Sebastián Calderón Bentin

Sebastián Calderón Bentin is a graduate student, actor and director in the Department of Drama. He is a native of Panama and Peru and holds an M.A. in Performance Studies and a B.F.A. in Theater (with Honors) and Anthropology form New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. As a performer he has collaborated with Anna Deavere Smith; John Jesurun; Witness Relocation; International Contemporary Ensemble; and Tim Etchells and Matthew Goulish's Institute of Failure, among others. His main areas of research include critical theory, empire studies and the avant-garde in Latin America

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Sukanya Chakrabarti

Received her B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She has been involved in various theater productions, in English and other regional languages, staged in Kolkata, where she was born and raised. She has also performed in several short films that have been screened at national and international film festivals such as Kolkata Short Film Festival, Kolkata Film Festival and Berlin Asia-Pacific Film Festival. She has been trained in Indian Classical music and dance since her childhood, and takes special interest in Rabindranath Tagore’s songs, literary works and philosophies. Her interests also lie in Eastern mystical thoughts and religious philosophies. Her academic areas of research include the spiritual and therapeutic possibilities of theater; religion; rituals; folklore; gender studies; and multiculturalism.

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Ileana Drinovan

Ileana Drinovan is a graduate student whose dissertation will focus on theater during antiquity. Her secondary area of study is the baroque period.

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Joy Brooke Fairfield

A graduate of NYU's Performance Studies Master's program, Joy Brooke Fairfield's academic work focuses on group performances of physical intimacy, researching such practices such as Contact Improv and Women's Roller Derby. Joy began directing theatre as an undergraduate at Harvard University, and has helmed over 20 productions in Cambridge, Seattle, and New York City. She is a 2010 Drama League Directing Fellow and has trained with the SITI Company and Double Edge Theatre. Dedicated to investigating theatre training, rehearsal, and performance as vital research modes, Joy is interested in the kinds of knowledge that can be formed through intellectually engaged practice.

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Angela M. Farr Schiller

Angela M. Farr Schiller received her B.A. in theatre from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her final year of study at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She has also studied at the University of Ghana at Legon, Accra and the University degli Studi di Siena, Italy. As a performer, she has appeared onstage with the Emmy Award-winning Kaiser Permanente’s Educational Theatre Programs, the National Dance Company of Ghana, the Tony Award winning Old Globe Theatre and the La Jolla Playhouse. Recently, Angela received her Master’s Degree in Africana Studies from New York University and has been teaching in Germany, where she also received her European Language Certificate in German. Her academic areas of research include late 20th century and contemporary African American performance and history, race, gender and identity politics, memory, oral history and documentary theatre.

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Ashley Hill

Ashley received her B.A. in Psychology and Theatre Arts (with honors) from Brandeis University and her M.S. in Secondary Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M-Commerce. She has an interest in embodiment and representations of madness in performance. Other academic interests include memory, bicultural efficacy, performance and affect, and identity.
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Lindsey Mantoan

Lindsey Mantoan holds an A.B. in Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton University and an M.A. in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin. Her master’s thesis, “Telling Stories: Documentary Theater as Trauma Archive and Historiography” examined the relationship between documentary plays and traumatic memory. She has presented her research on representations of war and performative responses to contemporary political issues at various conferences, including the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO), and the Mid America Theatre Conference (MATC), She co-wrote and co-directed, with Angela Schiller, The Knot, a multi-media performance piece about the African Diaspora that Stanford produced as part of its 2010-2011 mainstage season. She has worked at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Currently, she is a director for the Bay Area Educational Theater Company.
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Ljubi Matic

Ljubi Matic 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.

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Aida Mbowa

Aida Mbowa is a 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. She researches dramatic literature and music in the wake of political movements, such as decolonization in East Africa and the African American Black Power Movement. With a primary emphasis on the 1960s and 1970s, Aida locates East African cultural practices and ideas within African American conceptualizations of a black aesthetic. Aida's directorial interests include plays that implicitly or explicitly explore post-colonial African sociopolitical issues. In 2009, she directed a multidisciplinary performance project, Beyond My Circle: Performing Intercultural Exchange, at the Ugandan National Theater and later at Stanford University, using a team from both Makerere University in Uganda, as well as Stanford University. She is a member of, and partakes in conferences with, the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the African Literature Association (ALA), and Black Performance Theory (BPT).
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Angrette McCloskey

Angrette holds a BFA in Set Design, and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU-Tisch. Originally from Phoenix, AZ, Angrette has worked as a freelance set designer for theatre and film in NYC for the past seven years. Her credits include off-Broadway and regional plays, as well assistant credits on Broadway, and the Metropolitan Opera, and English National Opera. While in New York she also spent five years teaching stagecraft to high school students. Angrette's academic research is invested in the belief that the physical spaces we inhabit have profound effects on our beings. Her work is an exploration of space's ability to nurture an affective relationship between itself and its inhabitant, particularly through the construction process.

