Ph.D. Students
MARLON ARIYASINGHE
Marlon Ariyasinghe (he/him) is a writer, theatre practitioner and researcher from Sri Lanka. He holds an MA in English from the University of Geneva and a BA (honors) in English from the University of Peradeniya. As the Senior Assistant Editor at Himal Southasian, a regional magazine of politics and culture, his rapportage has been featured by Reuters, DW, BBC World, WION, The Washington Post, NPR and other outlets worldwide.
Marlon’s research interests include South Asian theater and historiography, performing blackness, colorism, casteism and nationalisms; and Sri Lanka’s traditional embodied practices, including Rūkada (puppetry) and Kōlam (masked dance-drama).
His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Performance Research, Theatre Research International, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Journal of Visual & Performing Arts – Sri Lanka, Mise en Abyme: International Journal of Comparative Literature and Arts, and Phoenix: Sri Lanka Journal of English in the Commonwealth. In 2021, he co-edited Mise en Abyme: International Journal of Comparative Literature and Arts (VIII, Issue 2), a special edition on Sri Lankan Combative Art, Angampora.
Selected directing credits include: Exorcism (2025), Twelfth Night (2019), The Clean House (2015), Antigonick (2014), and Rizana (2013). marlonariyasinghe.com
EMAIL MARLONA@STANFORD.EDU
LUCAS BAISCH
Lucas is a recipient of a Steinberg Playwright Award, the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting, a Jerome Fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center, the Kennedy Center’s KCACTF Latinx Playwriting Award, and the Chesley/Bumbalo Playwriting Award. His plays have been published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, Yale’s Theater Magazine, and 53rd State Press.
Outside of writing for theatre, his artworks have been presented at Elsewhere Museum, the Electronic Literature Organization, gallery no one, and the RISD Museum. He has held residencies through the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Millay Arts, ACRE, Elsewhere Museum, Page 73, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Ars Nova’s Play Group, the Goodman Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, and as a Lambda Literary Playwriting Fellow. Lucas is currently commissioned by The Alcove New Play Development Program at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.
In the realm of scholarship, his research interests arrive at the intersection between excess/dearth and affect theory. He’s invested in discard studies, material poetics, transgressive literatures, histories of excavation and technology’s influence on the composition of the playscript or artist’s score. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at Stanford University, where he is an inaugural Humanities & Sciences Dean’s Scholar Fellow. MFA: Brown University, Playwriting. lucasbaisch.com
EMAIL LBAISCH@STANFORD.EDU
KARISHMA BHAGANI
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.
EMAIL KBHAGANI@STANFORD.EDU
KAELANI RAE BURJA
Kaelani Rae Burja is a playwright, director, dramaturg, and performance artist originally from Tamuning, Guam and Bakersfield, California. She graduated from Princeton University in 2023, where she majored in Anthropology and received certificates in Theatre, Music Theatre, Latino Studies, and Latin American Studies. During this time, she had the pleasure of working in dramaturg and assistant directing capacities at theatres such as Clubbed Thumb, The Sol Project, Boundless Theatre Company, New Perspectives Theatre Company, The Chelsea Factory, McCarter Theatre Company, and Pillsbury House+Theatre. Her third-year capstone project investigated the popular Latin American social dance cumbia as a form of embodied performance and placemaking. Her senior thesis was an ethnographic study of power dynamics across New Jersey, Off-, and Off-Off-Broadway rehearsal rooms producing performances that uplifted historically excluded narratives. Upon graduation, she received the yearlong Martin A. Dale ‘53 Fellowship to research, write, and perform a play about her late mother’s life. This experience prompted her current research interests surrounding archivization and agency and investigating ethical obligations when performing archival traces of quotidian lives. From 2024-2026, Burja served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Malta, teaching English, theatre, and creative writing to middle school and university students across the Maltese archipelago. Additionally, she spent two seasons developing original scripts as a member of the country’s National Youth Theatre at Teatru Manoel, dancing on a Carnival dance team, and also did voiceover, scriptwriting, assistant choreography, and costume research work for local schools. Her chapter, "Judson Memorial Church," was recently published in the edited volume María Irene Fornés in Context (Cambridge University Press 2025). Burja is a Humanities and Arts Dean’s Scholar Fellow at Stanford and former recipient of an Aspen Ideas Festival Fellowship, as well as Princeton’s Asher Hinds Prize, Creative and Community Leadership in Theater Award, and Alex Adam ‘07 Award.
EMAIL KBURJA@STANFORD.EDU
MAXINE CARLISLE
I am a performer, using a dancer’s intelligence to write about unnameable things. Raised in Sydney, Australia as the daughter of a Chinese immigrant, my research interprets global dance practices as historical narratives. I look to expand my areas of interest while completing a PhD at Stanford University in Theater and Performance Studies. These areas include aesthetic criticism, disability theory, dance, performance theory, and lately, Enlightenment literature.
