Spring 2026 Courses

Professor Luis Rincón Alba
ASPP-GT 2043-001 (Graduate only)
Tuesday 2 - 5:35pm
4 points

In many political movements, the festive emerges as a major force shaping alternative social practices, forms of gathering, being together, and moving together. These alternative modes of being in collectivity are actively redefining the political. This sense of collectivity becomes particularly evident in the aesthetics of the Global South and its Diasporas. Consequently, this course explores the festive’s role in forming political movements beyond the traditional scope that reduces it to a simple byproduct of social life. Taking Latin American and Caribbean aesthetics as an initial case, this seminar engages in a detailed interpretation of performances that challenge traditional definitions of both the festive and the political. A wide range of performance practices, such as carnival parties, sound systems, cabaret shows, popular dance styles, artworks, organized slave riots, and indigenous uprisings, shape the modes students will engage in theory and practice.
For this course iteration, we will focus on questions around carnivals’ relation to the death and the dead, structures of solidarity codified in festive practice, how they enact utopian modes of communal life, and how these modes of communal life redefine current understandings of art and politics. The class involves field trips, visits to several performance events, and conversations with artists and organizers who use the festive as a political tool to engage in political action in NYC and abroad.
Questions regarding race, gender, and class will be directed to the philosophical, anthropological, and historical texts paying close attention to their involvement in the formation of colonial oppression. Performance studies’ methodologies will serve as the guiding mode to articulate these questions.

Professor Kathy Engel
ASPP-UT 1070 (Undergraduate section - juniors, seniors)
ASPP-GT 2070 (Graduate section)
Tuesday 2 - 5:35pm
4 points

If we listen to the water, what will we learn?

“…it is really vain to attempt to express the nature of something. We
notice effects and a complete account of these effects would perhaps
comprise the nature of this thing. We attempt in vain to describe the
character of a man; but a description of his actions and his deeds will
create for us a picture of his character…water is essentially the element
of life, wherever possible it wrests life from death. It is the great
healer of all that is sick and has lost its living poise; for water forever
strives after balance, a living balance, never a static one that would
extinguish life. It is everywhere a mediator between contrasts which
grows sharper where it is absent. Thus it brings together elements
hostile to one another, constantly creating something new out of them.
It dissolves what is solid, rendering it back to life.” - Theodore
Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos

“All water has a perfect memory….” - Toni Morrison, The Site of
Memory

“Words are waves. You learn to swim from the seduction of a wave
that wraps you
in foam. Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the
obscure: Come to me
in search of what you know not, the blue called out to you…” -
Mahmoud Darwish,
In the Presence of Absence, translated by Sinan Antoon

What are the language(s) of water…
We will read and write water – as essential, as movement, as nourishment,
as power, as story carrier, as cleanser, as resilience, as sensuous, as cold, as
warm, as bubbling, as still, as wave, as ripple, danger and endangered,
uncertain and constant, as beauty, as connector, as politicized, as
mysterious, in relation to land, ownership, liberation, libation, spirituality,
constructs of time; as body, as metaphor. As sacred. And more.

We will attempt to work (and play), writing as water, with water, to water,
guided by water. Which means a kind of fluidity. We will read, listen to, look
at, watch and sense in all ways works in relation to [bodies of] water, from
different perspectives, geographies, from and in varying forms including
movement, film, visual art, sound. As water changes, flows, freezes/ melts;
so does our writing, our making – as flood, as drought, as “fresh”, as “toxic”,
as interspersing, from and in the individual body, and as from sky, from
earth, as puddle, droplet, pond, lake, river, ocean and… as rain…as tears…
Materials may include Sea and Fog, Etel Adnan; Freshwater, Akwaeke
Emezi, theory of water, Lenne Betasamosake Simpson, Blood Dazzler,
Patricia Smith, the work of Christina Sharpe, The Site of Memory, Toni
Morrison, Water Wars, Vandana Shiva, Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs,
the visual work of Carolina Caycedo, and more.

