Rebecca is a doctoral student in the department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, minoring in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She holds a BA in English and Dance from Barnard College, Columbia University, and an MA in Gender and Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has performed with Pat Catterson, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Repertory Understudy Group, and Douglas Dunn and Dancers, among others, and currently dances with Gerald Casel Dance and Molissa Fenley and Company. Her academic interests focus on the critical intersection of dance and gender studies, using methods of autoethnography to explore the performative possibilities of the sensient body in space and time. Rebecca has shared her research and performance work at several conferences, including the Critically Kinesthetic Symposium and PSi19 (where she also contributed to the online performance review, psi19performanceblog.wordpress.com), and was a panelist for the Dance Discourse Project #18 at CounterPULSE, San Francisco. She was the 2013 recipient of the Marilyn Yalom Research Fund of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Sukanya currently a doctoral candidate, received her Master’s degree in English literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She has been involved in various theater productions, in English and other regional languages, staged in Kolkata, where she was born and raised. She performed in Seneca’s Oedipus, and directed Sam Shepard’s Killer’s Head, both staged as a part of Stanford Summer Theater Festival 2011. She also directed Divided Together, staged in Stanford University in March 2012. She performed in various student productions and devised performances in Stanford. In May 2013, she performed in a historical play, Noor: Empress of the Mughals, written and directed by Feisal Alkazi, which premiered in Brava Theater in San Francisco. She recently performed in Yoni ki Baat (March 2014), produced by Rangmanch – the South Asian theater group in Stanford.She has been trained in Indian Classical music and dance since her childhood, and takes special interest in Rabindranath Tagore’s songs, literary works and philosophies. Her interests also lie in Eastern mystical thoughts and religious philosophies. She participated in Performance Studies International (PSi) in 2011 and 2012, both as a scholar and a performer. Her academic areas of research include the spiritual and therapeutic possibilities of theater and performance; religion; rituals; folklore; gender studies; and multiculturalism.

Douglas holds a BA from Brown University in Philosophy and Theater & Performance Studies, where he was the recipient of the 2011 Weston Fine Arts Prize. He directed performance pieces in New York City for several years, with his work presented at the Center for Performance Research, Theatre for the New City, Judson Memorial Church, the Invisible Dog, and in the Catch! curation series. A review once called his work “totally uninterested in any mainstream notions of theatrical pleasure.” He researches the historical avant-garde, with particular focus on mid-century America, while looking for connections between aleatory performance, computer logic, cybernetic socialism, and queer erotics.  

Joy is a PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at Stanford University with prior degrees from Harvard and NYU. She researches contemporary queer, sex-positive & sex-radical cultural production and her dissertation focuses on extra-legal performances of marriage rites. She is also a director and deviser of collaborative performance with a particular interest in queer and intimate modes of theatre training and new work development. 

Karina is a doctoral student in the department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. As a performer, Karina has appeared in productions throughout California, having worked with Magic Theatre, Teatro Visiόn, Shotgun Players, San Francisco Playwright’s Foundation, BRAVA Center for the Arts, San Diego Repertory Theatre and Kaiser Permanente’s Educational Theatre Programs.

Karina received her undergraduate degrees in Theatre and Spanish Literature from the University of California, San Diego. Her primary research interest involves the appropriation of space and genre as it pertains to US Latina/o and Chican@ theatre. Other research interests include theatre for social change, gender studies, race, theatre history and the intersection of politics and performance.

She is a McNair and MURAP Scholar and is currently a part of the literary committee at the Magic Theatre. She has presented her work at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (MURAP) at UNC, Chapel Hill, and the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS). She is also a co-founder of BALTAN, the Bay Area Latino Theatre Artist's Network.

Kellen holds a B.A. in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. He is pursuing a PhD minor in African Studies, and received the African Studies Language Fellowship to study isiZulu in South Africa. His academic interests include critical theory, performance historiography, South African performance, intercultural theatre, and the global traffics of racialized performance. He has shared his work at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR), and Performance Studies international (PSi), where he co-edited and contributed writing to the PSi19 performance blog (http://psi19performanceblog.wordpress.com/). He is also an actor and a director who emphasizes corporeality in theatrical performance; he recently directed Maria Irene Fornés’s Mud and Lola Arias's A Kingdom, A Country or a Wasteland, in the Snow.

Alex received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama from NYU at the Experimental Theater Wing, served as an Urban Education Fellow at the Match Charter Public High School in Boston. At Match, he expanded extracurricular, arts, and volunteer opportunities, founded the school's drama program, and taught the capstone history classes. Additionally, while in Boston, he sat for two years on the Executive Council of the Massachusetts Educational Theatre Guild, and created the Boston Theatre Celebration, a one-day annual festival to offer performance opportunities to students in schools without devoted arts programming. His research interests include appropriations of performance language in diplomacy and economics, and performance as pedagogy. He is also an actor and director, focusing on devising and adaptation, including recent productions of Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and the Epic of Sundiata.

