PPP: Current Students

Angie Ahlgren

Angela Ahlgren is a second-year PhD student in Performance as Public Practice, and holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Minnesota. She is interested in the politics of "multicultural" performance, Asian American literature and performance, and queer studies. She presented "Watching With 'Unholy Fascination': Derek Jarman's Edward II, Its Critics, and Its Queer Moment" at the 2005 British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, and is developing a scholarly piece on race and gender in North American taiko drumming. She is a member of Mu Daiko, a professional taiko ensemble in Minneapolis, where she has performed and taught for the last nine years.

Shannon Baley

Shannon received her B.A. and M.A. in English literature from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her masters' thesis, "Re-Visionary Bodies: Feminist/Brechtian Theory in the Plays of Paula Vogel," explored a feminist/Brechtian reading of the constructions of gender, sexuality, and desire in such plays as Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz and Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief. She is currently completing her dissertation, "Towards a Gestic Feminist Dramaturgy." This dissertation explores a new feminist methodology for working with such productions as Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek and Sharon Bridgforth's love conjure/blues, one that examines the explosive potential of the gestus that occur around the gendered, sexed, and raced body. Shannon is a poet, a performer, and has published articles in Modern Drama and the Texas International Law Journal. She strives to embody PPP's citizen/scholar/artist in her work as a teacher, writer, actor, and dramaturg, skills most recently put to use in a collaboration she supervised between the department of Theatre and Dance students and the UT Law School's Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, creating living newspaper-inspired performances as a part of the "Working Borders" conference on the insourcing and outsourcing of labor.

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 PPP 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?

Bonnie Brookby

Bonnie earned her B.A. in Theatre with concentrations in Acting/Directing and Theatre History/Dramatic Literature from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She also earned her MA in Teaching from Trinity and has taught Theatre, English, Speech, Shakespeare, Creative Writing and Film Studies in schools in San Antonio and Houston. She returned to the PPP program after a six-year hiatus, during which time she served as Director of Theatre Arts at Tom C. Clark High School in San Antonio, Texas. Through her work in Educational Theatre, Bonnie developed an avid interest in the uses of theatre and performance as powerful tools for social change and community development. As an MFA student, she is now working to expand her work beyond the traditional classroom, through a focus on community-based theatre initiatives, educational outreach, and dramaturgy. During her first year back in the PPP program, Bonnie developed and launched Teatro ALAS, a community-based youth theatre program at SAY SI, a non-profit arts education organization in San Antonio. Committed to the creation of new and original work by, for, and about San Antonio youth, Teatro ALAS aims to develop leadership skills in middle and high school students through engagement in live performance. Bonnie currently serves as Program Coordinator. Bonnie plans to focus her thesis work on the continuing development of Teatro ALAS, with particular emphasis on cultivating youth audiences and community leadership. She is also interested in applied theatre methods for working with communities dealing with crisis and transition.

Meg Brooker

Meg Brooker is a performing artist and teacher with a strong belief in the inherent creative potential of every human being. Driven to articulate the common root of dance and theatre expression, she earned her B.A. in theatre studies from Yale University and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in Performance as Public Practice at the University of Texas at Austin. Meg has appeared in numerous New York City and regional productions and internationally in Moscow, Amsterdam, and Vienna. Most recently she danced a solo version of her choreography Thel in the ruins of an ancient Greek amphitheatre in Sevastopol, Ukraine. Thel premiered as part of The University Co-op presents The Cohen New Works Festival at UT in April 2007. Meg’s performance experience ranges from regional theatre to Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre to the dance works of Isadora Duncan as a member of Lori Belilove & Company and as a guest artist with the Duncan Dance Collective. In response to her Duncan interpretation, Financial Times critic Hilary Ostlere wrote, "Meg Brooker's breath of spring dance…projected the spontaneity and freshness necessary for this Prelude to a New Beginning." Meg has been a recipient of the Valeria Ladd/Thetis scholarship to support her studies of the work of natural dance pioneer Florence Fleming Noyes, and in June 2007 she was awarded a Graduate Student Travel Grant to attend the Society of Dance History Scholars conference in Paris, France. Meg has taught in New York City on the faculties of the School at Steps on Broadway and the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation and locally in Austin at Dance Discovery. Meg is available for Isadora Duncan workshops and lecture-demonstration performances (email MegBrooker@gmail.com).