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Derek Miller

Derek is working towards a dissertation on sound in and as performance, which will explore intersections among musicology, theater studies, and performance studies through explorations of musical theater, opera, and classical music performances. He won a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship in support of this work. He is also interested in copyright law and performance, particularly their mutual development in the nineteenth century. While at Stanford, Derek has acted as music director for Love’s Labour’s Lost and dramaturg for Rent; he is currently writing the script for an evening of opera scenes by Mozart, to be produced by the Music Department. His academic writings on musical theater have appeared in Theater Journal and Studies in Musical Theatre, and his article on the phenomenology of piano playing is forthcoming in Contemporary Theatre Review. He has presented papers on musical theater at Song, Stage & Screen and at the Harvard Graduate Music Forum, and has spoken about musicals around the Stanford campus. His extensive acting experience includes work at the Williamstown Theater Festival, with the Public Theater (most recently in All's Well That Ends Well at Stanford), and for MFA Directors at Columbia University, as well as training with Anne Bogart and SITI Company, at the Atlantic Theater Company, and at Boston University. Derek received his BA cum laude in English from Yale.

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Florentina Mocanu

Florentina is a graduate of Theatre Arts University, Targu Mures, and San Francisco State University. At Stanford she translated/directed Mr. Leonida by I.L. Caragiale and Frenzy for Two or More by Eugene Ionesco. Her dissertation research focuses on groundbreaking directorial practices with a special emphasis on the state controlled theater and film of twentieth-century Romania. Other interests include stage design, translation, performance as research and research as performance.

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Matthew Moore

Matthew is a 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 Caryl Churchill’s Far Away. 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.

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Ciara Murphy

Ciara is a native of Ireland, and holds a BA in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College Dublin. At Stanford, she has directed Bedbound by Enda Walsh and Splendour by Abi Morgan, and co-directed Our Country's Good with playwright Amy Freed. She assisted media and film artist Lynn Hershman Leeson on a forthcoming film concerning the history of feminist art in the United States.

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Jessica Nakamura

Jessica is a doctoral student in the Department of Drama. Jessica received her BA with High Honors in Theater from Swarthmore College. Recently, she returned to Hawaii to attend the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she received her MFA in Asian Directing. There, she directed Gao Xingjian's Wild Man for her masters thesis, trained in Nihon Buyo (Japanese Classical Dance) for three years, and played in a Balinese Gamelan orchestra. Jessica's research interests include Traditional and Contemporary Japanese Theater and Multicultural theater.

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Virginia Preston

Virginia Preston is a PhD candidate in the Department of Drama. She is working on a dissertation on the figure and globalization in early ballet. Her research interests include theater, dance studies, interdisciplinary performance and history. Her previous degrees include an MA in Comparative Literature and Translation, at Binghamton, and a BA from the Liberal Arts College at Concordia. Virginia’s research focuses on francophone artists. Her paper Imag/ing Theatre: Wajdi Mouawad's Seuls appeared in TheatreForum 35. She is a Fall 2011 resident at La Cité internationale des arts, in Paris, and a past participant in ‘New Dramaturgies in Canada and Germany’ at HAU II. She joined the Mobile Academy in Warsaw, Klangkunstbühne at Universität der Kunste Berlin and the Interdisciplinary Fine Arts Program at Concordia. Virginia comes to performance studies via dance. She works in dramaturgy and directing, and she trained as a performer in Ottawa, at Le groupe de la place royale, and in Montreal at LADMMI. She is the graduate student representative for the Society of Dance History Scholars, and she is thrilled to join the board of the Society for Canadian Dance Studies this year.

