M.F.A., UC Davis, Dramatic Art, June 2020M.A., University of San Francisco, Education, September 2004B.A., San Francisco State University, Interdisciplinary Art, May 1994
B.F.A., Choreography and Modern Dance, University of North Carolina School of the ArtsM.A., Scenic Design and Scenography, Technische Universität Berlin
Karola Lüttringhaus was born and grew up in Berlin, Germany,
where they founded ALBAN ELVED DANCE COMPANY in 1997 to form an
outlet for their diverse artistic pursuits in dance, visual art,
film, scenic design and sound design. Karola has worked as a
freelance artist, choreographer, and educator at theatres and
universities across Europe and the US. In 2007, they incubated
the SARUS FESTIVAL for Site-specific & Experimental Art in 2007
in Wilmington, NC.
B.H.A., English andTheater Arts, Carnegie Mellon UniversityM.F.A., Film/Video/New Media, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Anuj Vaidya is a media maker, curator, and educator, who is
currently pursuing his doctorate in Performance Studies at UC
Davis. His praxis engages a diverse range of forms and strategies
that include theater and performance, multi-media installation
and story-telling, social practice, curatorial practice, arts
education, and artivism. Deeply invested in collaboration, Vaidya
seeks to break down the divide between artist and audience by
engaging them not only as content consumers but also as
co-creators through participatory processes. His work pays due
attention to the material, social, and intellectual impacts of
our storytelling and media technologies, reminding us that we
must be attentive to both the footprint and the brain-print of
the stories we tell.
M.A., African American Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2018M.F.A., Studio Art, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC , 2011B.A., African and African American and Diaspora Studies, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, 2016B.F.A., Studio Art, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC , 2008
2023 Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Performance Studies,
University of California-Davis, Davis, CA.
Maurice Moore received his Ph.D. in Performance Studies at the
University of California-Davis with a Designated Emphasis in
Studies in Performance and Practice.
Sarah Haughn received her PhD in Performance Studies with
designated emphases in Studies in Practice and Performance and
African and African American Studies. Her research considers how
processes of birth and gestation as grappled with in the
literature of Black writers elucidate the violence operative in
western metaphysics’ recurrent use of gestational language to
explain being. Scholarly interests include critical black
studies, philosophy of antagonism, gender theory, science and
technology studies, and poetics.
Dissertation: “Vocal Processing in Transnational Music
Performances, From Phonograph to Vocaloid”
Gretchen is a performing artist concerned with presence and
embodiment in computer music, language and cultural difference in
performance, electroacoustic improvisation, and artistic
collaboration.
Lisa Quoresimo is Assistant Professor of Musical Theatre at
Southern Utah University. She is an internationally produced
composer and playwright, and an active director and performer.
Her work has been seen at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (West Coast
Premiere of An Octoroon), Shotgun Players, and the Brava
Theatre, and she served as Artistic Director of the Kairos
Theatre in New York City for many years.
Jessica Suzanne Stokes (they/she) is a disabled poet /
performer / educator / scholar pursuing their PhD at Michigan
State University. They analyze contemporary ecopoetics’ crip
methods for climate survival and read into the experimental
poetics of those who have historically been experimented upon.
They are co-founder of the HIVES Research Workshop and
Speaker Series. Their work has been published
in Amodern and We Are Not Your Metaphor: A
Disability Poetry Anthology. Jessica has a purple wheelchair
and a lot of red hair.
Sarah Thompson recived her Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies
at UC Davis with Designated Emphases in Classics and Classical
Receptions and Feminist Theory and Research. She earned a B.A.
with High Honors in English from Oberlin College. Her work
focuses on adaptations of Greek tragedy with attention to
feminist issues and modes of performance, as well as the
affective dimensions of translation. Her dissertation examines
relationships between women in Euripides texts and recent
adaptations.
Dr. Emma Leigh Waldron is a Researcher in Internet Culture and a
Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, where she
teaches courses on games and emotion, games and performance, and
storytelling for interactive media.
Sean Feit Oakes, PhD is a scholar, performer, and Buddhist
teacher, researching the intersections between contemplative and
creative processes. His current work explores states of
consciousness in experimental dance training and intensive
meditation practice, integrating Buddhist scriptural study,
trauma physiology, and social justice. He completed
his PhD dissertation in Performance Studies, “‘This
Very Body is the Bodhi Tree’: The Performance of Contemplative
States in the Western Jhāna Revival & Contemporary
Movement Theater” in 2016 at UC Davis.
