PPP: Current Students

Angela Ahlgren

Angela Ahlgren is a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is working on her dissertation about taiko drumming, gender, and spectatorship, provisionally titled “Taiko in Performance: A Feminist Analysis of North American Taiko Across Performance Contexts.” Other scholarly interests include Asian American theatre and performance, and queer theory and performance. Her essay, “‘In Search of Something Else’: Tiffany Tamaribuchi, Taiko Drumming, and Queer Spectatorship,” received the 2008 Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) Outstanding Graduate Research Award. She holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Minnesota, and a B.A. in Theatre Arts and English from Augsburg College. Angie has worked as a stage manager, dramaturg, and development director at Mu Performing Arts in Minneapolis. She was also a performing member of Mu Daiko, a Minneapolis-based taiko group, for nine years, and continues to compose and perform in Austin. Her taiko duet, “Futari Tomo”, premiered at the University of Texas, and appeared as part of a collaboration with Holly Williams at the 2008 American College Dance Festival in New York City. Her taiko solo, Water, will premiere at the 2009 University Co-op Presents the Cohen New Works Festival in April.

Download Angela's resume (pdf – download adobe reader.)

Heather Barfield

I received my undergraduate degree at the University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology with Honors. Before transferring to UT, I spent two years at NYU film school. Currently, I am in my second year of doctoral studies in the P.P.P. program. For my master's degree, I studied at NYU Performance Studies with Richard Schechner. My thesis was a performance focusing on trauma, sexuality, self image and AIDS with an accompanied paper describing the theory and research process for the performance. Among so many theatre passions, I am interested in experimental exchanges between spectators and performers through either staged performances or the development of original material that addresses sentiments peculiar to a community. I have been an active member of the Austin theatre scene for 15 years and continue to engage with the community through writing periodic reviews of productions in the Austin Chronicle weekly or directing and producing at various venues around town. I invest deeply in performance as public practice as a politically aware citizen of Austin arts and within the larger scholastic frame of theatre used as potent form of expression. Can performance move beyond the scope of the housed arena when catharsis moves us into affective reaction? Fundamentally, I am most attracted to a central question: what and how can theatre and performance teach us about ourselves and our world in an increasingly conflicted culture?

Cassidy Browning

Cassidy C Browning is an activist theatre scholar, educator, and practitioner. Browning began as a Ph.D. in the Performance as Public Practice Program this fall, and is a Co-Coordinator for the Queer Ethnography Research Cluster through the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at UT. Browning was recently an Instructional Assistant Professor in Illinois State University's School of Theatre, and graduated in 2008 with an M.A. in Theatre History and Criticism and minor in Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Browning's undergraduate degree is a double major in Acting and Theatre History from Illinois State University in 2006. Research interests include Queer Theory and Theatre, Gender Studies, Performance Art, Feminism, Guerilla Theatre, Transgender Identities, Performance Studies, Racialized Studies, Humor, and Internet Identity. Browning deposited a thesis in May 2008 titled, “A Room of Wong's Own: Identity Politics in the Life and Work of Kristina Wong” about a Los Angeles-based performance artist who became a figure of Third Wave Feminism after creating her infamous website.

Claire Canavan

Clare Croft

Clare Croft is a Ph.D. student with interests in dance history and the intersection between dance and cultural policy. Her dissertation focuses on U.S. State Department sponsorship of international dance tours as a form of cultural diplomacy. Her paper, “Photographs and Dancing Bodies: Alvin Ailey's 1967 State Department Sponsored Tour of Africa,” received the Society of Dance History Scholars' 2007 Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for outstanding graduate student work. Performance and book reviews by Clare will appear in upcoming issues of Theatre Journal and Dance Research Journal.

Prior to returning to graduate school, Clare worked at the National Endowment for the Arts as a specialist in the dance and media programs. She was also a regular contributor to The Washington Post, writing weekly dance reviews and features about issues in the arts. Her writings on dance have been published in The Baltimore Sun, Dance Magazine, and the Houston Chronicle. Currently, Clare writes about dance for the Austin American-Statesman. As a dancer, she performed with Alabama Ballet and, after college, with several modern dance choreographers in the Washington, D.C. area. Clare received her B.A. with honors from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, double-majoring in dance and American studies. She received her M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU.

Michelle Dvoskin

Michelle received her B.A. from Amherst College, with a double major in Theatre & Dance and Women's & Gender Studies. She completed her M.A. in Performance as Public Practice here at UT in May 2006. Her M.A. thesis, “Under Their Spell: How the Musical Episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Queer the Audience”, considered the intersections of queer content, serial episodic television, and the conventions of musical theatre on those two television programs. Now a Ph.D. student, Michelle's research continues to focus on musical theatre; her dissertation project looks at musicals that explicitly take up historical narratives, in order to explore what types of historiographic interventions such musicals might make. Michelle's other interests include constructions and representations of gender and sexuality in performance, US popular culture, and directing. As a director, Michelle has worked on a variety of projects, including serving as a co-director for the First Year Players throughout her time at UT.

