Field in NYC. It has been performed either in pieces or in its entirety in NYC, Santa Monica, Bali, Washington DC and North Carolina.
Monologues
I have had the wonderful opportunity to perform on story stages in New York, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam. Below is a collection of recorded monologues, both first-person and more “performance-art” leaning.
What Audiences Are Saying
"By seizing each of her characters in full from the moment she becomes them she performs the theatrical magic trick of making us forget that this is one actor playing many roles so that we can focus on the story, and enter the fictive dream...it's good art."
DC Theatre Scene
"Andrea Schell is that friend of yours who is the life of the party. Entertaining, enthralling, smart, sexy, she can salvage the shoddiest dinner party by her mere presence...Schell is a dynamo as she relates her journey through some of continental Europe’s inviting capitals...She is engaging, rippling with vitality and sexuality."
Bitter Lemons
“She is a skilled, facile performer with a keen gift for accents and elastic facial expressions."
DCist
“Compelling!”
The Examiner
"Count Andrea amongst the tiny handful of solo artists who can grab you by the lapels, pull you in, and get you to listen. It is a rare, honed skill."
"Andrea weaves different perspectives of the feminine deftly, bringing forth aspects of culture and the female experience in ways that made me laugh until it hurt, and want to cry for the wounds we as women carry."
"I’ve seen many solo shows, this one is in the top tier of them all. Andrea was funny, witty, sharp, intelligent, emotional, beautiful, poignant and important. I loved the effort she put forth to entertain the audience. She had pizzaz and was very skillful in keeping the audience under her control."
"This show hit me in all the right places. It’s the story I wish I’d written and the adventure I wish I’d had. And thanks to the Euro-travel resources on the back of the program, now I can! Andrea is hilarious and tender and totally authentic."
“Funny, honest, courageous show for anyone who wonders about what it means to be a sexual human being, fall in love and dares to live and break out of “the voices of should and must!” Every woman and being can relate to this! Performed with humor, honesty and just hilarious! Well done!
"I had the rare opportunity of watching Andrea’s one woman show in the beautiful setting of Bali. She was funny, uplifting and oh so witty! I can’t wait to catch her show in Los Angeles!"