Professor Kathy Engel
ASPP-GT 2004-001 (MA Arts Politics majors only)
Wednesday 2:30 5:14pm
2 points

The spring semester 2 credit Methods and Criticism II, the last core class in the one-year Masters in Arts Politics Program, offers a framework for synthesis, dialogue, and collaboration. Students are encouraged and supported to further deepen the work they’ve begun during the first semester and to work collaboratively based on shared interests and modes of working, while benefiting from the skills and insights of the whole cohort. There will be opportunities to engage with alumni and others in the field. Students will design projects that build on the work they’ve begun or have been moving towards, or something new may emerge that’s important to develop while in the program. The work can take any number of forms, including creating a map for a future project, developing a performance or art work, researching and designing a panel, writing, taking steps towards further study, or hybrid forms on key arts politics questions. With support from the professor, each other, and other networks, students will also identify pathways for their practices after graduation. We will discuss a limited number of texts and engage with different artistic expressions. We will meet with guest artist/scholar/activists, alumni, and visit sites of arts/politics.

The intention is to make a space that is both expansive and precise, challenging and supportive, building on the work of the first semester. At the close of the semester we will curate two sessions devoted to presenting your project, your work-in-process. These offerings can be in the form of panels, performances, visual work, writing, or another configuration, and/or combination.

Professor Sheril Antonio
ASPP-UT 1020-001 (course only open to undergraduate sophomores, juniors, seniors)
Thursdays, 2pm - 5:35pm
4 points– will count toward Humanities General Education credits for TISCH undergraduates

This course looks at how difference (othering) is constructed in film. We accomplish our goals via in class viewing of short and full length features, and critical analysis of the visual form and content in mainstream Hollywood, independent, and international films. This inquiry takes note that while some of these films may be conventional in form, in content they challenge accepted notions of differences or other. Our goal is to catalog films and other media that resist accepted notions of the “other.” We deal primarily with textual analysis that focuses on story, character and cultural spaces, as well as cinematic space and time. With the help of reading assignments, we examine socially accepted notions of the “other” and see how they are derived and/or challenged in and by films, thus looking at how an art form can interact with socially accepted forms of “othering.” The objective of the course is to train emerging artists and scholars to engage in critical analysis that can make profound contributions to the individual’s unique creative or academic process. Another intention of the course is to delineate and occupy the space left for debate between authorship as expressed from a directorial perspective from authorship from the spectator’s point of view.

Professor Anna Deavere Smith
ASPP-GT 2013-001
Sundays, 12pm - 5pm,
Sophomores, Juniors, Seniors and Graduate Students (with instructor’s permission, after video application)
4 points

This is a studio class in which performance is used as a way of investigating identity. The purpose of the work is to find nuance in how one understands one’s own identity and how one understands the identity of someone or something very different from the self. This could be another person, another idea, another entity – such as family, a nation, a corporation, a university, or a natural phenomenon. For example, one assignment might be to create a five-minute performance taking on the behavior of a real person who one cannot imagine ever being. 

Each student will create and present an original performance for a curated audience on the final day of class. Students do not need to be performers to participate in or to gain from this class. For those with performance experience, skills will be refined, toward increased power and increased nuance. All genres of performance are welcome: theater, music, dance, interdisciplinary. The professor will use exercises she has developed over decades, both as a teacher and in her performance work as a professional theater artist. World-class guest artists are integrated into the syllabus, collaborating with the professor to help create memorable and transformative activities.

The class is conducted like a workshop, and meets once weekly on Sundays* from January 25th to April 19th, excluding Sundays that are University holidays. Each student is expected to take proactive responsibility for creating an incubator environment where risk-taking is supported. Students from all disciplines and all schools throughout the university are welcome. Students from other professional schools, who are not studying artistic forms, but who wish to have greater communication skills, or who are preparing to take on leadership roles, are welcome.

The dates for this class are: Jan 25th, Feb 1st, Feb 8th, Feb 15th, Feb 22nd, March 1st, March 8th, March 29th, (Saturday) April 11th, and April 12th.

To apply for this class, please record a one-to-two-minute video in which you explain what you believe you can contribute to a creating a supportive class community, and what about people unlike yourself is of interest to you. Submit your video to Yumin Oh by email (yumin@annadeaveresmith.org) no later than November 30, 2025.

