Sarah Berry Pierce (She/They) is a New York based theater director and scholar whose work primarily focuses on girlhood, queerness, and the ways in which theater can disrupt gendered roles and perceptions. Originally from Mississippi, Sarah Berry hopes to examine the ways that theater has developed societal perceptions of Southern women and plans to critique and examine historical theatrical representations of women in the American South and Bible Belt. Sarah Berry is currently exploring how contemporary representations of complex Southern feminine people who struggle with race, class, gender, and sexuality in the present-day South can be represented through theater and performance. Sarah Berry graduated from Vassar College in May of 2022 with Honors in Women’s Studies and Drama, where she directed her senior thesis Our Dear Dead Drug Lord by Alexis Scheer. During their time at Vassar, she received the June Ross Marks ’49 Travel Fund award to complete archival research in Paris for their thesis in Women’s Studies entitled “Not Another Cinderella Story: Re-Imagining the Princess Through Camp in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006).” Sarah Berry was selected to present her research at the 2022 National Collegiate Research Conference at Harvard University and received the Eloise Ellery Fellowship for Graduate Study. They hope to use their experiences as a queer girl raised in the South to reorient the ways in which theater is made, engaged with, and archived. Her other academic interests include Fat Studies, immersive and interactive theater, and feminine power. Their dream is to merge all their interests to create sparkly theater that young them would have loved (and needed) to have seen.

Why PS @ NYU?

I chose Performance Studies to be trained as both a scholar and artist! Commitment to both scholarship and practice makes performance studies the ideal field for me to continue to learn how to reorient gendered conceptions through performance. I believe that performance is more widely connected to the world around us, oppression, and power and I hope to able to explore all those intersections through scholarship, art creation, and pedagogy. NYU’s dedication to interdisciplinary study, critical theory, and research makes it the ideal place to pursue my research and artistic projects and I am thrilled to be a part of this incredible community!