DCORRELL@STANFORD.EDU

Danielle Adair is an artist, performer, and writer. Her works have premiered in exhibition, screening, theater and concert venues internationally. She is the author of From JBAD: Lessons Learned (Les Figues Press) based on her time as “embedded media” with US Forces in Afghanistan and for which she created the feature-length video-performance FIRST ASSIGNMENT. Her second feature-length work And I Think I Like It. is a collection of 13 video-song-poems with an accompanying artist book (Edition Solitude). As part of her three-part video-performance Caution, bomb, Adair created and premiered her experimental opera Caution Baum with the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart. Adair is a California Community Foundation Visual Arts Fellow, a Center for Cultural Innovation – ARC Grantee, the recipient of The Louis Sudler Prize in the Performing and Creative Arts, and Fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Digital Arts Studios Belfast, and I-Park Foundation, among other distinctions. She holds her BA with Honors in Human Development and in Visual Arts from The University of Chicago and her MFA in Critical Studies and in Studio Arts from California Institute of the Arts.

In her work and writing Adair is interested in the construct and guarantor of persona, conceptions of psychopathology, immaterial and emotional labor, and the relationship between persona and machine intelligences. danielleadair.com

  MARLONA@STANFORD.EDU

Marlon (He/Him) is a theatre practitioner, performance studies researcher, and writer. He is the author of Froteztology (2011). He is a MA graduate in English literature from the University of Geneva and an English honors graduate from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.

He served as the secretary of the Sri Lanka Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and has organized five international literary conferences from 2010-2023. He is a guest editor of Mise en Abyme International Journal of Comparative Literature and Arts (VIII, Issue 2), special edition on Sri Lankan Combative Art, Angampora.

He was the Senior Assistant Editor of Himal Southasian, a regional magazine of politics and culture. His rapportage has been featured in Reuters, DW, BBC World, WION, The Washington Post, NPR, and other outlets worldwide. He has directed plays for Emmet Theatre Company in Geneva.

His research interests include migrant writing and literature, Southasian studies, performing blackness, blackface, Southasian antiblackness, theatre pedagogy, theatre historiography, decolonizing actor-training traditions, combative arts, and cognition and performance. He tweets at @exfrotezter. Click here to access his artistic profile.

KBHAGANI@STANFORD.EDU

Karishma Bhagani, from Mombasa, Kenya, is pursuing a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. She graduated from New York University (NYU) with a B.F.A in Theatre and a B.A. in History. In her capacities as a director, producer and scholar of the performing arts, Karishma is keen on contributing to the development of a sustainable creative economy within East Africa. Karishma currently serves as the Associate Artistic Director for the Tebere Arts Foundation in Uganda and Associate Producing Director for the Nairobi Musical Theatre Initiative in Kenya. She is also a fellow at the Georgetown Lab for Global Performance and Politics. While at NYU, Karishma was the recipient of the Richard Hull Fellowship, the Bevya Rosten Memorial Award, the CTED Development Impact Fellowship and the Presidents’ Service Award. She was also the Tisch bachelor’s representative at NYU’s All-University Commencement ceremony.

YUTSHA@STANFORD.EDU

Yutsha (she/her) is a researcher, writer, and artist from Nepal. After completing her Bachelor’s from the University of Delhi and a Master’s in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Yutsha worked as a research associate at Nepal Picture Library, a digital photo archive in Lalitpur, Nepal.

During her undergraduate years, as the co-president of the English Theatre Society, The Ariels, she collaboratively directed, acted, and produced plays like The Maids by Jean Genet, Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, and The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco. More recently, her artistic endeavors have been rooted in digital archiving, field research, and photographs. She has been part of two exhibitions at Nepal Picture Library: The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project (2018) and The Skin of Chitwan (2020).

Her research interests intersect embodied citizenship, political identity, representation, and visual media/culture.

  SARIELGF@STANFORD.EDU

Sariel Golomb (she/her) is a dancer and writer who researches intersections between (abject) corporeality, the politics of representation, and the erotics of the gaze. She holds a BA in English and Dance, with departmental honors, from Columbia University. Her dissertation explores the ontology and aesthetics of the body in twentieth and twenty-first century theatrical dance in relation to humanist/post-humanist dialectics and the material conditions of embodiment under biopolitics. Sariel is also pursuing PhD minors in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity.

