Devon Baur explores virtual entanglements as a PhD student in TAPS. Her research aims to destabilize the priority of the senses in performance and new media, with a specific focus on the role of olfaction. She has done ongoing work as a researcher and artist-in-residence in the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University. Prior to this, she worked in the VR/AR industry for half a decade as both a curator and producer. Most notably, she produced the award-winning Tree VR, which toured to over 90 festivals including Tribeca Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, and twice to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Anna Brungardt is a Ph.D. student in the Germanic Languages and Literature Department, now the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS). Her Ph.D. research centers around intersections of performance, gender, and representation within a colonial and post-colonial German context. Using frameworks from performance studies, memory studies, and queer studies, her larger research project focuses on performance, visual, and aesthetic legacies of the Herero genocide as they have (dis/re)appeared in twentieth-century German culture.
Pankhuri Z Dasgupta is a PhD student at the Department of Gender Studies, UCLA. She is interested in using Feminist Methods and Performance Theory to study migration within South Asia. She has a MPhil in Women's Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi where she submitted her dissertation titled Gender and Contemporary Dance in India.
Patty Gone (they/she pronouns) is a trans poet, multimedia artist, and PhD student at UCLA. Gone is the author of Love Life (Mount Analogue, 2019) and The Impersonators (Factory Hollow Press, 2017) and director of the ongoing video serial, Painted Dreams (2017, 2018, 2020). Her performance and video art has appeared at the Queens Museum, AS220, Dixon Place, The Poetry Project, and Smack Mellon, and has received grants and support from Mass MoCA, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Northampton Open Media. Gone's PhD research centers on adaptation, camp, fanfiction, satire, trans & femme cultural forms, and popular taste. pattygone.com/
Lenessa Hickman is a PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies upon receiving the Eugene V. Cota Robles Fellowship. She holds a BA in History and Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh where she received the Robert C. Laing Excellence in Theatre Award for her commitment to theatre artistry at the University. She has presented her research at the Penn York Undergraduate Research Conference. Her research interests include Black and Indigenous music and theatrical performance, Black feminist literature, The Black Arts Movement, Fashion, Environmentalism, Girlhood, Horror, and Specualitve fiction. She is also interested in theatre as pedagogy, and restorative justice in children’s education via music and dance. Lenessa has worked as a teaching artist, musical director and choreographer across adult and children’s theatres in Kansas City, Philadelphia and New York City, and recently finished an Urban Education Fellowship with AmeriCorps VISTA in New York CIty. Additionally, she has performed in several theatre productions, commercial and film. Lenessa enjoys martial arts, sewing and designing, hiking, and creative writing. She is from Kansas City, Missouri.
Iyanna Hamby is a Ph.D. student, she comes to UCLA from Nashville Tennessee. Her research interests include race, gender, and casting practices in theatre. She earned a degree was at Fisk University where she graduated summa cum laude and was her classes valedictorian. Past projects include Subversive Playwrights and Racial Tension in America.
Kirk Kanesaka is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. His dissertation is focusing on the cross-fertilization between Early Modern popular fiction and play writing. He focuses on two particular writers, popular fiction writer Ihara Saikaku and playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon. In addition to his scholarly pursuits, he is the only non-Japanese citizen to be accepted as a professional Kabuki Actor in the theater's history. He also teaches Japanese Classical dance throughout the United States.
Sarah Lewis-Cappellari is a Ph.D. student in the UCLA Theater and Performance Studies program and a Eugene Cota-Robles fellow. Sarah was based in Berlin for several years where she received her MFA at the University of Arts Berlin in the "Art in Context" program and worked with the art & science collective Mobile Academy Berlin. Her current research intersects concepts of "the marvelous real", performance, critical race and Caribbean studies to look at the symbolic and material resonance of how sugar has come to dictate tastes while exploring potentialities of consuming this seemingly banal ingredient differently.
Jennifer L. Monti is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her studies focus on Iberian Literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular interest in women writers and artists. Jennifer’s current research and dissertation project centers on the presence and representation of Cuba in a number of twentieth and twenty-first century Spanish literary texts, films, and photographs written and produced by women.
Farrah O’Shea is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theater and Performance Studies whose research focuses on the intersection of musicology and performance studies. Her recent project explored authenticity, race and celebrity in Janis Joplin’s voice and performance by examining conventional wisdom about her “authentic” whiskey voice and “originality” as a performer. Another project explored a performer’s embodied and experiential relationship to both music and poetry while performing Kaija Saariaho’s “Vent Nocturne” for solo viola and electronics. O’Shea has worked with musicologist, Susan McClary, music theorist, Diane Urista and violist, Lynne Ramsey. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Boston University and a Master of Music from the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Elizabeth Schiffer is a PhD student in the Theater and Performance Studies Department at UCLA, and a Certificate in Food Studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of food and performance, examining contemporary edible acts at both quotidian and theatrical scales through feminist, indigenous, new media, phenomenology and Anthropocene studies. Her undergraduate degree is in Theater Design and Comparative History of Ideas at University of Washington with an emphasis on nonhuman-human American mythologies and immersive performance. She was the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Pacific Science Center, with residences and video art screenings along the West Coast, her art-practice sifts through the relationships and crossings between food and performance. Find more at www.elizabethschiffler.com.
Janine Sun Rogers is a Ph.D. student in Theater and Performance Studies. Her current research explores entanglements of the state, capital, and desire in Asian American and transpacific performance. Her writing is featured and forthcoming in publications such as Variable West, Theatre Bay Area, The News Lens, Westwind Journal of the Arts, and The Documentarian.
Clara Wilch is a Ph.D. student interested in indigenous studies, affect theory, queer theory, contemporary theater and performance, ecology and biology. Recent and ongoing work has focused on intersections between performance/art, climate change, indigenous-led environmental movements, affective relationships to land and possible American futures. Clara has an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.A. in Biology from Occidental College (summa cum laude).
Qianxiong Yang is a Ph.D. student in Theater and Performance Studies and a John H. and Patricia W. Mitchell fellow. His research looks at performance and surfaces (including fashion, cinema, architecture, text) as they intersect with transnational studies (particularly the Sino/Anglo interface), technoculture and media studies, queer theory, and philosophy. Recent work has explored notions of foreignness and control via these (inter)disciplines, while other interests include fictocriticism and experimental literature. He is from Shanghai, and completed an M.A. in Performance Studies at King’s College London and a B.A. in English at Tongji University, Shanghai.
Yun-Pu Yang is a Ph.D. student in Theater and Performance Studies. She earned her MA in theater from Taipei National University of the Arts and her BA in Chinese literature from National Taiwan University. She is the recipient of the prestigious Scholarship for Oversea Study awarded by the Taiwan Government’s Ministry of Education. Her research interests are Chinese opera, gender performance, and queer theory.