So-Rim is a doctoral candidate in the department of Theater and Performance Studies. She holds a B.A. in Film Studies from Columbia University, an M.A. in English Literature from Seoul National University, and an M.A. in Text and Performance from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Before coming to Stanford, So-Rim worked as a professional translator and editor with commissions from Seoul Metropolitan Government and Literature Translation Institute of Korea. She wrote her master’s theses on Allen Ginsberg’s performance poetics in “Howl” and the potentiality of theatrical mise-en-scene in the photographs of Angus McBean and Diane Arbus. So-Rim researches the intersection between Performance Studies and Visual Studies, historiographies of the First Avant-Garde, East Asian Trans-Pacific performances, and transnational translation and adaptation theories. Classically trained in piano and visual arts practice with an emphasis on photography, she continues to exhibit her work in Seoul, New York, London and Berlin. At Stanford, she recently directed Anthony Neilson’s Stitching.

Angrette holds a BFA in Set Design, and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU-Tisch. Originally from Phoenix, AZ, Angrette has worked as a freelance set designer for theatre and film in NYC for the past seven years. Her credits include off-Broadway and regional plays, as well assistant credits on Broadway, and the Metropolitan Opera, and English National Opera. While in New York she also spent five years teaching stagecraft to high school students. Angrette's academic research is invested in the belief that the physical spaces we inhabit have profound effects on our beings. Her work is an exploration of space's ability to nurture an affective relationship between itself and its inhabitant, particularly through the construction process.

Audrey received her Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. She has worked in technical production for dance and theater in downtown Manhattan, trained with SITI Company and studied with Anne Bogart, and indulges in theorizing about ways art can improve the world. Her research interests include narratives of modernity; minimalism and postmodern dance; and the history of feminism in performance. She enjoys directing, playwriting, and will perform onstage when irresistible opportunities arise.

Thao P. Nguyen holds a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from the University of California at Berkeley, a Master of Arts (MA) degree in Communication Studies with a focus on Performance Studies from San Francisco State University, and a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Psychology from Brown University. As a scholar, her area of study is at the intersection of live performance, mental health, and social justice. She is particularly interested in increasing the visibility and understanding of issues most pertinent to populations experiencing multiple vectors of structural oppression, such as Asian American women and Queer and Trans People of Color (QTPOC). Nguyen is a playwright, solo performer, and comic storyteller. Her full-length one-person comedy Fortunate Daughter was named one of the top ten Bay Area plays of 2013 by KQED Year in the Arts. Nguyen has been a member of the Solo Performance Workshop since 2007. She served as the Artistic Director for the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center of San Francisco from 2013 to 2014. For more information, please visit www.thaosolo.com.

Vivek is a theatre director and playwright, whose current research is on caste, capital and performance in India during the era of economic liberalization. He is artistic director of Theatre Counteract (www.theatrecounteract.com) and alumnus of Royal Holloway, University of London, where he completed MA Theatre Direction on a Charles Wallace Award. Directorial credits include Ends and Beginnings (2007-08), based on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Girish Karnad’s The Fire and the Rain (2004), as well as the new plays An Arrangements of Shoes (2011) by Abhishek Majumdar, A Flame in Hero's Tower by Andy Dickinson (2009) and Pestilences (2012), a multilingual production inspired by Albert Camus's The Plague. In 2010, he wrote Walking to the Sun for the Mumbai-based Theatre Arpana, directed by Sunil Shanbag at the Tagore Utsav in Kolkata.  

Rebecca holds a B.A. in Theatre and English from Florida Gulf Coast University, and an M.A. in Theatre Studies from Florida State University. Before attending FSU, Becky recently completed an internship in Literary Management at the Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota. Her research interests include critical theory and the avant-garde, and the intersection between postmodernism, race, and sexuality in feminist performance. Becky is also interested in exploring methods of devised performance, and has worked with several groups in the Southwest Florida area on new work concerning coalition building among women of color, and their allies.

