Featured Graduate Alum:
Venus Opal Reese

"Has your hair ever betrayed you, saved your life, or set you free?" So asks Venus Opal Reese (PhD '02) in her solo performance Split Ends, a solo multidisciplinary and multimedia piece about women of African descent and hair in relationship to society, men, and each other.

Split Ends has been performed in Palo Alto, San Francisco, Dallas, Rhode Island, and most recently off-Broadway at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, to rave reviews. According to Venus, hair connects with culture and politics, whether as an attempt to conform or as a way to declare a revolution. "Some people know wine. I pay attention to hair. I've spent a long time looking at identity formation through hair."

Venus created Split Ends after interviewing hundreds of black women about their hair. Using dance, video, and music with the monologues of characters in a hair salon and the music industry, of a cancer survivor and drug addict, and explores the conflicted relationship between black women and their hair. In one scene, she enters the stage dressed as a drag queen wearing a Tina Turner wig that, in one performance, accidentally flies off of her head. Waving it in her hands, she states, "Being a woman is a performance. It's a full-time, thankless job" and just kept dancing. In another, the owner of a hair salon rants about "good hair": "Good hair is when you comb your hair and it don't break all the teeth of the comb...if you lock your hair, you will be called a dyke, a ragtag, an intellectual or confused...if you cornrow, you will look as if you are about to serve twenty to life." The work addresses political content, from Condoleezza Rice to Angela Davis, from a cancer piece to a teenager paying homage to Beyonce's weave. As Venus herself described it, "Split Ends is provocative and evocative; it entertains as it educates."  

Now an Assistant Professor of Aesthetic Studies the University of Texas at Dallas, Venus is also an award-winning playwright, director, choreographer, poet, and solo performer. She appeared in the U.S. premiere of Will Powers' The Seven in San Francisco and New York, which was featured in American Theatre Magazine and won three Critic's Choice Awards. She has trained and worked with Anna Deavere Smith and has studied acting with Vanessa Redgrave, mime with Marcel Marceau, and dance with Gregory Hines and Judith Jamison, among others. In addition, she was recently included in Who's Who in the Humanities, and Who's Who in Fine Arts. Venus' classes at UT Dallas link Africa, the Middle Passage, antebellum slavery, and minstrelsy with hip-hop culture and fuses them with digital technology. She also offers and designs course in spoken word, movement theater, African dance, American character, acting, performativity, womanism/feminism, queer theory and critical race theory.

In all of her travels, Venus has not forgotten Stanford. She returned to campus last year through the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, giving a lecture titled "Ready Or Not: Lauryn Hill as Hip-Hop's Mammy."

Of her work, Venus affirms, "I welcome all opportunities to be of service to humanity-to contribute my God-given talents and gifts in service to what is possible in being alive. My life's work is to manifest God in thought, word, and deed. I believe in the dignity of the human spirit-in its array of colors, creeds, genders, and lifestyles.