Rachel Anderson is a fourth-year doctoral candidate. At Stanford, she directed Act One of Chekhov’s The Seagull, Lisa Rowland’s senior project Crossroads, Edvard Radzinsky’s She: In Absence of Love and Death, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and Femi Osofisan’s Farewell to a Cannibal Rage for Stanford Summer Theater. Her research interests include Russian theater and theatrical ensembles.
Matthew Daube has a BA from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA from Smith College. At Stanford, he has directed Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud, and his own adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. His dissertation research centers on race and ethnicity in stand-up comedy and his article “The Case of Rabbi Cantor vs. Roscoe W. Chandler: The Marz Brothers’ Ethnic Construction of Character” is due to be published in the collection One Hundred Years of the Marx Brothers (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).
Micaela Dìaz-Sánchez was born in Nuevo Mexico and grew up in San Antonio where she was raised in community-based Teatro Chicana/o. She has a BA in history from Dartmouth College. Her interests are sexuality and identity politics in Chicana performance and art for social change. She directed Cherríe Moraga’s first play, Giving Up the Ghost, for the winter 2003 Graduate Directing Project. In the spring of 2004 she directed Migdalia Cruz’s Salt.
Ileana Drinovan is a fourth-year graduate student whose dissertation will focus on theater during antiquity. Her secondary area of study is the baroque period.
Douglas A. Jones, Jr. researches nineteenth-century theater and performance with particular emphasis on antebellum culture and politics, abolitionism, and historiography. Currently a first-year graduate student at Stanford, he serves on the BTA executive board as the graduate student representative. Douglas holds a Master's degree from University of Maryland, College Park in Theater History and Criticism and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (with Honors) in Theater from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts.
Ljubi Matic is a third-year PhD student. He was born and grew up in Serbia, where he received his MFA in Theatre Directing from Belgrade University of Arts. At Stanford he directed Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh, a play dealing with teenage angst and infatuation with music, as well as Roberto Zucco by Bernard-Marie Koltès, a play dealing with a young man’s killing spree and infatuation with violence, death and, strangely enough, invisibility.
Aida Mbowa is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Drama. She is a Ugandan national who was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and she received her BA in Performance and Identity Studies from Mount Holyoke College. Aida's directorial interests include plays that implicitly or explicitly explore post-colonial African sociopolitical issues. She is also interested in researching dramatic literature written and performed before and after radical political movements, such as decolonization in East Africa and the African American Black Power Movement.
Matthew Moore is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Drama. He holds a BA in English and Theater from Muhlenberg College and has worked as a director in various theaters on the East Coast. At Stanford, he directed the premiere of a short play by Mac Wellman last spring and will be working on Caryl Churchill’s Far Away this fall. Matthew is interested in the interplay of theater and politics during times of artistic and political revolution, and is especially concerned with the collisions of Modernism and Post-Colonial discourse in the early twentieth century.
Ciara Murphy is a third-year graduate student. She is a native of Ireland, and holds a BA in Drama and Theatre Studies from TrinityCollege Dublin. At Stanford, she has directed Bedbound by Enda Walsh and Splendour by Abi Morgan. She is currently assisting media and film artist Lynn Hershman Leeson on a forthcoming film concerning the history of feminist art in the United States.
Elizabeth Nordt is a doctoral candidate writing her dissertation on the political uses of theater and performance by La Huelga de Dolores, a student union in Guatemala. Her main fields of study are Latin American and Latino/a performance, community-based theater, and theater for social change. She has an MA in Performance Studies from NYU and a BA in philosophy and theater from Lehigh University.
Virginia Preston is a first-year graduate student and director in the Department of Drama. Most recently she has lived and worked in Berlin, Warsaw and Montreal. Her previous degrees include an MA in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University and a BA from the Liberal Arts College at Concordia University, Montreal. Her interests include art performance, affect, and trauma studies. Virginia comes to theater research and practice via contemporary dance.
Daniel Sack is a fifth-year doctoral candidate with a BA in Creative Writing/English Literature from Brandeis University. He is currently working on his dissertation, “Stages of Conception: Potentiality and Performance in Contemporary Live Art,” which considers instances in live art particular to the turn of the millennium that stage a generative event that refuses to achieve realization in an identifiable form or action. Broader research interests include contemporary live art, performance and critical theory, and the intersections between visual art and experimental theater. Daniel’s writings on the Italian company, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, have appeared in Theatre Journal and Theater. At Stanford, he most recently directed a production of Howard Barker’s The Castle.
Michael St. Clair is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Drama. He received a BA from Case Western University. At Stanford, he has directed Sam Shepard’s Action and Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer.
Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Drama and the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies Humanities. An artist-scholar specializing in Russian theater practices, and issues of actor training, and curriculum development, she is currently completing her dissertation, “Meyerhold and Stanislavsky at Povarskaia Street: Art, Money, Politics and the Birth of Laboratory Theatre.” She is a 2003 Fulbright recipient and a 2004 Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship recipient. Recent publications include “Pig Iron: a Case Study in Contemporary Collective Creation” in The Lives and Deaths of Collective Creation, forthcoming, IUTA Press. As a theater practitioner and filmmaker, she has worked in cross-cultural productions since 1990. As a teacher of acting, stage movement, and Theatrical Biomechanics, she has taught at Stanford University, Yale School of Drama, and privately in New York City. She has also organized numerous cross-cultural actor-training programs, offering American theater students access to some of the best available movement theater instructors from Russia and Poland.
Kathryn is the 2007-2008 Irving D. Suss Guest Artist in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Colby College, where she will teach a course on the art of the actor in the imagistic theater from Meyerhold to Mnouchkine, and direct a “Meyerhold-inspired” production of Leonid Andreyev’s circus-tragedy, The One That Gets Slapped.
Arden Thomas is a sixth-year doctoral candidate writing her dissertation on contemporary theater, dance, and performance art that engages with issues of ecology and environmentalism. She produces the Department of Drama’s First Fridays New Plays Series, where she recently directed Bug by Tracy Letts. Arden has directed A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee for the Dragon Theater in Palo Alto, Museum by Tina Howe for the Palo Alto Pew Players, and Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht and One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace for the Department. Recently, she taught “Dance and Live Art in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries” in the Dance Division of the Department of Drama.
Nia Witherspoon is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Drama. After receiving a BA from Smith College in American Studies with a focus on race and the visual and performing arts, she worked with the Sankofa Kuumba Cultural Arts Center as Project Coordinator and Head Teacher for the Creative You After School Program in Hartford, Connecticut, as well as a dancer in the Sankofa Kuumba Afro-Caribbean Dance Company. At Stanford, Nia has been fortunate enough to expand her interests in directing film/video to directing for the theater. Last year she directed Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and assistant directed Stan Lai’s Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. This past summer Nia traveled to New York to assist filmmaker Hima B. with her upcoming film Liscence to Pimp. In May 2008 she will direct Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and other STDs) at Stanford.