A proud experimental theatre and dance collaborator, I work to create contemporary dance pieces. My work has been supported by Australia Arts Council, CreateNSW, DirtyFeet, Riverside Theatre, MarchDance and Casula Powerhouse Museum.
I received contemporary dance training from Sydney Dance Company (2016). I hold a BA Honours First Class from the University of Sydney (2022), and an MA in English from New York University (2025) with my thesis, “Butoh: a physical history of disability and violence in the East Asian diaspora.”
EMAIL MRC333@STANFORD.EDU
YUTSHA DAHAL
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.
EMAIL YUTSHA@STANFORD.EDU
KATHY FANG
Kathy Fang (she/her) holds a BA in Comparative Literature & Society and Drama & Theatre Arts from Columbia University. Her research is interested in Asian/American immigration, diasporic performance, technology and new media, translation theory, and foreign language pedagogy. Her writing can be found in TDR and Theatre Journal (forthcoming). Kathy is also a director and dancer whose artistic praxis currently explores translation as a dramaturgy of performance. Recent directing credits include Love & So (2024, Barnard Theatre Department) and Anointed with Gasoline (2021, NOMADS).
EMAIL KXFANG@STANFORD.EDU
SIXTUS CHETACHI IGBOKWE
Sixtus Chetachi Igbokwe is a Nigerian playwright, theatremaker, and PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from the University of Iowa and a BA in English and Literary Studies from the University of Nigeria, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of The Muse, West Africa’s oldest student journal, founded by Chinua Achebe in 1963. He is also a 2019 alumnus of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop.
His plays, which often explore family and cultural memory through African-Igbo epistemologies, have been developed or staged in Nigerian theatres and at the University of Iowa. His writing has appeared in The English Academy Review, The Hopkins Review, and other publications. He received the 2021 Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Prize for Drama, was longlisted for the 2023 Nigeria Prize for Literature, and was a semi-finalist for the 2024 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.
Igbokwe’s scholarly research focuses on African and Black diaspora theatre, with particular emphasis on Nigerian performance traditions, Igbo folkloric aesthetics, popular comedy, and the representation of disability and minoritized identities in performance.
EMAIL SIGBOKWE@STANFORD.EDU
DANIEL JACKSON
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.
EMAIL DNJACK@STANFORD.EDU
GAYOUNG LEE
Gayoung Lee (they/she) is an artist-scholar working across performance, video installation, and writing. Their practice explores the regulatory power of language in public and private spheres, and the politics of multilingualism. Their work has been presented at Post-Territory Ujeongguk (Seoul), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul). They attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2024 and holds a BA in Philosophy and BIS in Comparative Literature from Yonsei University, a BFA in Painting from Seoul National University, and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania as a Fulbright Scholar.
Lee’s research interests include performance theory, race and technology, Asian/American exhibition history, and computational approaches to language and classification. They are currently working on how systems such as world’s fairs, robotic performance, large language models, and language technologies classify, substitute, and translate Asian or racialized bodies, minoritized languages, and culturally marked performance forms.
Lee is a 2025 Edge Doctoral Fellow at the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education, 2026 RAISE Doctoral Fellow at the same. gayoung-lee.com
EMAIL GAYOUNGL@STANFORD.EDU
CONNOR LIFSON
Connor Lifson is a director and lighting designer of live performance. Engaging across disciplines and forms, Connor draws on cinematic vocabularies in his onstage work through live video cameras, dynamic video projections, and various forms of puppetry.
Alongside his artistic work, Connor’s scholarship engages two primary threads: 1) how the genres of fantasy and science fiction can serve as a catalyst to rehearse new realities, and 2) how certain aesthetic styles, including “theater of images” of the 20th century avant-garde, performatively shape perception.
Connor is a proud graduate of Northwestern University’s Department of Performance Studies, where he studied directing, adaptation, and toy theater, 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.
Connor’s directing work has appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Lookingglass Theatre Company, and Witch Hunt Theatre. In addition to his own directing projects, he has assistant-directed at many Chicago theaters, most recently for Mary Zimmerman at the Goodman Theatre. connorlifson.com
EMAIL CLIFSON@STANFORD.EDU
CAITLIN MAIN
Caitlin Main is a researcher from North Vancouver, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences from Quest University Canada and an MFA in Theatre Studies from the University of Calgary. Her current academic interests lie at the intersection of performance and environment, with emphasis on water and oceans. Her past research focused on memory in performance creation with attention to (i) working with traumatic, autobiographical memory in devised theatre and (ii) facilitating social connections amongst older adults in dance with an interdisciplinary research team, Moving Connections (UCalgary/Pil Hansen). Caitlin has also worked in programming and curation at Artspeak Gallery (Vancouver) and TRUCK Contemporary Art (Calgary) and led qualitative and community-engaged research for the Calgary Arts Development.
EMAIL CMAIN@STANFORD.EDU
AIDEN McCORMICK
Aiden McCormick is a director and scholar raised in California’s Central Valley. His research interests surround the representation and embodiment of marginalized groups—specifically queer—within rural communities, taking a special interest in communal spaces like churches, bars, or schools. Other interests include theatre exploring the inclusion of all senses and the use of sex and sexuality on stage.