Ninoska Escobar McField

Denise Forbes-Erickson

D. Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson was born and raised in Jamaica, West Indies. She is a Ph.D. student in Theatre History/Criticism/Theory/Text (Performance as Public Practice). Her dissertation focuses on sexuality in Caribbean design and performance, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular performance in British West Indian slave societies, as a lens to examine the controversies of homophobia, homoeroticism and hetero-eroticism in contemporary Caribbean visual culture, performance and its trans-nationality. She is currently completing a Doctoral Portfolio in African and African American Studies specializing in the African Diaspora in the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS). Denise holds an M.A. in Theatre, University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. She earned a B.A. (Hons.) in Theatre Design from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, England, and a Diploma in Sculpture, specializing in welded steel sculptures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual Arts and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica. She presented scholarly papers at international conferences, including the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) Annual Conference in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil (2007), the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) Annual Conference in Winchester, England (2006). She also presented scholarly papers at national conferences at the Africa 2007 Conference at the University of Texas at Austin (2007), and the Comparative Drama Conference (CDC), Los Angeles, California (2006). As an artist and theatre designer, Denise exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, as well as theatre productions in the Caribbean, USA, Canada, the Czech Republic and England. She worked as a theatre designer for Theatre Centre Company in London, England in association with Mercury Theatre in Colchester, England, with British directors Rosalind Hutt and Adrian Stokes. Denise was also the set designer for the Little Theatre Movement (LTM) National Pantomime Company of Jamaica in Kingston, Jamaica, led by acclaimed Caribbean theatre practitioners and scholars, Barbara Gloudon and Rex Nettleford. Denise is currently designing for ProArts Collective in association with St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the Society of British Theatre Designers (SBTD), the Jamaican Artists and Craftsmen Guild (JACG), the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA).

Nicole Gurgel

Christina Gutierrez

Christina Gutierrez is a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice. Her Master's Degree in Theatre History is from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her B.A. in English Language/Lit and Performance is from Whittier College in Los Angeles. Christina's dissertation research is on modern performances of medievalism, both on stage in plays that engage with medieval themes and motifs, and in spaces like Renaissance Fairs and the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas tat allow for embodied and participatory experiences of the Middle Ages. She also works with modern productions of Shakespeare's history plays as medieval historiography. Her master's thesis, entitled “Staging God's Ply: Translating the York Mystery Plays for (Post)Modern Audiences“, examined two twentieth century productions of a fourteenth-century play cycle. Christina is also a professional dramaturg, and works extensively with the Austin Shakespeare Festival and with UT department productions She has also freelanced both academically and professionally as a dramturg with The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, the Rude Mechanicals, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, Scottish Rite's summer Shakespeare series, Fresh Baked Theatre Company, The University of Colorado at Boulder, and Whittier College. Christina is from Los Angeles, California.

Rebecca Hewett

Rebecca completed her B.A. with honors at The College of William and Mary, where she majored in Theatre and minored in Women's Studies. She finished her master's degree in the Performance as Public Practice Program in May 2004. Her master's thesis, titled “‘Sing Me a Song with Social Significance’: Cultural Labor as Public Performance in Pins and Needles,” explores the performance of race, gender, and class in Pins and Needles, a musical performed in the 1930s by members of the International Ladies' Garment Worker's Union. Now a Ph.D. candidate, Rebecca is working on a dissertation focusing on performances of citizenship in early twentieth century historical pageantry. She is an active dramaturg here in the Austin community, and recently served as an assistant curator for the Harry Ransom Center's exhibit on Arthur Miller.

Kelly Howe

Kelly is a Ph.D. candidate in P.P.P.. Her dissertation, “Adapting Boal's Legislative Theatre: Producing Democracies, Casting Citizens as Policy Experts,” examines legislative theatre projects in Vancouver, British Columbia; Omaha, Nebraska; and Austin, Texas. Kelly's research interests include: intersections of performance and policymaking, Theatre of the Oppressed and other theories of theatre workshop facilitation, community-based theatre, feminist theory/pedagogy, critical race theory, feminist comedy, and directing new plays. Kelly is President-elect of the board of directors of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO) and a graduate student representative for ATHE's Theatre and Social Change (TASC) focus group. She also co-edits PTO's newsletter. Her article, “Embodied Think Tanks: Practicing Citizenship Through Legislative Theatre,” appears in Text and Performance Quarterly's July 2009 issue on citizenship. In May 2009, she co-facilitated The Eye and Tooth Project: Forum Theatre on the Death Penalty, a legislative theatre project performed at The Off Center in Austin. She has reviewed the Augusto Boal edition of the Routledge Performance Practitioners series and A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (for Theatre Journal) and Theatre for Living: The Art and Science of Community-Based Dialogue (for Theatre Topics). Kelly also co-authored “Learning with Gertrude Stein: Playgrounds of Aggression and Grace738221; with James Peck (Theatre Topics, September 2004).

