Dr. Joni L. Jones is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance, and Associate Director of the Center for African and African-American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an artist/scholar who is currently engaged in performance ethnography and videography around the Yoruba deity Osun. In Austin, Texas and Washington, D.C. she has received acting awards for her work in professional theatre. Her articles on performance and identity have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, The Drama Review, Theatre Insight, and Black Theatre News. While on a Fulbright Fellowship in Nigeria (1997-98), Dr. Jones taught at Obafemi Awolowo University and contributed Theatre for Social Change workshops for the Forum on Governance and Democracy in Ile-Ife. Her dramaturgical work includes con flama for Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre in Austin, Texas, Clay Angels for New WORLD Theatre in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery and Pill Hill for First Stage Productions in Austin, Texas. She continues to perform her performance art critique of the academy entitled "sista docta" on the academic circuit. Dr. Jones is also the proud mother of a seventeen-year-old daughter who is a freshman at Temple University.