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 BA with honors from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, double-majoring in dance and American studies. She received her MA in Performance Studies from NYU.

Jessica Del Vecchio

Jessica Del Vecchio is a first year Master's student in the Performance as Public Practice program. Her interests include feminist critiques of popular culture, performance as political activism and performance of masculinity. She graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in psychology and a certificate from the Program in Theatre and Dance. Her interdisciplinary thesis, Role Play: Feminist Theatre, Feminist Therapy and Moreno's Theories of Psychodrama, used primary source interviews with feminist performance artists to explore the therapeutic nature of autobiographical performance. Merging theory and practice, her thesis research also involved the creation and performance of her own autobiographical work, a rock extravaganza entitled "Babe in Boyland." As a performer in New York City, Jessica developed "Pop," a satirical re-imagining of the Bonnie and Clyde story with choreographer Ursula Eagly and "Pair a Dice," a parody of celebrity-obsessed culture in which she starred as Kevin Federline. Also an accomplished singer/songwriter, Jessica represents one third of the all-female country camp band, Manage Twang and she spent many years touring and recording with folk-rockers, Valentino Drag.

Michelle Dvoskin

Michelle received her BA from Amherst College, with a double major in Theatre & Dance and Women's & Gender Studies. She completed her MA in Performance as Public Practice here at UT in May 2006. Her MA 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 PhD 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.

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 a 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, group exhibitions and 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).

Thomas Graves

Thomas Graves is a third-year MFA student in Performance as Public Practice, and holds a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Earlham College. For his Master's thesis, Thomas is working to develop a sustainable infrastructure to support the theatrical arts community in Austin through facilitating the sharing of resources. In the summer of 2004 Thomas trained with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company at their summer intensive in Saratoga Springs, NY. He is a company member with the Rude Mechs, a theatre collective based in Austin, TX. In the summer of 2007 he was in residency with the Rude Mechs at the Orchard Project in Hunter, NY exploring the life and tragic death of actor-training guru Stella Burden.

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 PhD 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.

Lindsay Hockaday

This year I will be a first-year masters student in the Performance as Public Practice program. I received a BA in Theater with an honors emphasis in directing from Augsburg College in Minneapolis in 2002. I've since worked as a dramaturge and director for various theater companies in Minneapolis including Frank Theater, the Playwright's Center, and Theatre Unbound. I've recently completed coursework in the Theater Historiography program at the University of Minnesota. I hope to continue to use performance as an enactment of theory and also as a tool for investigating and writing about history and popular culture.

Kelly Howe

Kelly received her M.A. in Performance as Public Practice (PPP) from UT in May, 2006, and her B.A. in Theatre and English from Muhlenberg College in 2003. Now in her final year of coursework in PPP, she has begun research for her dissertation, Adapting Boal’s Legislative Theatre: Dramaturgies of Using Performance to Research and Translate Political Desire. Her master’s thesis, a play entitled Arrested Professional Development: Some Workplace Taboobs, explored how she and many of her colleagues have internalized the policing of women’s bodies in academic workplace contexts. Kelly’s research interests include community-based theatre, intersections of performance and policymaking, Theatre of the Oppressed, feminist comedy, historiographical performance, pedagogy as performance, and the politics of “outreach” and community engagement at professional theatres. "Learning with Gertrude Stein: Playgrounds of Aggression and Grace," an article Kelly co-authored with James Peck, appears in Theatre Topics, September 2004, and her review of Augusto Boal and A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics appears in Theatre Journal, December 2006. In April 2007, she directed the premiere of colleague Sarah Myers’ new play, God of the Gaps, an absurd and earnest exploration of the Intelligent Design controversy from an admittedly pro-science perspective. Kelly has recently 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. For the past two years, she has also served as the artistic director of Plays from Portland, a summer performance devising program in Louisville, Kentucky. Open to middle-school and high-school students who live in or identify with the Portland neighborhood, Plays from Portland is a collaboration between Actors Theatre of Louisville and Portland Promise Center.

