Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Francesca Montanile Lyons. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Francesca, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Just after finishing grad school, I created “Dear Diary LOL.” This was a fun, pink-soaked ensemble show made up of the verbatim text from my middle school diary, and those of my friends and collaborators. This show taught me that shining a light on something that made me feel embarrassed, or ashamed – like the truly cringe-worthy words I wrote when I was 13 – and creating art from it, is transformative. I had the best team, and we had such a blast celebrating these former parts of ourselves. Hearing audiences laugh and empathize with these parts of myself I thought were ridiculous led me to accept and love them too. I heard from so many audience members that the show encouraged them to dig up their old pre-teen journals to giggle and reminisce about their younger selves too, and to appreciate all the ways they were trying to process and understand what the world wanted from them, and who they really wanted to be.

That project kicked off my fascination and ongoing artistic research in disempowering shame by finding ways of sharing the things we might first want to hide, with humor and with vulnerability, in a way that is healing for both artist and viewer. I strive to do this when I’m the author or creator of my own work, and also when I am supporting other artists in making their work as a director.

I also have to mention that a huge part of what makes any project meaningful to me is my collaborators, and I’ve been so lucky to work with incredibly visionary and kind artists.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a director, performer, educator, and experimental artist currently based in Philly! Across mediums, my work seeks to disempower shame and taboo through radical honesty and voyeuristic delight. I create work that is hyper personal and intimate in an effort to reveal broader truths and reckonings, and create connection through vulnerability. I make invitations to myself and my audiences to laugh ourselves out of rigidity, so we can accept ourselves and each other with compassion. My work has been called “a sugary sweet jawbreaker with a spicy-sour center.”

As a performer, you can find me at venues across Philadelphia, exploring the overlap of alt-comedy, clowning, buffon, and burlesque. My areas of expertise as a director include clown and buffon, ensemble devising, physical/dance theater, staging verbatim non-theatrical text, and new work development. I also experiment with visual art and hybrid art: creating drawings, embroideries, and animations that live both independently and alongside or within my performance work. For me, an area of artistic research often finds expression in various forms: an interest in texting and digital intimacy becomes drawings, watercolor paintings, the beginnings of a new musical, large tufted rugs, and a community workshop. I also love creating opportunities for social and community participation in my work.

My career as an artist has always been intertwined with my career as an educator and facilitator of community-based projects. My teaching artistry focus falls within the arts, literacy, and social/emotional learning with a trauma-informed lens, and I find particular joy in curriculum creation. My work has ranged from dramatic story times for infants and their caregivers to adjunct teaching at Temple University & the Community College of Philadelphia, with plenty in between: visiting school classrooms for theater curriculum with various organizations, bilingual arts and literacy classes with the Barnes Foundation/Puentes a las Artes, and sexuality education with YES! to Consent and Puentes de Salud.

Right now I’m working on 1001 Unread Messages, a multi-disciplinary project creating music (with Terran Scott and Si Si Boudoin) and visual art from real text messages between romantic partners, which will eventually become a stage production, and a new solo show about fascism and cheese. A show I directed, the Van Gogh Shogh by Donna Oblongata, is headed to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival!

And lastly, you can catch my solo show “VILE” this September at Cannonball in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

It took me some time to learn how to speak about myself and my work.

For a long time, I would answer the question, “What do you do?” by listing my day jobs. One time my mom overheard me do this and she looked at me funny and said, “You don’t say you’re an artist?” I had internalized the idea that because I wasn’t making money exclusively from my art, I didn’t have the right to say I was an artist. Leading with “I’m an artist” has changed the way that I see myself and how I move through the world. We all have to survive and find ways to make money, and doing so does not minimize the importance our art practice in any way.

It also doesn’t have to feel like self-promotion to tell people about what you’re up to. People are curious! Let them be as curious about you and what you do as you are about others.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Yes!

There are Small Business Development Centers that are great for artists learning about business, marketing, and sustainability. (Temple SBDC for example!) Also YNAB (You Need a Budget) has a lot of free YouTube videos for personal financial literacy, even though their software costs money to use.

Here are some newsletters to keep an eye out for residency and grant opportunities: Artwork Archive, Creative Capital, Hyperallergic, and Creative Philadelphia (or your city’s local arts office newsletter). I like to make a spreadsheet and aim for a certain number of rejections per year! It gets easier the more applications you write because you’ll develop a base of go-to language you can re-use.

And for Philly area teaching artists, look into the Bartol Foundation. They offer workshops for teaching artists and have a newsletter that shares local opportunities and upcoming grants.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.francescamontanilelyons.com
• Instagram: @frenchyfrancesca; @fmldrawsbutts

Image Credits

John Hawthorne
Torian Ugworji
Andrew P. O’Neill
Wide Eyed Studios