For more information, email Professor Smith (ads2@nyu.edu) and cc Yumin Oh (yumin@annadeaveresmith.org).

Professor Michael McElroy
ASPP-GT 2047-001 (Graduate only)
Tuesday 10am - 1:35pm
4 points

Public Policy and African American Music is a course designed to spark critical and creative thinking regarding the relationship between art and policy. Focusing on the music birthed by African American artists and public policies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Public Policy and African American Music aims to identify the ways in which public policy inspires, provokes, and motivates the artist and the music they create. Centering the music of Black America, while honing research skills, students will build presentations which offer a glimpse into key moments in our country’s history, the policies created, the African American artists, and the new music genres they produced. Public Policy and African American Music’s objective is to fine tune research abilities, strengthen presentation skills and ultimately through exploring past intersections of policy and art, offer students a space to gain a deeper understanding of their voices as artists, art creators and policy makers. As we enter into a time of seismic shift in our country’s policies on art making, arts education and art advocacy, it is vital that students have a deeper understanding of the rich legacy that has come before them. Beginning by researching socio-political moments as the spark of public policies, students will move towards the artists to understand the power, brilliance, and contribution that African American contributed to the evolution of music in America. By inviting students to enter into the world of a particular period in history, students will identify the patterns related to how African Americans utilized music to speak to their lived experiences. And in doing so, gave voice to the humanity that unifies us all. Public Policy and African American Music will require students to immerse themselves in multiple modes of research. They will be required to study the world as it exists in the time of the policy’s creation; the values, mores, beliefs, traditions held in society; how the socio-political moment intersected with the culture to create policy, the policies, the African American art makers birthing music, as well as the specific genres created. Through weekly assignments, students will utilize critical and creative research tools to holistically bring the world to life, and weave the connections between policy and art. In doing so, Public Policy and African American Music will challenge students to gain a greater understanding of the interplay of public policy, art making, and in today’s political climate, gain a deeper connection of two forces which shape our world. Field trips will include Bobst Library, New York Library of Performing Arts, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Professor Luis Rincón Alba
ASPP-GT 2042-001 (Graduate only)
Thursday 3:15 - 6:50pm
4 points

This course explores the multiplicity of communal and public gardens that populate New York City’s landscape while at the same time indicating the relationship that artists, communities, scholars, and activists create with soil, communal grounds, and their territory. The course proposes an approach to these concepts that understands the performative power that resides in the multiple modalities in which people and communities establish a concrete and poetic relation to their grounds, lands, and territories they inhabit. In paying close attention to how the materiality of the soil participates in contemporary art-making, the course proposes that soil are active performers in the constitution of the community. The course takes the case of the Amazonian “terra preta de indio” (a.k.a. Dark Earths) and the scholarship produced around it in the last few decades to understand revealing qualities of soil performance that overwhelm the paradigm of productivity as a major factor in soil valuation. Instead, we will approach soil from the perspectival vantage point of contemporary art-making, social sciences, and community engagements. Urban Gardens and farms will serve as an experimental site in which students will be able to directly experience notions of soil, land, and territory as much as an environment that facilitates and nurtures the learning experience. The course will be divided in three major areas of knowledge: First, theory and history of soils. Second, practice of land and territory. And third, a practice section that will provide students basic knowledge of soil composition and identification. While class assignments and activities will be clearly designated under one of the three major areas, students will not encounter them in a sequential order. Instruction will have students experience these areas in interspersed order and sometimes they will experience them all at once. The first area will offer students a historical and theoretical approach to contemporary studies on soil taking the paradigmatic case of Amazonian “terra preta de indio” (black indian soil or Amazonian Dark Earths) as a focus of approach that will allow students to approach pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial conceptualizations of soil from political, economic, and philosophical traditions. In the second area, students will encounter multiple modalities in which contemporary artists and communities interact with soils in modes that challenge extractivist relationships with the environment. The third area will give students the chance to learn basic techniques of soil identification and enhancement applied in urban gardens and farms in New York City. Classes will take place in the classroom and in a variety of gardens that will give students a direct experience of the practical elements that involve nurturing and sustaining a garden within the urban landscape. This will also give the students a unique insight into the modes in which local communities in NYC build relations based on radical gardening practices that require alternative modes of organizing and management.