Jill Inderstrodt

Carrie Kaplan

Sydney Katz

Sydney Michelle Katz is a second year M.A. student in the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to UT, she worked at Current TV, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and the California Shakespeare Theater in the Bay Area. Sydney received her B.F.A. in Drama from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. While living in New York, she interned at New York Theatre Workshop and the Blue Light Theater Company, and apprenticed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. Sydney spent this past summer at home in California, where she worked as the Program Associate for Campus Engagement at Stanford University’s Lively Arts organization. She is very interested in gender and performance, as well as the work of Mary Zimmerman.

Ji Hye Kim

I'm Je Hye, a 3rd year Ph.D. student. I received my undergraduate degree at Ewha Woman's University (Seoul, Korea) in Politics & Diplomacy. I also majored in Women's Studies at Ewha Woman's University. My MA thesis is "A Critical Study of Development and Historical Implications of Western Lesbian/Feminist Theories." It deals with tension and conflict between gender politics and sexual politics of lesbian theories, from a critical lesbian/feminist perspective. I'm especially interested in lesbian/feminist performance, performance studies, drag king shows, gender-bending performance, performing race, lesbian/feminist theory of lesbians of color, and queer cultural studies. For my dissertation, currently, I'm working on Performing Female Masculinities with a focus on intersections of class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. I owe a lot to queer studies, feminist/gender studies, and critical racial theory which PPP intensively provides. Also, my critical approach to female masculinities coincides with the PPP project in that it explores the layers among power dynamics, social contradictions/issues and representations in the process of production, interpretation, and reception of performance.

Jenny Kokai

Jennifer Kokai received her Bachelor’s degree from Butler University with a double major in Theatre and Philosophy, and her Master’s degree in Theatre from Washington University in St. Louis. Her Master’s thesis was entitled, “When is a Vagina Not a Vagina? A Critical Examination of The Vagina Monologues, V-Day, and Eve Ensler.” She is currently working on her dissertation, which continues her interest of studying the history of feminist activism in performance. Her dissertation is currently titled “Who Played Lady Liberty?” and explores women and performance in Boston, Massachusetts from 1780-1820. Other research interests include non-western drama, theatre and colonialism, theatre as social activism, and docudramas. Jenny has directed throughout her career, most recently directing Boom Town, Ghost Town for the 2005 University Co-Op Cohen New Works Festival and The Ladies of the Corridor for the 2003 First Year Players Show. She is also a playwright whose work has been seen in Louisville, Indianapolis, and New York, and has published an article on the aforementioned Dorothy Parker play The Ladies of the Corridor and its critical reception in Theatron Journal. At UT she has enjoyed teaching Acting for Non-Majors and Training the Speaking Voice. She also served as the Assistant to the Producers for the 2005 University Co-Op Cohen New Works Festival.

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.

Erica Lies

Erica is a second year M.A. student in the PPP program, and she holds a B.F.A. in theatre from West Virginia University. A performer and writer, Erica has worked as an artist-teacher at the Children's Theatre Company in New York's East Village and performed at the Bowery Poetry Club under the direction of Bob Holman. She also performed and studied improvised comedy at Gotham City Improv and The Magnet Theater. Since coming to Austin, Erica wrote and performed a solo piece on Emma Goldman for the Harry Ransom Center's "Voices of the American Twenties" museum theater series, and she is currently working on an oral history film for The Project in Interpreting the Texas Past and researching her thesis on female improvisers and comedians. Erica is also part of the production team for Mortified Austin. She is a native of West Virginia, and comes to UT by way of Brooklyn.

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.

