WHY PS @ NYU
I came to Performance Studies looking to unburden and expand my thought. During my undergraduate career, I became increasingly frustrated and limited by the constraints of doing work under the domineering aegis of a rigid, arcane disciplinary logic. Inquiries- like mine- into the politics and aesthetics of sound, media, and performance work tend to sprawl far beyond the confines of one particular regime of thought, spawning diverse assemblages theretofore unanalyzable to me. I needed to find a way to take up multiple analytic positions and develop new, articulated modes of research and practice in order to get closer to knowing what and how I wanted to know. At Performance Studies, I came to find people asking questions similar in type, scale, and sense to my own, and even more: our faculty and my colleagues are horrifyingly intelligent, dramatically innovative, generously collaborative, and radically post disciplinary, consistently pushing at the border of both knowing doing and doing knowing. Also, our department happens to find itself in the epicenter of both a city and a series of worlds that performatively match its ethos, making PS an experience and opportunity unlike any other. I'm not sure I'd be able to pursue work like mine anywhere else, because performance studies is always looking to accept and to grow, to expand itself beyond itself in order to take seriously the objects, processes, and performances that make the world around us.