Professor Laura Harris
ASPP-GT 2006-002 (graduate)
ASPP-UT 1006-002 (undergraduate)
Monday 10:20am - 1:55pm
4 points

We will look at some of the history of the ideal of the nuclear family, as socio-bio-economic-affective and reproductive unit. We will consider the moral/ideological justifications for this unit and the measures taken by states and other apparatuses to promote it, however unsustainable it may be, and to interdict it, however sustaining it may be (measures that include state surveillance, management and dissolution of families or other support systems that don’t fulfill the functions this unit is meant to fulfill). We will consider the way class war, colonial war, race war, the wars against women, queer and crip people are carried out through interventions in biological in reproduction, including eugenics and population/workforce management through birth control, coerced sterilization, “one child” policies, sex-selection (now legal only in the US), and adoption as well as efforts to control pregnant people through rape, restrictions on pregnancy termination and IVF, among other measures. We will also consider the way the reproductive unit has been supplemented by paid surrogates, wet nurses and other caregivers. Course materials will include sentimental, utopian and “monstrous” representations of families as well as critical writing about reproduction in its various forms by authors and artists such as: Thomas Robert Malthus; Jonathan Swift; Jade Sasser; Michel Foucault; Francis Galton; Mary Shelly; Silvia Federici; Edward Steichen; Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Jennifer Morgan; Hortense J. Spillers; Ana Maria García; Lourdes Portillo; Rita Laura Segato; Mary Pat Brady; Jennie Livingston and her many coauthors; Mark Rifkin; Joseph M. Pierce; Tsai Ming-liang; Rey Chow; W. E. B. Du Bois; Octavia Butler; Rachel Carson; Heather Davis; Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos; Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and perhaps some horror films from the 1970s.

Professor Ella Shohat
ASPP-GT 2041-001 (graduate students only)
CINE-GT 1025-002 (Cinema Studies section)
Monday 2 - 5:35pm
4 points

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the various dimensions of the cultural politics of Middle Eastern/North African cinema within transnational perspectives. We begin from the premise that representation itself is a site of contestation, with profound historical and theoretical implications impacting the subject, genre, aesthetic, and narrative framing. Drawing on various texts from diverse disciplines, including from film/media studies, literary theory, visual culture, and cultural studies, this course examines issues of representation in their various ramifications for debates over “the colonial,” “the national,” and “the diasporic.” The course will engage in a close analysis of the films, while also taking on board the various scholarly texts written about the films and their production and reception. The course will be organized around key concepts and questions having to do with Orientalist visual culture, the imperial imaginary, contested histories, imagined geographies, gender and national allegory, diasporic identity and postcoloniality, and the graven images taboo and the theology of adaptation. The course also examines Middle Eastern/North African films in terms of image, sound, editing, and so forth, exploring the ways in which cultural representations are shaped by specifically mediatic techniques. The close study of films will be combined with the analysis of related audio-visual materials. Discussion of the readings in relation to the screening will form a substantial part of the course.

Professor Elizabeth Mikesell
ASPP-UT 1009 (Undergraduate section - sophomores, juniors, seniors)
ASPP-GT 2009 (Graduate section)
Thursdays, 11am - 2:35pm
4 points

In this course, you will develop the skills you need to write about your own work. A series of guided reading, research, and writing exercises will help you think about what your work is, what it means, and why it matters, so that you will be able to craft language that accurately and effectively represents you as an artist and thinker. We will study a variety of personal statements, project descriptions, manifestos, and other artist writings, examining them for their relative strengths and weaknesses with an eye towards gathering effective expressive strategies. You will use the writing you’ve generated in your assignments as the groundwork for several final artist statements that approach and represent your work from different perspectives.

After we explore a variety of public and private sources of funding, fellowships, and residency opportunities in the US, you will identify several opportunities that would be appropriate for your work. You will then prepare applications for two opportunities of your choosing (three for graduate students). You will exit the course with writing that you might revise and reuse for many different purposes in your professional creative life.
This course will count toward elective credit for undergraduate students.