Ayo Walker is an Associate Professor of Critical Dance Studies at
Columbia College Chicago and a member of the core faculty for
Rennie Harris University.
Joselle Miller is a theater director, scholar and educator whose
work focuses on the utility of beauty and empathy in performance
for social change. After working for five years as the Theatre
Department Chair at the Oakland School for the Arts, Miller
founded Hapgood Theatre Company, an Equity theater in the Bay
Area. As Artistic Director, she led the company for five seasons,
directing more than a dozen productions, while simultaneously
doing freelance directing work with organizations such as Marin
Theatre Company, the Eugene O’Neill Foundation and AtmosTheatre
in San Francisco.
Alexander Boyd graduated from the University of California
at Davis Graduate Program in Performance Studies in June 2014.
His dissertation, “The Sustainability of Traditional Knowledge
Systems: Embodied Learning through Practice, Teaching and
Application,” draws on 20 years of professional practice and
teaching in Daoist Qigong arts (Daojiao Lishi Quanfa)
that he has studied since 1985 with his main teachers Chee Soo
(who passed in 1994) and Desmond Murray.
Christopher McCoy has worked as a teaching artist for Seattle
Children’s Theatre, Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, the Denver Center
Theatre Company, and, most recently, for the Citi Wang Theatre in
Boston. In 2001, Chris was selected for an education fellowship
through OPERA America, through which he worked with St. Louis
Opera Theatre, San Diego Opera, and Austin Lyric Opera. Directing
credits include Pterodactyls by Nicky Silver, Long Christmas Ride
Home by Paula Vogel, A Number by Caryl Churchill, Baltimore Waltz
by Paula Vogel, among others.
Kara Jhalak Miller is an Associate Professor of Dance in the
Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawai‘i at
Mānoa. She is an artist/scholar, director, choreographer,
performer, movement based media artist, and yoga practitioner.
Her research in dance and performance studies has been published
nationally and internationally. Her creative work has been
commissioned and presented in North and South America, Europe,
Asia, and the Pacific. For over 30 years, she has performed,
choreographed, and collaborated with dancers and companies,
touring extensively.
Nita Little Nelson is a founding developer of Contact
Improvisation, and a dance artist investigating modalities of the
embodied mind in composition and performance.
Sampada Aranke is an Associate Professor of Art History and
Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. Her research
interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual
culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has
been published in e-flux, Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, and
October. She has written catalogue essays for Sadie Barnette,
Betye Saar, Rashid Johnson, Faith Ringgold, Kambui Olujimi, Sable
Elyse Smith, and Zachary Fabri.
Dylan Bolles is a music composer, multi-disciplinary performer,
and collaborative artist whose current work focuses on healing
our relationship with the more-than-human world. He is a
member of Lost Meadow Land Cooperative in central Vermont, USA,
where he and his family are raising goats, practicing Korean
Natural Farming, and running Bottomless Well, an off-grid arts
and ecology immersion program dedicated to providing land-based
living and learning opportunities to historically marginalized
and un-landed peoples.
Dissertation is titled “Process-Based Aesthetics in a
Product-Based World: Somatic Awareness as a Critical Lens on
Art-Making and Money-Making in the Modern West”.
Jorge L. Morejón is a Lecturer of Dance at the Frost School of
Music. He received his bachelor’s degree in Special Education
from Florida International University with a focus in Dance
in 1998, and was awarded his Master’s Degree in Liberal
Studies from the University of Miami in 2006.
M.A., Theatre Directing, Royal Holloway University of London, 2002
Nitza Tenenblat is an artist and currently teaches at the Theatre
Arts Undergraduate and Graduate Programs of the University of
Brasília, Brazil, where she leads the Criação em Coletivo
para a CenaResearch Group.
Judith Halebsky is a professor of English at Dominican University
of California. She holds a PhD in performance studies from the
University of California, Davis, and an MFA in poetry from Mills
College. For three years, she studied noh theatre at Hōsei
University in Tokyo on a fellowship from the Japanese Ministry of
Culture (MEXT). Her articles on performance and cultural
translation have been published in the Asian Theatre Journal and
Theatre Research in Canada.
