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A Little More About Me
Throughout my career I have been interested in the impact of theater and performance beyond the moment of its presentation. I believe that story telling, in its many forms, can help us better understand experiences that mirror our own and also those that seem alien to our own existence. Whether reading a Shakespeare play and “experiencing” the world of star-crossed lovers who lived centuries before us, or researching the relationship between a theater company and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru, I have looked at performance as a powerful tool for fostering knowledge of the past and an opportunity to intervene in the present. I offer a global perspective of drama and performance, with a specialization in the relationship between theater and justice. I also bring to students and colleagues my experiences working with world-renowned artists and my own work as an artist/practitioner. I have had the great pleasure of developing my teaching and research skills at Arizona State University while pursuing my PhD, as a Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Whittier College, as a Research Fellow for the Hemispheric Institute (New York University) at Florida State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor and currently as an Assistant Professor at Temple University.
RESEARCH: My interest in non-traditional and non-western performance led me to receive my PhD from the Theatre and Performance of the Americas program at Arizona State University, where my colleagues and I focused on performance practices from throughout the Americas, destabilizing a Eurocentric perspective of theatre and world history. In my dissertation, Performing Nation, Performing Trauma: Theatre and Performance After September 11th, Hurricane Katrina and the Peruvian Dirty War, under the direction of Dr. Tamara Underiner, I examined how theater and performance are utilized to respond to, document, memorialize and represent national traumas resulting from such historical crises as the Peruvian Dirty War, Hurricane Katrina and September 11th, as well as how they resist dominant narratives that construct these events as national traumas.
In the dissertation, I explored how national traumas illuminate who is included and excluded from larger performances of national identity and look at performances that challenge those constructions of national belonging. In the process of researching the dissertation, I have developed a larger knowledge of trauma studies and theater in areas of conflict, and theater and performance connected to peace building and reconciliation projects. I have participated in and served as the co-convener for the Traumatic Structures working group as part of the American Society of Theatre Research’s annual meeting. (For a review of my dissertation go to http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/6098)
I am also interested in researching performances that reclaim queer spaces. For this work I am examining performances in Los Angeles and New Orleans that are archiving sites of queer belonging that have been shut down permanently as a result of the policing of queer spaces and queer sexual practices. I am interested in reclaiming the "ghosts" of physical spaces of "belonging" and what happens to those communities once those spaces are taken away. Inspired by my research participation in a working group at the Hemispheric Institute's Encuentro, I am looking at queer narratives in festivals and hope to edit an anthology of essays on this topic.
"ARCHIVAL" WORK: In 2005 I had the great honor of traveling to Lima, Peru to collect the work of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani which is part of the Hemispheric Institute's Digital Video Library. The HIDVL is an international project that collects videos of theater groups and performance artists from throughout the Americas whose body of work is considered to have made a substantial contribution to theatre and performance of the Americas. For this collection I spent approximately two months with the group to select which videos would best be part of the collection and to gather information on the videos to help provide the socio-political context in which the performances took place.
In 2006 I did the same in San Juan Bautista to help implement the collection of El Teatro Campesino's work. This was a ground-breaking project as ETC had closed its archival doors to the public for nearly two decades. In 2013-2014 I held a Postdoctoral Research position with New York University and the University of Manitoba to help provide guidance and support to artists and scholars who are in the beginning stages of new contributions/collections to the DVL which will focus on Canadian performance. I also initiated and am currently implementing the collection of videos from Cornerstone Theater (in Los Angeles) and the Free Southern Theater/Junebug Productions (in New Orleans).
INSPIRATIONS: I have had the great pleasure of training with, researching and being generally surrounded by great examples of performance and social activism. I have been able to take workshops with Augusto Boal, Brent Blair, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Markus Kupferblum and Rickerby Hinds. I am inspired by the people I encounter both close to home and via my international travels. I love to break down barriers of genre and style and am interested in performing poetry, creating performance art installations based on my photography, making documentary films, creating performances around museum installations. . .etc.