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Myrton Wesley Running Wolf

Myrton is a Blackfeet Indian from Browning, Montana.  He received his Masters degree in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2008.  A tuition scholarship award winner to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City and a Master of Fine Arts graduate in film production from the University of Southern California in 2003, his interests include the marginalization and overt romantic depictions of Native Americans in mainstream media, the cultural politics of accessibility to feature film, broadcast television, and Broadway theater, critical race theory, and religious studies.  More broadly, he is interested in the transition period from 1875–1915 when the myth of Native America ceased to be anthropologic in nature and shifted to Third World politics.  His play titled Carlisle – a different three sisters, inspired by Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and set at the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the year 1913, received multimedia staged readings to standing-room only audiences at La MAMA ETC., The American Indian Community House (NYC), The Kimmel Center at NYU, The Barrow Group Theater, and Vassar College in Upstate New York.
His recent short film JARIN – a fable by Jim, Knute, and Red, won the Disney ABC Television Group’s VideoFest and the Best Short Film category at The International Cherokee Film Festival 2009; it was also nominated in the Best Live Short Subject category at the 34th Annual American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco and has been invited to the Smithsonian Institute’s Native Film+Video Festival 2010. 

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Michael St. Clair

Michael is a 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’s Suddenly Last Summer.

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Ryan Tacata

Ryan holds a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied briefly at the Experimental Performance Institute at New College of California with an emphasis in queer activism. His current research is invested in bridging critical theory with performance architecture through feminist and queer investigations of dwelling, place and paratheatrical space. Other interests include the postdramatic, postcolonial theory, the economics of live-art and (re)examing site specificity in performance. Most recently he completed a DIY residency at Mama Calizo's Voice Factory with the debut of Anal Foreclosure and is currently a director of The Good Shop Co-op in San Francisco, Ca.
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Arden Thomas

Arden is writing her dissertation on contemporary theater, dance, and performance art that engages with issues of ecology and environmentalism. At Stanford, she has directed Bug by Tracy Letts, 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.

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Raegan Truax-O'Gorman

Raegan holds a B.A. in English from Colorado College; an MA in Humanities and Social Thought from John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Program at NYU with a concentration in Gender Politics; and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. Her research interests include the body and violence, and she is currently researching resilience as an embodied performance while creating a dramaturgy of what she terms the misbehaving body. She was the recipient of The Leigh George Odom Memorial Award for Distinguished Master's Student from NYU's Department of Performance Studies and most recently worked with Guggenheim Fellow Carlos Motta on an international multi-media art project We Who Feel Differently. Raegan spent seven years working as the Director of Programming for Learning through an Expanded Arts Program, the largest Arts in Education Non-Profit in New York City which trains artists and organizations to develop quality arts programming for kids.

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Giulia Vittori

Giulia obtained both a BA and a MA summa cum laude in Theatre History from the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice. She is interested in modern and contemporary theatre history and in aesthetics. She published an essay from her thesis: Giulia Vittori, Ethics of space. Space according to Robert Wilson. In Kandinsky’s footsteps, “Il Castello di Elsinore” 58, University of Turin. She has been for many years performer and vocal trainer for an indipendent vanguarded theatre group in Venice, ItinerisTeatro. She is also a musician and a teacher of music.

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Nia Witherspoon

Nia is a 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. At Stanford, she directed Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and assistant directed Stan Lai’s Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. Nia also traveled to New York to assist filmmaker Hima B. with her upcoming film Liscence to Pimp. In May 2008, she directed Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and other STDs) at Stanford.

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Isaiah M. Wooden

Isaiah Matthew Wooden is a doctoral candidate and director-dramaturg in the Department of Drama with creative and research interests in cross-cultural performance, popular culture, and contemporary drama. His research has been supported by the Denning Family Fellowship for the Arts and the Ric Weiland Graduate Fellowship at Stanford. Isaiah’s academic writing has appeared in Southern Studies and Theatre Journal, with additional essays forthcoming in Callaloo and Theatre Journal. Recent directing credits include Eisa Davis’s Bulrusher, Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, Nilaja Sun’s No Child…, and Beyond My Circle, the multidisciplinary performance event that he co-directed and co-devised with collaborators from Stanford and Makerere Universities in 2009. Isaiah received his Bachelor’s degree in Government and Theater from Georgetown University, where he also served as an adjunct faculty member and Artistic Director of the Black Theatre Ensemble. Very active in ATHE, he is a member of the planning committee for the 2012 conference in Washington, D.C.

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