Aiden holds a BA in Theatre from University of California, San Diego where he worked on the directing teams of new works such as Dead Girl’s Quinceañera and Baby Shower Katie.
EMAIL AJM27@STANFORD.EDU
eli melgar
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]
EMAIL JMELGAR@STANFORD.EDU
PAULINE MORNET
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.
EMAIL PMORNET@STANFORD.EDU
MARÍA ZURITA ONTIVEROS
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.
EMAIL MZ114@STANFORD.EDU
SHAILEE RAJAK
Shailee Rajak (she/her) is a researcher, writer, and archivist from India. She is pursuing a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her current research examines rekhti—an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Urdu poetic form—and the queer politics of voice, gesture, and recitation in the mushaira.
At Stanford, Shailee wrote and directed The Algorithm of Happiness for Graduate Repertory 2026 and served as dramaturg for the TAPS Main Stage production of Fun Home (2025). Her scholarship and creative writing have appeared or are forthcoming in the South Asian Review, HowlRound Theatre Commons, Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, The Bombay Review, and Montreal Serai among others. Her research has received support from Stanford’s Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Prior to this, Shailee completed an MA in English at McGill University and worked as an archivist at Teesri Duniya Theatre in Montreal. She is the author of the graphic novel My Story, My Voice: Sita and Helen.
EMAIL SRAJAK@STANFORD.EDU
ZOE RYU
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.
EMAIL ZOERYU@STANFORD.EDU
FIONA SELMI
Fiona Selmi is a dramaturg, writer, director and theater practitioner originally from Washington DC. Before arriving at Stanford to pursue her PhD in Theater and Performance Studies, she was the assistant to the head of Theater at United Talent Agency. Previously, she was the Artistic Fellow at Playwrights Horizons and the Manager of the Emerging Playwrights Fund at Audible Theater. She is co-founder and Artistic Director of a devised, backyard theater company called Live Animals Onstage! which embraces a rock and roll ethos to subvert classic texts in an attempt to create theater that is joyous, experimental and ritualistic.
Fiona graduated from Williams College in 2021 with a BA in Theatre and Political Science, with a concentration in Political Theory. Her thesis, “Teenage Girls and Femme Futurities: An Investigation into Coalition Building through Contemporary Feminist Theater” explored the growing trend of “teenage girl plays” in conjunction with utopian performance theory and political theories of coalition and community building, earning her honors in the theatre department. Most recently, her essay on the re-emergence of realism in the contemporary American theater, “The Playwright as Bad Glazier,” was published in volume 34.3 of the Contemporary Theatre Review.
Her current research interests revolve around contemporary theater and playwriting with a specific emphasis on DIY aesthetics, self-production, alternative theater scenes and the re-emergence of the contemporary theater company and collective. Using her background in Marxist and Critical Theory, she hopes to use her research, intermixed with practice, to investigate collective-based producing models, with the intention of de-centering capital and bringing theater into direct conversation with the community.
EMAIL FSELMI@STANFORD.EDU
LAVANYA SINHA
Lavanya Sinha is a scholar of experimental literature and performance and the contentious relationship between the theatrical and the real. Raised in Delhi, India, she has a BA in Humanities and Comparative Literature from Yale University and an MPhil in Literature, Culture and Thought from the University of Cambridge. Her undergraduate and Master's dissertations focused on the theatricality of French narrative artist Sophie Calle, who in her eyes has made a blackbox of her own life through her bizarre artistic experiments. Lavanya's specialization in theatricality and its permeation of art and life goes back to her background in studying avant-garde groups such as OuLiPo and the Living Theatre, which has informed her work on Calle. The theatricalization of "life" and its existential significance is at the heart of her research interests, which include queer performance and performativity, performance-as-resistance, and community-building through theatrical practice. As a writer and director, she has explored these topics through experimental works such as verbatim plays, devised ensemble pieces, and postdramatic adaptations. Her first original undergraduate play The Talks (2023) was a series of Carrollian vignettes written entirely from verbatim transcripts of a week of her everyday life. Her production work has since emphasized the performance space as a site where the excessive and theatrical coincides with the banal and real. Her final undergraduate play Living Theatrically: A Sophie Calle Cabaret (2025) was a devised tribute to the theatrical meaning she found in Calle's life, and in recent years she has worked with the Cunning Folk Theatre on new plays with religious and mythological themes.
Lavanya finds crucial value in treating the whimsy necessitated by performance with sincerity,
which has given meaning to her work in sketch comedy and children's theatre instruction in addition to her experimental theatre. As a teen, she was one of the youngest actors in Feisal Alkazi's Ruchika Theatre Group in Delhi, with whom she travelled as a cast member and developed an understanding of theatre as fundamentally communal. Now, as a PhD student in TAPS, she is interested in producing scholarly and artistic work that parses and honours these principles, and theorizing what she calls a "theatrical ethic" that reflects them, on and off the stage.