As a dancer, Sariel has performed works by Diane Frank, amara tabor-smith, Gesel Mason, Trisha Brown, Gwen Welliver, Alexandra Beller, Pam Tanowitz, Sam Kim, and Heidi Henderson.

Sariel’s writing on dance and dance texts has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, ODC.Dance.Stories, and Dance Research Journal, and is forthcoming in TDR and the anthology The Articulate Body: Dance and Science in the Long-Nineteenth Century (University Press of Florida). She serves as Colloquies Editor for ARCADE (a digital salon of the Stanford Humanities Center), and Assistant Editor for The Articulate Body. Sariel is Graduate Student Representative for the Dance Studies Association (DSA). She is the recipient of TAPS’s Carl Weber Memorial Fellowship with TDR (2021-2023) and a 2022 Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for excellence in graduate dance scholarship.

  HUMPHRIS@STANFORD.EDU

Emma Humphris (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies and Master student in Education at Stanford University. Her research employs the lens of performance studies to examine and assess security sector reform initiatives, specifically in the context of police training and capacity development programs. She has an overarching interest in the performance of state violence and its modes of reproduction through training, gestures, discourse and representation. Her jurisdictions are the United States and France, where she works with police academies and the French Gendarmerie Mobile. She holds a Msc In Criminology and Criminal Justice from Oxford University and a degree in political science from Sciences Po Paris and Philosophy from la Sorbonne Paris (IV).

Emma’s research interests have shaped her creative practice in and outside of the academic world. She has written and created a short dance film entitled Bala Sabab while working in the Lebanese criminal justice system. She has also devised Women in Waiting, a play about women’s experiences in immigration detention centers. She is now using similar material to develop an exhibition at the VBKO museum in Austria in September 2021. 

  DNJACK@STANFORD.EDU

Daniel Jackson works in live performance and digital media at the intersection of technology, interactivity, and identity. His work interrogates the possibilities that new technologies provide for creating surprising experiences that question our understanding of the world. His recent work includes An Old Ruinous Vault, With A Strong Grated Door, Through Which The Moon-Beams Are Gleaming, exhibited as part of San Antonio’s CAM Perennial group art show, and Basement Complex Suite 102 at Jump-Start Performance Co. He holds an MFA in Video for Performance and Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts.

In addition to creating and producing his own work, Daniel has spent time working as an artist and technician with Andrew Schneider, Young Jean Lee, Radiohole, The Wooster Group, and Jump-Start Performance Co.

Daniel’s research interests include algorithmically generated performance, the execution of code as performance, performance in virtual spaces, and contemporary American experimental theater.

MARINAJB@STANFORD.EDU

Marina Johnson (she/they) is a third year PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies Department at Stanford University, also pursuing PhD minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Critical Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She was a 2021-2022 Graduate Public Service Fellow with the Stanford Haas Center. She is the co-artistic director of the Nitery Experimental Theatre on Stanford’s Campus. Marina has a BA and a BS from Penn State University and received her MFA in Directing from the University of Iowa. She is the co-host of Kunafa and Shay, a podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons. Bergenstock is a member of Silk Road Rising’s Polycultural Institute and is an Associate Literary Manager with Golden Thread Productions’ 2023 ReOrient Festival. She has trained with the SITI Company and in the Kennedy Center Directing Lab. Prior to beginning her PhD, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Beloit College for three years.

Recent directing credits include: Shakespeare’s Sisters, The Palestinian Youth Monologues, Supposed Home, Man of God, Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche, and In the Next Room at Beloit College. Additionally, she was the assistant director and dramaturg on As Soon As Impossible (Stanford, 2021) and dramaturg and assistant director for Twice, Thrice, Frice at Silk Road Rising (2019). Her work has been published in MATC’s Theatre/Practice, Eumenica, and in Arab Stages. marina-johnson.com

  TSJ2110@STANFORD.EDU

What’s going on folx. My name is T. Shacon (He/Him/His), and I am from New Haven, Connecticut. You can usually find me devouring crispy wings, listening to 90’s jams, creating art, or hiking with my new pup Langston. I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Performance Studies and a Master’s student in the Graduate School of Education studying the intersection of race, choreography, technology, and citizenship. I am primarily interested in the black male body in movement practices of care, belonging, intimacy, and surveillance.

