Current Students

Olateju Adesida

Adekemi Adeyemi

Derek Barton

Research: marionette performance in the Czech Republic and Germany

Lisa Biggs

Andrew James Brown

Research: queer memory practices in diaspora, genocide, and refugee conditions; re-emergence and resilencing in commemoration, musealization, and monument building.
Performance: exploring the line of appropriation in theories of epic memory and the ability to remember what belongs to another time, space, and identity.

Hilary Cooperman

Colleen Daniher

Research Interests: Mixed-race cultural production and performance in everyday life; racial epistemologies (especially "post-race" rhetoric); affect and identity.

Meiver De la Cruz

Research interests: The gendered, sexual, imperial, and racial politics of "belly dance" and Arab dance performance in the US (particularly since the start of the "war on terror"); how ideas of race, gender, national belonging, and ethnicity play out as ritual and cultural performance practices are transferred (both geographically and conceptually) — and as a result, appropriated/re-invented — within the capitalist, globalized world. Commodity Orientalism, Marxist feminism, queer theory.

Victoria Fortuna

Research interests include: contemporary Latin/o dance performance, performance-based engagements with state violence, and dance archival practices. Victoria's dissertation will focus on the relationship between Buenos Aires-based contemporary dance and politics from the 1960s to the present, with specific attention to dance practice as a site for negotiating and transmitting cultural memory.

Roy Gomez-Cruz

Interests: Contemporary circus as a multidimensional performance space where varied forms of circus tradition and popular culture are being reinterpreted for global audience’s consumption. The politics of labor practices in the itinerant circus. Aesthetic in circus and the connotations of transgression, grotesquery and bestiality historically associated with traditional circuses.

Barnaby King

Barnaby is a performer, teacher, and director who studies clowning as a set of transformative social practices in South America, and especially Colombia. He particularly engages with issues of play, boundary transgression, symbolic inversion, political subversion, humor, and the carnivalesque, as these pertain to clowning and other kinds of comic, improvisational, and political performance.

Kareem Khubchandani

Kareem is interested in the experiences of queer South Asians in the diaspora, and the ways in which they use public culture (specifically Bollywood Dance) to perform socio-political identities.

Elias Krell

Elias thinks about and performs gender deviance among transgender and gender nonconforming Do-It-Yourself musicians in the U.S. and Canada. In particular, he looks at the ways in which contested identities are performatively constructed, essentially experienced, and erotically performed through the voice in song. He uses the trope of touring in order to look at identities in process, doing ethnography that follows the mobile nature of his research subjects.

Rae Langes

Rae is interested in queer performance artists/troupes that embody the grotesque as an aesthetic to construct sexual/gender/national identities, and how their practices complicate normative LGBTQ politics and boundaries of the human body. 

Mario LaMothe

Mario’s dissertation project explores the process by which Haitian creative practitioners (dis)articulate facets of Haitianness. He illustrates this by demonstrating how Franco-Haitian singer Toto Bissainthe (1934–1994), Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969), and Haitian choreographer Jean-René Delsoin represent the folk in music, dance, spoken word, literature, and visual arts. He specifically investigates the ways in which they question images of the folk as the "ethnic" Haitian body that has been metonymic of these remembering expressive practices.

Margaret Lebron

Research interests: performances of patriotism and national identity in the United States, affective and embodied formations of patriotic collectives, disciplining structures of military training as identity formation.

Jasmine Mahmoud

Research interests: Political economy of theater and performance landscapes; arts policy; dialogue among cultural histories and normative historical narratives.

Greg Mitchell

Gregory's dissertation examines how tourism in Brazil influences presentations of racialized masculinity in everyday life, particularly in sex industries. Research interests also include political economy, stagings of cultural performances, and queer folklore and language.

Mbongeni Mtshali

A contemporary dance and physical theatre performer and choreographer, Mbongeni is also an actor, director, designer and puppeteer, and is particularly interested in site-specific multimedia performance art works.  His research focusses on postcolonial black modernities, the politics of intimacy, affect and belonging, and the spatial modalities of race, ethnicity, gender and class in post-apartheid South Africa.

Munjulika Rahman

Research: Bangladeshi dance practices, Indian classical dance, ethnography, nationalism, postcolonialism, Hindu mythology

Priscilla Renta

Research: Afro-Latin performance practices in a global context.

Kantara Souffrant

Stephanie Tam

Stephanie focuses on the performance of well-being in international development discourse, exploring poverty as a dialogue between equality and freedom that is performed, perceived, and constructed through low-income housing and slum upgrading projects. Her research interests include fuzzy performance measurements in developmental economics, human rights, post-colonialism and the international developmentindustry, and the ethics and politics of aesthetics.

Rhaisa Williams

Rhaisa is interested in investigating the complexity of language (both performative and constative) among black trans(gender)sexual women and how those articulations help them negotiate various forms of survival.

Nikki Yeboah

Soo Ryon Yoon

Justin Zullo

Justin is a percussionist, beatboxer and hip hop producer interested in the correlations of art, activism and identity. 
Research interests: Race and inequality, undocumented immigrant communities, ‘artivism,’ DREAM Act, global hip hop culture, sound installation, ethnography, and Participatory Action Research.