Devon Baur is a PhD Candidate in Theater and Performance Studies with a Graduate Certificate in Emerging Technologies for Performance. Her research is dedicated to new media, performance, and the senses -- with a particular focus on the role of olfaction. She has designed classes that she taught at UCLA including "Multisensory Theatre" and the CUTF Awarded "I Think You're Muted: Exploring Digital Co-Presence in New Media and Performance." During her PhD she has held multiple residences/fellowships in multiple technology labs, including the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford, The Multisensory Devices Group at University College London; and on campus at UCLA with both The Center for Scholars and Storytellers and the Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP).
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 is a poet, performer, video artist, and scholar. She is the author of Love Life (Mount Analogue, 2019), and her writing has appeared in publications including The Believer, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Howlround, Boston Review, and jubilat. She has performed or been exhibited at the Queens Museum, The Poetry Project, Smack Mellon, Human Resources, and REDCAT, and her work has received support from NYU, Mass MoCA, Northampton Open Media, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Her PhD research traces how trans-feminist aesthetics from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were co-opted by the straight mainstream. She lives in Los Angeles and asks you to protect and support trans kids. 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 curator, cultural producer, and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) whose work engages the interface of performance, contemporary art, colonial visual economies, and Black Studies. Lewis-Cappellari 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 as one of the collective’s primary curators and researchers. Sarah has also researched and worked with collaborative art practices as a member of the art collective LEWIS FOREVER (which presented work amongst other places at Performance Space 122 and the New Museum in NYC), independently with SOIT in Brussels, Agora, and Sophiensaele in Berlin. Her current doctoral research delves into the material and symbolic resonance of sugar to explore how this “tastemaker” has fed the racial imagination. Considering the impact of this ingredient and energy source, Sarah delves into what this ‘sweet’ commodity elucidates about practices of racialization while exploring potentialities of consuming sugar 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 candidate at UCLA in Theater and Performance Studies, with a graduate certificate in Food Studies. She is a part-time faculty member in Food Studies at The New School. Her work focuses on contemporary performance that uses food in and as performance, entangled with human, nonhuman, and ecological scales. She is the 2022 recipient of the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge Fellowship at UCLA, and a Global Food Initiative Fellow with University of California Office of the President. She has contributed to Theatre Journal, Food, Culture & Society, and the Graduate Journal for Food Studies. 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. candidate in Theater and Performance Studies and a John H. and Patricia W. Mitchell fellow at UCLA. His main research interests are transnational cultural studies, media theory, political theory, and philosophy. He is currently writing a dissertation on underperformance in China and the US to interrogate the paradigms of biopolitical management and productions of subjects in times of transnational late capitalism, and more broadly the changing meanings of politics, value, work, and critique. He also works with fashion studies, fictocriticism, queer theory, and experimental film and literature. He is from Shanghai, and completed an M.A. in Performance Studies and Critical Culture at Kings College, London and a B.A. in English at Tongji University, Shanghai.
Yun-Pu Yang is a PhD candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include East Asian Theater (particularly Taiwan and China), gender and sexuality, Sinophone Studies, and Digital Humanities. She is currently writing her dissertation titled "The Eroticism of Peking Opera Kunsheng over the Twentieth Century." Yun-Pu is a CUTF fellow and has received the Full Scholarship for Overseas Study awarded by the Taiwanese Government's Ministry of Education, as well as the dissertation fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.
Dr. Guillermo Avilés-Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor at California State University, San Bernardino. His research exists in the intersection of indigenous mythology, site-based theater and critical historiography. He has built a career around using theatre as a way of exploring issues of social inequality as well as self-empowerment. His study of theatre has taken him all over the Americas and to the Caribbean and he has collaborated with Spanish-speaking theatre groups in Mexico, Cuba and the U.S. including Grupo malayerba from Ecuador, Yuyachkani from Peru, and Teatro de los andes from Bolivia. His Publications are featured in the Cambridge Opera Journal, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; Theatre Forum; Theatre Journal; Chiricú Journal; Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Ecumenica. He is also the 2021 co-winner of the Lowrider Studies Scholar-Activist of the Year Award, and a 2021 and 2022 participant in the Mellon School for Theater & Performance Research at Harvard university.
Graduation Year 2022
Current Affiliation: California State University, San Bernardino
Dr. Kimberly Chantal Welch is a black feminist scholar and J.D. Candidate at UCLA School of Law. She earned her Ph.D. from UCLA's doctoral program in Theater and Performance Studies in June 2018. Before matriculating to UCLA School of Law, Welch was an assistant professor of English and a Gender Studies affiliate faculty member at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL). With an emphasis on the African diaspora, her research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century performances and diverse iterations of homelessness and incarceration, questioning the ways in which the law and constructions of gender, sexuality, and race mediate how people navigate said sites of spatial dispossession. Welch’s work has been featured in several journals including American Literature, Performance Research, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, and Cultural Dynamics.
Graduation Year 2018
Current Affiliation: UCLA School of Law
Dr. Carla Neuss is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Baylor University. She is currently working on a monograph that traces transnational circulations of medieval biblical drama. The project traverses four twentieth and twenty-first century theatrical adaptations of the medieval mystery cycle tradition across the global North and South—ranging from pre-revolutionary Russia and World War II France to post-apartheid South Africa and the contemporary United States—exploring questions of social and spiritual transformation through performance during periods of political rupture. She earned her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at UCLA, having previously received her B.A. in English Literature at U.C. Berkeley and her MPhil in Medieval Studies at the University of Oxford. She was a postdoctoral fellow from 2021-2023 at Yale University in Religion and Literature. Her writing has been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Exemplaria, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.
Graduation Year 2021
Current Affiliation: Baylor University
www.carlaneuss.com
Dr. Farrah O’Shea is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Music Department at St. Lawrence University. Broadly, O’Shea’s research considers how performances of contemporary Western classical music resonate with respect to gender, race, and sexuality both on stage and on screen. O’Shea has co-organized multiple interdisciplinary conferences: Music Performance Studies Today (2021) and Contact: Performing Proximity, the UCLA Theater and Performance Studies Graduate Conference (2021). She was also organizer of UCLA QGrad, a queer graduate student conference (2021). A dedicated educator, O’Shea’s teaching has been recognized and supported by the UCLA Collegium of University Teaching Fellows. At St. Lawrence, she teaches students to read and write music, and to consider how music performance embeds in larger social contexts. With multiple degrees in viola performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music and Boston University, O’Shea brings a performer’s perspective to her research. Her teachers have included Michelle La Course, Kirsten Docter, Lynne Ramsey, and Sheila Browne. O’Shea has performed nationally and internationally in orchestral and chamber music festivals, including as a fellow with the Youth Orchestra of the Americas and the National Repertory Orchestra. She earned a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Graduation Year 2022
Current Affiliation: St. Lawrence University
Jenna Tamimi is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Reed College. She is a scholar-director whose research and artistic work focus on radical reimaginings of classics and minoritarian embodiments of the past as performance. Her work has been published in the Thornton Wilder Journal and Theatre Journal.
Graduation Year 2020
Current Affiliation: Reed College