In 2021, I earned a Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis from Stanford and recently served as a facilitator for DEI engagement in the Office of Inclusion, Community and Integrated Learning (ICIL) and as a Graduate Scholar in Residence at the Black Community Service Center. I’ve also taught at the Hope House and worked as a Graduate Fellow at the Haas Center, CCSRE, BEAM, Arts Intensive, and Nitery. 

Prior to studying at Stanford, I earned an MFA in Theatre Management and Producing from Columbia University, as well as a BA in English Literature /BA in Dance from Morehouse College. In addition, I’ve studied at the Ailey School, Earl Mosley’s Institute of the Arts, and the British American Drama Academy. I’ve also worked on and off-Broadway at shows like Sleep No More and cultural institutions such as New York Theater Workshop, Ballet Hispanico, Parsons Dance Company, and New York Live Arts. Before coming to Stanford, I worked in K-12 education as a teacher and senior-level administrator, and often moonlighted as a DJ and arts education consultant.

Outside my academic and professional work, I am involved in LGBTQ+, homelessness, sex education, and foster care advocacy. In my free time, I enjoy bodybuilding, photography, and amusement parks. I am a huge fan of Jordan Peele, a lover of Tiny Desk Concerts, and as of this fall, a new learner of American Sign Language (ASL).

Feel free to reach out: tsj2110@stanford.edu

  CLIFSON@STANFORD.EDU

Connor Lifson is a director of live, devised, and multimedia performance. Alongside his artistic work, Connor’s scholarship and practice-based research examine how the genres of science fiction and fantasy can serve as a catalyst to rehearse new realities: not to hold up a mirror to society, but a shimmering looking glass — not to reflect our world’s reality, but its fantastic potential. In service of this mission, Connor engages across disciplines and forms, drawing on cinematic vocabularies in his onstage work through live video cameras, dynamic video projections, and various forms of puppetry. He is currently developing a highly collaborative process for devising performance, called Worldbuilding, which integrates methodologies of world-building popular among speculative fiction writers with critical frameworks of worldmaking, phenomenology, and posthumanism.

Connor is a proud graduate of Northwestern University’s Department of Performance Studies, where he studied adaptation, toy theater, and directing under the department’s scholar-artists. Remaining at Northwestern, he worked as an Assistant Producer, supporting student-driven performances. He also served as a guest lecturer/teaching assistant, running workshops on adaptation and object performance.

Currently, Connor is creating a shadow puppetry short film for Lookingglass Theatre Company’s 50 Wards: A Civic Mosaic, entitled “The Garden of the Phoenix.” In addition to his own directing work, he has assistant-directed at many Chicago theaters, most recently for Mary Zimmerman on The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci at Goodman Theatre. For more on Connor’s work, please visit www.connorlifson.com

  JMELGAR@STANFORD.EDU

eli melgar is a first-generation scholar and playwright from Sihuatehuacan (Santa Ana, El Salvador), which means place of feminine wisdom and vitality in Nahuatl. Their current work situates forms of migration and environmental justice in conversation with critical theories of race and performance studies. Other interests include Central American studies; indigeneity and decolonial feminism; avant-gardes in the Global South; queer theory and Marxism; theatre and philosophy; and ethics and poetics. Before coming to the ancestral land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe (Stanford), they studied playwriting under the mentorship of Jorgelina Cerritos.

A.A., Secondary Education, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

B.A., Spanish, The City College of New York, CUNY

M.A., Spanish, The City College of New York, CUNY

[photo credit: René Figueroa]