Lindsey Mantoan

Lindsey Mantoan is a first year Master's student in the Performance as Public Practice program. Her scholarship focuses on the staging of political dialogues and the intersection between theater and politics. She holds an A.B. in Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton University, where her senior thesis analyzed the theatricality of British landscape garden design in the 1800s. Since graduation, she has worked as a stage manager for Northern Stage in Vermont, a production intern for the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and the assistant technical director for the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

Ray Matthews

Ray is a first year M.A. student. She received her B.A. from Bard College in Integrated Arts/Theatre in 2002. Her senior thesis, Re/presenting the Stage: Positioning the Feminine Spectator in Theatrical Space, was a critical analysis of the feminist and feminine spectator with the intention of re-creating theatrical structure and architecture in order to foreground a feminine spectator. In addition, she created a performance piece in order to put theory into practice. Since then Ray has been involved in several activist and queer performance projects. In 2004 she toured with An Olive on the Seder Plate, a multimedia performance exploring how Jewish people wrestle with the Israeli military occupation of Palestine. Ray is also co-founder and host of CampCamp, Austin's monthly queer performance night. In her studies she wishes to continue exploring the intersections of feminist and queer critical theory as they inform and complicate one another, using these theories as a format for understanding difference and how shifting identities are incorporated into a definition of community.

Marcus Mcquirter

Sarah Myers

Sarah is a third-year PhD candidate, as well as a playwright, performer, and teaching artist. She earned her BS from Northwestern University with a double major in Theatre and English and her MFA from UT Austin in Playwriting/Drama & Theatre for Youth. She is currently a company member with Rude Mechanicals theatre collective in Austin, where she directs a writing and performance workshop for teenage girls called Grrl Action. Her dissertation, "But I am the Average American Girl": Grrl Action and the Performance of Adolescent Female Identity, is an outgrowth of her work with this program over the past five years. In it, she explores Grrl Action as a case study for the ways in which young women use the tools of theatre to perform multiple selves onstage and challenge popular constructions of female adolescence. In addition to her scholarship, Sarah continues to work as a playwright and performer. She is a winner of the 2005 National Waldo M. and Grace C. Bonderman Playwriting for Youth Award for her script, The Realm, which was published by Playscripts, Inc. and Dramatics magazine in 2007. Her original solo piece [assimulation], directed by colleague Jaclyn Pryor, was staged at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s 2006 Women & Theatre Annual Conference in Chicago and in the FronteraFest Long Fringe Festival in Austin. Her most recent play God of the Gaps was featured in a staged reading directed by colleague Kelly Howe at the 2007 University Co-op Cohen New Works Festival. Sarah was named the 2007 Winifred Ward Scholar by the American Alliance for Theatre and Education.

Erica Nagel

Before coming to UT, Erica worked as Literary Intern at McCarter Theatre Center, Literary Assistant at Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Literary Fellow at Geva Theatre Center. During her time at these institutions, she served as assistant dramaturg on productions including Candida (dir. Lisa Peterson), Anna in the Tropics, (dir. Emily Mann), Wintertime, (dir. David Schweitzer), My Fair Lady (dir. Gary Griffin), and Hamlet (dir. Mark Cuddy). While in residence at Geva, she also worked as a guest instructor at SUNY Brockport, where she taught a semester-long undergraduate seminar on Dramaturgy, and the University of Rochester, where she curated the Annual Festival of New Plays. Her freelance production dramaturgy includes Copenhagen (New Century Theatre), Bash (Abingdon Theatre, NYC), and Facing Brown, a text she co-created from transcripts and oral histories of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Erica graduated Summa Cum Laude from Washington University in Saint Louis in 2003 where she served as Literary Manager for the Thyrsus Student Production Company as well as Dramaturg and Assistant Director on departmental productions of Blithe Spirit and Big Love. While at Wash U, she completed her senior honors thesis, "Dangerous Glory: Mothers and Daughters in Greek Tragedy," a study of the maternal role in rituals of death, marriage, sacrifice, and suicide in three plays of the Greek canon. Erica am a proud and grateful recipient of a 2005 LMDA "Dramaturg-Driven" grant for her work in summer 2005 to research, write, and present Bare Mountains, a documentary play created from interviews with descendents and original inhabitants of communities displaced by the creation of the Palisades Interstate Park System. In Summer 2006, she will be funded by the Ludwig-Vogelstien Foundation to experiment with including the interviewees in the artistic development of that piece. While at UT, Erica plans to focus her studies on the play development process, particularly in relation to Theatre for Young Audiences, Documentary Theatre, and, perhaps the intersection of the two. Other explorations she hopes to undertake in the PPP program include investigation of the dramaturg as community liaison/advocate, and the potential for meaningful communication between dramaturgs and critics.

