I'm an Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at Oxford College of Emory University. I completed my Ph.D. in Theatre Arts with a minor in Directing at Cornell University. I earned my M.A. in Theatre Arts from Cornell, and my B.A. magna cum laude in Theatre with a minor in Creative Writing from Hamilton College.
My research and teaching interests are prison studies, applied and physical theatre, critical theory, studies of race and gender, acting and directing, and dramatic literature. My most recent article, "Pedagogies of Self-Humanization: Collaborating to Engage Trauma in the Phoenix Players Theatre Group," co-written with Bruce Levitt, is published in a special issue of Teaching Artist Journal. My other writings are published online in Modernism/modernity, The Theatre Times, Etudes, and Rejoinder. In 2016, I co-curated the symposium, From Cell to Cell: The Prison in Television and Performance.
As a performer in New York City I worked with groups like Company XIV and Theater Reconstruction Ensemble. I've directed productions of The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Miss Julie, The Hunger Artist, Titus Andronicus, Friedrich Schiller's Bad Girls Club, and Cornell's annual Ten-Minute Playfest. Spaces in which I performed and/or collaboratively developed new art include: Dixon Place, Walkerspace, Incubator Arts Project (formerly Ontological-Hysteric Theater), HERE Arts Center, Theater for the New City, WorkShop Theater, Producer's Club, and TheaterLAB.
I'm currently revising my dissertation into a monograph for publication, titled Cagecraft: Theatre and Performance in Carceral America. This work draws upon five years’ work as a teaching artist in the Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Upstate New York, where I co-facilitate a company of incarcerated writers and performers, the Phoenix Players Theatre Group. “Cagecraft” is my term for the process of making theatre in response to imprisonment, a concept which I employ to study a range of modern and contemporary performance objects made with, by, and about incarcerated peoples, including: a prison performance by Buffalo Bill; the Edison Company’s film Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901); the playwright Naomi Wallace; and a collaboration between conceptual artist jackie sumell and Herman Wallace, who spent over 40 years in solitary confinement. In the case of the Phoenix Players, our cagecraft uses physical theatre techniques to stage personal narratives, in order to collectively devise performances for an invited audience—a process that takes approximately two years. I’m currently assisting the group to workshop material for its fifth show. The Phoenix Players Theatre Group creates space for incarcerated artists to be witnessed as full human beings, an experience that has transformative effects individually and socially. Animating this project is my theory of the “carceral subject,” which characterizes an existential state of capture and bondage that affects many different persons, coalescing most dramatically on the black, brown, indigenous, poor, queer, feminine, and differently-abled. To be recognized as a person entails surrendering to a cage made from an individualizing network of social, cultural, and institutional traumas. Yet, by examining cagecraft, I argue that carceral subjects can enact a utopian, world-making gesture from behind their bars. I conclude that cagecraft has the power to liberate actors and audiences, at least in the moment of performance, because artists re-make themselves and therefore re-make the world.
My research and teaching interests are prison studies, applied and physical theatre, critical theory, studies of race and gender, acting and directing, and dramatic literature. My most recent article, "Pedagogies of Self-Humanization: Collaborating to Engage Trauma in the Phoenix Players Theatre Group," co-written with Bruce Levitt, is published in a special issue of Teaching Artist Journal. My other writings are published online in Modernism/modernity, The Theatre Times, Etudes, and Rejoinder. In 2016, I co-curated the symposium, From Cell to Cell: The Prison in Television and Performance.
As a performer in New York City I worked with groups like Company XIV and Theater Reconstruction Ensemble. I've directed productions of The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Miss Julie, The Hunger Artist, Titus Andronicus, Friedrich Schiller's Bad Girls Club, and Cornell's annual Ten-Minute Playfest. Spaces in which I performed and/or collaboratively developed new art include: Dixon Place, Walkerspace, Incubator Arts Project (formerly Ontological-Hysteric Theater), HERE Arts Center, Theater for the New City, WorkShop Theater, Producer's Club, and TheaterLAB.
I'm currently revising my dissertation into a monograph for publication, titled Cagecraft: Theatre and Performance in Carceral America. This work draws upon five years’ work as a teaching artist in the Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Upstate New York, where I co-facilitate a company of incarcerated writers and performers, the Phoenix Players Theatre Group. “Cagecraft” is my term for the process of making theatre in response to imprisonment, a concept which I employ to study a range of modern and contemporary performance objects made with, by, and about incarcerated peoples, including: a prison performance by Buffalo Bill; the Edison Company’s film Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901); the playwright Naomi Wallace; and a collaboration between conceptual artist jackie sumell and Herman Wallace, who spent over 40 years in solitary confinement. In the case of the Phoenix Players, our cagecraft uses physical theatre techniques to stage personal narratives, in order to collectively devise performances for an invited audience—a process that takes approximately two years. I’m currently assisting the group to workshop material for its fifth show. The Phoenix Players Theatre Group creates space for incarcerated artists to be witnessed as full human beings, an experience that has transformative effects individually and socially. Animating this project is my theory of the “carceral subject,” which characterizes an existential state of capture and bondage that affects many different persons, coalescing most dramatically on the black, brown, indigenous, poor, queer, feminine, and differently-abled. To be recognized as a person entails surrendering to a cage made from an individualizing network of social, cultural, and institutional traumas. Yet, by examining cagecraft, I argue that carceral subjects can enact a utopian, world-making gesture from behind their bars. I conclude that cagecraft has the power to liberate actors and audiences, at least in the moment of performance, because artists re-make themselves and therefore re-make the world.