Gigi is a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary performance artist, writer, and psychogeographer.  She holds a B.A. from Brown University in an independent concentration entitled “Hybridity and Performance” and an M.A. in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. Her master’s thesis focused on issues of memory, embodiment, and the politics of space in relation to public art and memorials in the aftermath of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983). Her work in performance and video has been presented nationally and internationally. From 2002 to 2008, she directed her own arts organization (a)eromestiza, dedicated to presenting cutting edge video and performance by queer artists of color.  Her writing has been published in Performance Research, Social Justice Journal, shellac, artistmanifesto.com, Antithesis Journal: Sex 2000 and anthologies such as Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays and Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory / Theorizing the Filipina American Experience. She has received awards from Core77, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the San Francisco Art Commission, the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, and the National Association for Latino Art and Culture, among others. More info: gigiotalvaro.com

Jessi received an M.A. in Theater Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin where she studied as a DAAD scholarship holder. Her thesis explored monstrous strategies of Shakespearean adaptation in the work of German playwright Heiner Müller. Originally from Canada, Jessi completed her B.A. in the drama honors program at the University of Alberta with a focus on critical theory, solo and clown performance, and directing. Current research interests include embodiments of monstrosity in contemporary performance, postdramatic theater, and intersections of politics and performance.

Matt holds a B.A. in Literature from Harvard College and an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the theatrical cultures of modern Western Europe (primarily Germany and France) and examines the relation between modes of spectatorship and political conceptions of community in these contexts. His Master’s thesis intervened in Alain Badiou’s 2010 book project Five Lessons on Wagner, bringing historical evidence from the 1882 premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal to bear on Badiou’s claims about the opera as a modern ceremony. Other research interests include theories of spectacle, 19th-century German literature, and sound studies.

As a theater-maker, Matt works primarily as a director and sound designer. His productions of Genet’s The Balcony and Kane’s Cleansed appeared on the American Repertory Theater’s Mainstage in 2011, and he has also directed projects for Sightline Theater Company and the Dunster House Opera Society. His sound design credits include work for the ART/MXAT Institute, Fulcrum Theater, Sightline Theater Company, and art.party.theater.company.

Raegan works broadly across the disciplines of performance, dance, gender studies, art history and visual culture.  Her primary research is focused toward developing a nuanced understanding of durational and time-based performance, with a specific investment in queer and feminist performance art.

Artistically, Raegan is a durational performance artist and her research reflects her embodied knowledge of time-based work.  Her second year production at Stanford, if this gets messy, concluded with a consecutive twenty-eight hour performance. Her work has been presented at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZKU) in Berlin, The Northern California Performance Platform, Stanford’s Department of Art and Architecture, and Dance Theatre Workshop in New York City. She is also collaborator to Carlos Motta’s international art project “We Who Feel Differently” and the WWFD symposium at the New Museum in New York City.

Raegan holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado College; an MA in Humanities and Social Thought with a concentration in Gender Politics from John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Program at NYU; and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. She was the recipient of The Leigh George Odom Memorial Award for Distinguished Master’s Student from NYU’s Department of Performance Studies in 2011, The Shannon McGee Prize in Women Studies in 2002, and the Ann Rice Memorial Award in 2001.

Áine Josephine Tyrrell is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. After briefly studying Medicine at University College London, she completed her B.A. in English Literature and Drama Studies at Trinity College Dublin. During this time she was awarded Trinity College's Foundational Scholarship and became a Scholar of the university as well as the Chief Editor of the college's Journal of Literary Translation. Though she is primarily a director, her background in theater includes set design, devising, music composition for the stage, and acting. Her focus is on interdisciplinary research, with particular attention to the intersections between neurology, human psychology, politics and performance. Her academic interests include, but are not limited to, psycho-geography and spatial theory, bio-art, and performance art that investigates states and experiences beyond language/articulation.

Isaiah is a director-dramaturg and Ph.D. Candidate in TAPS with creative and research interests in popular culture and contemporary black theater and performance. His critical writing has appeared or is forthcoming in academic journals such as Callaloo, PAJ, Southern Studies, Theatre Journal, and Yale’s Theater and on popular sites including The Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, and NewBlackMan (in Exile), among others. Isaiah’s dissertation project, “The Afterwards of Blackness: Race, Time, and Contemporary Performance,” analyzes the aesthetic strategies and practices that contemporary black cultural producers deploy to critique concepts of normative or “modern” temporality. Isaiah’s research has been supported by the Denning Family Fellowship for the Arts, the Ric Weiland Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities, and the Diversifying Education, Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Doctoral Fellowship at Stanford. An active theater practitioner, Isaiah’s recent directing credits include: Wit by Margaret Edson; A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry; Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine by Lynn Nottage; The Gospel at Colonus by Lee Breuer and Bob Telson; Bulrusher by Eisa Davis; No Child… by Nilaja Sun; Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl; and, Beyond My Circle, the multidisciplinary performance project that he co-directed and co-devised with collaborators from Stanford and Makerere Universities and presented at the National Theatre, Kampala. A recipient of the 2014-2015 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, Isaiah is currently a Guest Artist and Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at his alma mater, Georgetown University, where he recently directed Insurrection: Holding History by Robert O’Hara and will direct In the Red and Brown Water by Tarell Alvin McCraney in fall 2014.