In Kelly's most recent new play collaboration, she directed Martin Zimmerman's Phoenix Unforgiven, based on testimony about Argentina's Dirty War. In April 2007, she directed the premiere of former P.P.P. colleague Sarah Myers' new play, God of the Gaps, an absurd and earnest exploration of the Intelligent Design controversy from a pro-science perspective. She has also directed the premieres of Robert Sanchez's The Chev and her own play Arrested Professional Development, part of her M.A. thesis. Kelly has worked as a teaching artist for the Austin-based Theatre Action Project and the UT Humanities Institute Living Newspaper Project. In 2006/2007, as a playwright contracted by the Harry Ransom Center, Kelly wrote performances that animated artifacts in the exhibit The American Twenties. She also served for three years as the artistic director of Plays from Portland, a community-based devising program run by Actors Theatre of Louisville. Kelly received her M.A. in Performance as Public Practice from UT in May 2006, and her B.A. in Theatre and English from Muhlenberg College in 2003.

Carrie Kaplan

Kristin Leahey

Kristin is a second year Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice. Some of her concentrations of study include drama and theatre for youth and dramaturgy. In the spring of 2005 she was the dramaturg for the University of Texas' production The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, a collaborative project with Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum. She also performed in UT's 2005 David Mark Cohen New Works Festival and with Austin's Second Youth Theatre. She earned a master's degree in theatre with specializations in child drama and performance at Northwestern University. Her master's thesis, “Removing the Blindfold: An Anthology of Socially Challenging Theatre for Youth Plays,” is a dramaturgical examination of new plays that address social issues affecting young adult audiences. While in Chicago she worked as a dramaturg, teaching artist, and in outreach administration for the Goodman Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre, Child's Play Touring Company, Metropolis Centre for the Performing Arts, and Emerald City Children's Theatre. She is a graduate of Tufts University with majors in drama and history.

Stephen Low

Shelley Manis

I hold a master's in english from the University of Kansas, where I focused as much as possible on dramatic literature. Prior to graduate school, I spent several years working for a professional theatre company in Kansas City, attended the Publishing Institute at the University of Denver, and spent four years as a Contract Administrator for a Kansas City publishing firm. I'm passionate about the important rhetorical and ideological work cultural performances, from television to literature to politics, do, whether or not their creators explicitly espouse a particular ideology. I'm deeply invested in careful close readings of cultural productions; I believe in the power and the pleasure of engaging with these performances wields, affectively, intellectually, and ideologically. I refuse to separate intellectual and ethical rigor from entertainment, and I hope to write and teach in such a way as to model attention to the affective and ideological mechanisms at work in the creation of cultural and historical meaning-making. Tentatively titled “‘Careful the Tales You Tell’: The Performance of Civilization in a Post 9/11 World,” my dissertation takes four performances as case studies through which to analyze and interrogate narratives about the post-9/11 world: the ABC Television series, Lost; post-9/11 productions of Into the Woods (primarily the Broadway revival of 2003); Tom Stoppard's trilogy, The Coast of Utopia; and the post-9/11 Bush administration.

Marcus Mcquirter

Nikiko Masumoto

Eleanor Owicki

Eleanor Owicki is a Ph.D. student in the Performance as Public Practice program. Her primary focus is on Irish theatre, and particularly the performances of sectarian, sexual, and gender identities in the context of the Northern Irish Troubles and their aftermath. She received an M.A. in P.P.P. in spring 2008 with a thesis titled: “Our Day Will Come?: Female and Catholic Identities in Northern Irish Theatre.” She holds a B.A. from New York University, where she double majored in History and Theatre History. Before coming to UT, Eleanor spent a year as an intern in the Education and Dramaturgy Departments of TheatreWorks, a regional theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area. While there, she was the dramaturg for Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig. Eleanor has also worked as a dramaturg on several productions at UT, including Big Love, Still Life with Iris, and The Idiot.

