I'm an associate professor of theater at Oxford College of Emory University. My research and teaching interests are critical prison studies and abolition, trauma theory, acting and directing, performance studies, modern and contemporary drama, and adaptation. I earned my B.A. at Hamilton College and Ph.D. at Cornell University.
My writing is published in Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Research in Drama Education, PUBLIC, and Teaching Artist Journal, as well as in the volumes Into Abolitionist Theatre and Race and Performance after Repetition. My current book project, Performance After Policing: Abolition Dramaturgies in Carceral America, examines the prison state as a performing structure that continually re-stages race and class oppression. I not only consider how performance contributes to resistant, liberatory, and abolitionist movements, but also how performance has historically served to support and circulate the logics of imprisonment. In part, 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 helped facilitate a company of incarcerated writers and performers, the Phoenix Players Theatre Group.
In my research, I argue that abolition utilizes dramatic images and narratives as vectors of relation that can connect people in situations of mutual interdependence. Abolition also resists spectacle and uses performance in order to bear witness to everyday, structuring, atmospheric violence that operates in pandemic time. These performances exist outside of conventional dynamics of critique, recognition, and empathy and appear as visions from another (after)world.
I'm also a theatre artist, and have directed or performed in over 50 productions in professional, academic, and community-based settings. Recently, I've directed productions of Shakespeare's As You Like It, Rachel Cusk's Medea, Jaclyn Backhaus' Men On Boats, Lauren Gunderson's Ada and the Engine, Max Frisch's The Arsonists, and Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, as well as two projects devised during the pandemic: a digital theatre performance for social justice, titled Fragments and Connections, and the Isolation Performance Project, a collaboratively created series of 12 original theatre experiments staged for an audience of one.
My writing is published in Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Research in Drama Education, PUBLIC, and Teaching Artist Journal, as well as in the volumes Into Abolitionist Theatre and Race and Performance after Repetition. My current book project, Performance After Policing: Abolition Dramaturgies in Carceral America, examines the prison state as a performing structure that continually re-stages race and class oppression. I not only consider how performance contributes to resistant, liberatory, and abolitionist movements, but also how performance has historically served to support and circulate the logics of imprisonment. In part, 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 helped facilitate a company of incarcerated writers and performers, the Phoenix Players Theatre Group.
In my research, I argue that abolition utilizes dramatic images and narratives as vectors of relation that can connect people in situations of mutual interdependence. Abolition also resists spectacle and uses performance in order to bear witness to everyday, structuring, atmospheric violence that operates in pandemic time. These performances exist outside of conventional dynamics of critique, recognition, and empathy and appear as visions from another (after)world.
I'm also a theatre artist, and have directed or performed in over 50 productions in professional, academic, and community-based settings. Recently, I've directed productions of Shakespeare's As You Like It, Rachel Cusk's Medea, Jaclyn Backhaus' Men On Boats, Lauren Gunderson's Ada and the Engine, Max Frisch's The Arsonists, and Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, as well as two projects devised during the pandemic: a digital theatre performance for social justice, titled Fragments and Connections, and the Isolation Performance Project, a collaboratively created series of 12 original theatre experiments staged for an audience of one.