  RASHI91@STANFORD.EDU

Rashi has an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, MA in Conflict and Peace Studies from Jamia Millia Islamia University and a Bachelors in Economics and Computers from Delhi University. Rashi was actively involved in Delhi University’s campus theatre where she was a member of, and later headed, Maitreyi College’s dramatics society Abhivyakti. She acted in various productions such as In The Name of Honour (a devised protest performance against honour killings in India), O Ibsen (based on Henrik Ibsen’s plays), Akka Amoli Anni (an adaptation of Munshi Premchand’s story ‘Bade Bhaisaheb’) and Eklavya Uvach (a satire on the prevalent caste system in India), which were performed at different university festivals in India. Amongst these the play O Ibsen was performed as part of the Norwegian Collegiate Theatre Festival in Delhi in 2010. She recently co-directed a devised experimental performance, based on Sadaat Hasan Manto’s partition stories, titled Enter At Your Own Risk. A seditious play in a few scenes showing sanity and insanity as performed by actors of National Paagalkhana — by order of Toba Tek Singh. She has also been associated with different socially and politically active theatre groups in Delhi in different capacities.

Her research interests include exploring the relationship between aesthetics, politics and performance; postcolonial studies; and representation & subjecthood of the subaltern in theatrical as well as every day performances. Rashi was a recipient of Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights at NYU as part of which she explored the role of theatre in fostering the human rights discourse, specifically looking at theatre practices of Palestinian artists in the West Bank.

  WMONT@STANFORD.EDU

Westley holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Music with additional studies in German and Arts Management from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Westley’s scholarly interests lie at the intersections of performance studies, sound studies, gender studies, and Black studies. Current research interests include the role(s) of opera in Black identity development and performance; post-colonial, queer, and materialist approaches to the voice; and Tik Tok as a stage for the (sonic) performance of race and gender.

Westley is also a vocalist and multidisciplinary artist. Select operatic roles include Boy Sam (David Lang’s the difficulty of crossing a field), Ovlur (Bordin’s Prince Igor), and Benvlio (Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.) Westley has also produced, curated, and dramaturged several new works and productions, including …Who I Am, an adaptation of Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915 addressing Black lived experience in the American South, and Afrika Singt, a collaborative work exploring depictions of Afro-Deutsch and Afro-American identity in Germany.

  PMORNET@STANFORD.EDU

Pauline Mornet is a PhD student in TAPS at Stanford University. She holds a MA in Performance Studies from New York University and a BA in Political Humanities from Sciences Po Paris. Originally from France, Pauline has spent equal parts of her life bumbling between Hong Kong, Europe and Australia and cannot dissociate these migratory pathways from her work. She is interested in alternative community formations and how we host each other. 

Pauline has a background in theater, co-writing and co-directing a play titled Titre Provisoire about performances of everyday life that toured in France at the Festival des Bourbons in 2019 and won the directorial award at festival Reims Monte en Scene. 

Her piece Intimate Archives: Love Letters in Wartime Europe will be upcoming in peer-reviewed academic journal Performance Research. It explores an archive of love letters sent during the Second World War and uses practice-as-research techniques to engage with the archive. 

  MZ114@STANFORD.EDU

María Zurita Ontiveros is director, puppeteer and theatermaker born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Duke University in Theater Studies and in History, and a minor in German. She has training in directing, playwriting, and performance from the National Theater Institute, the Mexican General Society of Writers, and the City Academy in London, UK. Her paper, Identity and Activism: What did La Raza mean for Los Siete? was published in the monograph of the 2020 National Association of African American Studies Conference. She has directed Euripides’ Medea, the musicals In the Heights and Title of Show, at Duke University, assistant directed Tender Age at the 2019 National Playwrights Conference, directed a collection of new work at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and co-directed I Want to be Naked with the Who Are They Now Theater Collective, which she founded alongside other Duke Theater alumni. She performed as a puppeteer at the 2021 La Mama Puppet Fest, as well as building sets and puppets for the festival. She served as company manager for the Off-Broadway production of sandblasted by Charly Evon Simpson. She has also worked in Development and in the Literary Department of the Vineyard Theatre in New York. She has received numerous awards, including the University Scholars Program Scholarship at Duke University, the Benenson Award in the Arts, the Graywill Arts for Arts Leadership and Service, and the Award for Excellence in Directing. She is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society.

She is interested in producing research and theatrical work around trauma and healing– particularly how theater traditions have been and continue to be used as outlets for communities to heal. Moved to this research because of the femicide crisis in Mexico, she seeks to create community-driven work to provide victims’ families ways to grieve and social justice theater to demand justice. Human resilience fascinates her, fills her with hope, and guides her art. Her artistic practice is based on community, healing, and endless curiosity.