Jaclyn Pryor

Jaclyn is currently a Ph.D. student in P.P.P., with a doctoral portfolio in cultural studies. Her research interests include contemporary theater and dance practices, cultural memory and diasporic performance, lesbian/gay/queer history and activism, popular culture, and the relationship between theory and practice. Jaclyn graduated summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.A. in Performing Arts (dual emphasis acting and criticism). Her undergraduate thesis was on Maria Irene Fornes' play, Mud, which she also directed. After graduating from college, Jaclyn worked as a teaching artist in the Chicago Public School system; she also directed, dramaturged, and performed with various Chicago companies, including Redmoon Theatre, Stage Left Theatre, Scrap Mettle SOUL, The Bailiwick, and Steppenwolf. She moved to New York to train with Anne Bogart's SITI Company before relocating to Austin. Her M.A. thesis, “floodlines”, was a site-specific, durational, performance installation in response to 9/11. In 2005, “floodlines” was re/presented as part of The Refraction Arts Fuse Box Festival in Austin. Currently, she is directing assim-u-lation, a solo show by colleague Sarah Myers about the intersections of ethnic and sexual trauma and devising a new work, Distant/Local Readings, with colleague Paul Bonin-Rodriguez. In the department, Jaclyn has taught undergraduate classes in Theatre History/Criticism and Acting. She is also a teaching artist for Theatre Action Project, where she co-teaches an after-school program for adolescent girls. Her review of the Throws Like a Girl festival is forthcoming in Theatre Journal and she is co-editing, with Jill Dolan, a book project about Peggy Shaw.

Roen Salinas

Fadi Skeiker

Fadi is a third year student in the Ph.D. program. He received his B.A. in Theatre studies from the Higher Institute of Theatrical Arts, Damascus, Syria. His B.A. thesis is entitled “The Syrian Theatre in the Mirror of the West”. Fadi was the dramaturge for a modern dance company in Damascus “Ramad.” He was offered a Fulbright grant, which allowed him to earn his M.A. in Theatre education at Emerson College in Boston. His M.A. thesis was “Unveiling The Mask: Designing a College-Level Arab Theatre Course.” While at Emerson, Fadi directed Ohio Impromptu by Samuel Beckett and Penguin Blues by Ethan Philips. He was the production dramaturge for Game of Patience at Boston actor's workshop; he participated in several puppet pieces where he presented original pieces by him and The King's Elephant by Syrian playwright Wanus in Puppet Showplace Theatre in Brookline Village. He also performed in Boston a version of A Day in the Life of a City with The Living Theatre Company. While in Austin, Fadi has been active in leading workshops on “Dream work for actors” and “Shadow Theatre” both at UT and in the Austin area. He was the production dramaturge for Kneeling Down at Noon written by Steve Moore, he directed Sycorax by Susan Todd for the University Co-op Cohen New Work Festival. He also directed week 10 of Suzan Lori Parks 365 Days/Plays. The show was presented in a shadow theater style. It was performed on January 15, one of the coldest nights Austin has ever seen.

Fadi's main influence has been Eugenio Barba. Fadi's passion is to find a common ground for communication between the West and the Arabs. Fadi is also interested in the way the theatre can be used as a tool for social change especially in Arab communities. Fadi is currently infatuated with Sufism and its perfromative aspects. Fadi is also taken by hand drumming, puppetry and photography.

Check out Fadi's Student Profile

Tamara Smith

Tamara Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance as Public Practice. She is originally from Halifax, Canada where she earned a B.A. in Theatre History and Criticism from Dalhousie University in 2001. Her primary research interest is the response to popular theatre in nineteenth-century American news print media. This interest figured prominently in her M.A. thesis, “In Most Things Unlike Women: Domestic Femininity and the Response to Burlesque in American Quality Magazines,” which she completed in 2004. She is currently writing her dissertation, a study of nineteenth century American newspaper responses to scandals involving visiting British stars. In addition to her research, Tamara also enjoys directing, stage managing, and especially teaching. She taught Introduction to Theatre for Non-Majors from Fall 2005 to Spring 2008, and is currently working as a consultant for the Undergraduate Writing Center in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric.

Download Tamara's resume (pdf – download adobe reader.)

Beliza Torres Narvaez

Beliza is a performer, dancer and artist educator. She studied Spanish Studies and Drama at the University of Puerto Rico. She has an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, and is currently in the Ph.D. Performance as a Public Practice Program.

She was a resident puppeteer at the Bread and Puppet Theatre in Vermont. While living in Quito, Ecuador, she studied acting, body movement, improvisation, and text interpretation with Malayerba, considered one of South America's most important contemporary theatre companies. In her homeland, Puerto Rico, she was a member of the Hincapi Contemporary Dance Company.

Before coming to UT, she worked as Theatre Instructor at the University of Puerto Rico. Some of the courses she taught were Corporal Expression, Dramatic Activities for Teachers, Theatre as an Experience and she supervised teaching students majoring in Theatre.