Eleanor Owicki

Eleanor is a first year M.A. student with particular interests in Dramaturgy and Irish Theatre. She received her B.A. in History and Dramatic Literature from New York University. While in New York, Eleanor completed an internship with New Georges, an off-off-Broadway company dedicated to producing new works by women playwrights. After graduating, she 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 taught many classes at the Palo Alto Children's Theatre, the nation's oldest children's theatre.

Jaclyn Pryor

Jaclyn is currently a Ph.D. student in PPP, 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 BA 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 MA 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 isdirecting 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

Susanne Shawyer

Susanne received her B.A. in Theatre Studies and English Literature from Dalhousie University (Canada), and her MA in Theatre from the University of Texas at Austin. Her Master's thesis, titled "The Performance of Protest in Post-Cold War North America," used semiotics and performance theory to investigate the performance of space and props in Gulf War and global justice activism. She is currently working on her dissertation project, "Radical Performance in the Yippie Tradition," which traces the influences of the everyday-life performance and the public theatrics of the Yippies, a cultural revolutionary movement of the 1960s. She has taught courses in English language, dramatic literature, introduction to theatre, and world theatre history at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Dalhousie University, Mount Saint Vincent University (Canada), and the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests focus on the ways performance is used as a tactic of social change, and include dramaturgy, cultural studies, theatre history, and performance and activism.

Fadi Skeiker

Fadi is a third year student in the PhD program. He received his BA in Theatre studies from the Higher Institute of Theatrical Arts, Damascus, Syria. His BA 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 MA in Theatre education at Emerson College in Boston. His MA 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 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 Sycroax 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 originally from Halifax, Canada where she earned a BA 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 MA 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 conducting research for her dissertation, which will be a study of how emerging American nationalism influenced the nineteenth century newspaper response to scandals involving visiting British stars.

In addition to her research, Tamara also enjoys directing, stage managing, and especially teaching. She has been teaching Introduction to Theatre for Non-Majors since the fall of 2005.

Mary Katherine Stickel

Mary Katherine Stickel is a first year MA student in the Performance as a Public Practice program. She studied for a year at the Universit?t W?rzburg in Germany and graduated with a BA in German Language and Literature from Davidson College in North Carolina. After graduating, she spent two years in Austria with the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant program, and another two years teaching English and theatre at an International Baccalaureate high school in Linz, Austria. She is interested in how theatre promotes language education, specifically within immigrant and refugee communities in Austria and Germany.

Susan Todd

Susan is a longtime Austin area resident who received her B.A. in English at The University of Texas, where she discovered her love of theater in the Shakespeare at Winedale program. She then taught English for eight years, developing a Shakespeare Through Performance program at Leander High School. In 2003, she returned to UT to earn her MA in Women's and Gender Studies. For her thesis, "Centralizing Women in Shakespeare Through Adaptation, Collaboration, and All-female Production," she wrote, directed, and produced a feminist adaptation of Macbeth, entitled The Weird Sisters, Hand in Hand. She and the cast also formed The Weird Sisters Women's Theater Collective, which continues to promote women in theater. Since her return to UT, Susan has taught Shakespeare performance pedagogy in the UTeach-Liberal Arts Program, served as assistant director for Shakespeare at Winedale, supervised UTeach-LA interns, and taught in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. Susan serves as a visiting scholar each summer in the Huntington Library's Teaching Shakespeare program. She currently teaches a course of her own design entitled The Rhetoric of Performance. In addition to academic pursuits, Susan continues writing and directing plays that confront the canon: her play, Sycorax, was included in the 2007 University Co-op presents the Cohen New Works Festival, and she continues to direct all-female productions for The Weird Sisters. Susan remains deeply concerned about equality issues surrounding casting and artistic choices in the production of canonical works in educational and other publicly funded settings. She believes that while these works usually serve inadvertently as tools of hegemonic oppression, careful teachers and theater practitioners can use Shakespeare as a vehicle for challenging patriarchy. Her dissertation title is Canonical Confrontations: Feminist Adaptations of Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Tempest.

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.