  ZOERYU@STANFORD.EDU

Zoe Ryu holds a BA in Economics from Korea University and an MA in English literature from Seoul National University. The main concentration of her current studies lie primarily on the intersection of race and gender in American theatre and literature. Her theatre practice focuses mainly on dramaturgy – in Seoul, where her work is based, she worked with prominent Korean theatre companies and produced plays such as Machinal by Sophie Treadwell and A Fortunate Day by Hyun Jin-geon both performed at the Yeohangza Theatre. Her future aspirations lie in intercultural performance that makes use of traditional Korean movements, dance and sound derived from Korean masked dance and traditional Korean opera.

  AMANI@STANFORD.EDU

Amani Starnes is an actress, dancer, writer, producer, and singer in Stanford’s PhD TAPS program. She graduated from Yale University, where she majored in Theater Studies with a concentration in Performance and African American Studies.

Her work focuses primarily on race and gender in performance and culture. Recently, Amani received critical acclaim in such publications as The Washington Post, Jezebel, The Jane Dough, Madame Noire, and Racialicious for a web series she wrote, produced, and headlined, The United Colors of Amani. In the tradition of Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, the series explores Amani’s uncomfortable racial adventures in Hollywood.

In addition to her web presence, Amani is the face of several national commercials. She also sings, choreographs, produces content for networks like AOL and AMC, and performs in independent films, plays, concerts, music videos, rock operas and musicals. She has been a member of Tim Robbins’ The Actors’ Gang theater company for over a decade.

  ADINW@STANFORD.EDU

Adin Walker is a fourth-year PhD Candidate in Theater and Performance Studies with minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Walker works in the medical humanities with attention to public health activism and cultural production, queer and transgender historiography, and queer musical theater and cinema. Walker’s writing is published or is forthcoming in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (upcoming 10-year anniversary issue), GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, MASKA: The Performing Arts Journal (published in English and Slovenian; special issue on “Performance and the Attention Economy”), and Routledge’s Milestones in Queer U.S. Theater. Walker is a Stanford R.A.I.S.E. Fellow for community-engaged research and has been a guest artist and lecturer at Yale School of Drama, Princeton, and NYU Tisch. Walker received a B.A. in English from Princeton University.

Walker is a frequent collaborator with the internationally-touring dance, puppetry, and climate-justice focused Phantom Limb Company, whose production Falling Out about the 2011 tsunami and radiation disaster in Fukushima premiered in BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Walker recently directed the world premieres of Yilong Liu’s PrEP Play, or Blue Parachute in San Francisco with the New Conservatory Theater Center, Roger Q. Mason’s The White Dress (Off-Broadway), and is directing Adam Ashraf Elsayigh’s Data Queen for Golden Thread’s ReOrient Festival in San Francisco. adinwalker.com

  EMWATERS@STANFORD.EDU

Emily Waters is a Brooklyn-raised interdisciplinary artist grounded in a Black theater tradition that explores the roles of witness and testimony in collective and intergenerational healing. Waters helped to roll out the first ever #MeToo curriculum with Girls for Gender Equity, focusing on joy and storytelling through theater. Emily was an Emerge Fellow 2019 with Hemispheric Institute where they presented their work in progress at Abrons Arts Center. Waters is also the recipient of the Peace and Social Change Fellowship with Columbia University where she supervised research on the healing capacity of theater for survivors of sexual assault. In December 2019, Waters was awarded the Mount Tremper Arts Residency. They have presented their original work at Jack Theater, the Apollo, the High Line, Novo Foundation Grantmakers of Color Conference, and Judson Church. Waters is a Performance Project Fellow alum and was a selected writer in Billie Holiday Theater’s annual 50in50 and Black Revolutionary Theater Workshop’s Revolution Now! Program. Emily Waters received a Drama League Award nomination for outstanding digital theater alongside the selected artists for All for One Theater’s Solo Short’s Series. Most recently, Emily presented their original performance, Look Back At It, at The Shed as part of the Open Call commission program for early career artists. 

Emily’s current research interests African diasporic narrative healing modalities, folklore and religious studies, and the connections between contemporary Black performance movements and anti-violence work.