REGISTRATION INFORMATION
Check for registration holds. All holds must be resolved and removed in order to enroll in classes for the Fall semester. Go to the Student Center in Albert and look at the “Holds” section on the right side of the page.
Update your contact information. Go to the Student Center in Albert and click on "Personal Information." All students are required to have an "NYU Emergency Alert" cellular phone number and emergency contact information to register for Fall 2026.
NON-MAJORS: Due to the one-year format of the Master’s program, most of our classes are restricted to majors only. If you are interested in registering for a class, you must submit an External Student Registration form.
If space becomes available, you will be contacted by the department one week before the start of the semester, and in some cases, not until the first week of classes. If space becomes available, the department will contact students with updates at that time. Non-Major registrations will not be processed before then.
NOTE: Introduction to Performance Studies is open to Performance Studies MA students only. No exceptions can be made.
Last updated: March 23, 2026
Fall 2026 Graduate Course Offerings:
Introduction to Performance Studies | F. Moten
PERF-GT 1000.001 (19195)
Performance Studies MA students only
This course will introduce incoming Master’s students to some of the concepts, terms, and theoretical genealogies that they can expect to encounter in Performance Studies. What makes performance studies performance studies, and why do it? In considering this question we will consider the specificity of performance as an object of study, a mode of inquiry, a practice of self-hood and sociality, and as an aesthetic practice; we will also focus on the specific challenges and potentialities in writing about/as performance.
Advanced Readings in Performance Studies | D. Taylor
PERF-GT 2201.001 (19200)
Performance Studies PhD students only
The course will work toward a collective conversation about some of the most influential theoretical and analytic texts in the field of Performance Studies. We will consider relevant disciplinary research paradigms (movement analysis, ethnomusicology, theater history, orature studies, and art history among others) and their use in PS scholarship. Through close readings of exemplary works in our field, we will consider the theoretical, ethical and practical challenges presented by different objects of analysis. Students will develop practical skills related to archival research, ethnography (including participant observation and interviewing), documentation and analysis of live performance, and the analysis of documents of various kinds, including visual material. We will discuss what constitutes rigor in a variety of research methodologies. We will consider the writing strategies that best serve different kinds of projects, including those written about and/or from minoritarian and postcolonial perspectives. Work for the course will include written responses to the weekly readings, as well as 7 exercises oriented toward the practical development of students’ exam areas and the subsequent formulation of their dissertation projects.
Issues in Arts Politics | S. Smalls
PERF-GT 2312.001 (21617)
What are some of the issues that impact arts, politics, and the intersection of arts & politics? There are many! This course introduces Arts Politics MA students to methodological (systems of approach to an area of study), critical (analysis, theory), and discursive (what is being talked about/discussed at a broader level) tools to engage with the selected themes and art objects for the course.
The course will focus on reading, watching, listening, participating, observing, and writing in order to engage questions such as: what is the relationship between art and politics/the political? How does geography, embodiment, time period, genre, and other factors shift what politics are and how artists, art critics, scholars, and others engage with art as a political tool and a political method? How do we deploy writing, thinking, and discussion as aesthetic, civic, and intellectual responses to global politics.
Sitting with these questions, the course will engage three main themes: criticism, institutions, embodiment. The course tasks consist of reading, seeing visual art work, watching films, workshopping with small groups, and writing and final paper. Readings may include: bell hooks, Art On My Mind; John Berger, Ways of Seeing; Edouard Glissant, A New Region of the World; Theodor Adoro, Aesthetics; Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’,”; nikki a greene, Grime, Glitter, & Glass; Okwui Enwezo et al. PostWar Revisited; Joseph Pierce, Speculative Relations; Laura Marks, The Fold; Tina Campt, Listening to Images.
There will be site visits to galleries, museums, and festivals, as well as guests to our class and invitations to attend relevant lectures, workshops, and talks. Students will write a final paper, make a presentation, and participate in a paper workshop.
Performance & Social Theory: Du Bois & Performance | F. Moten
PERF-GT 2386.001 (19201)
We’ll think about the force of performance in some key works by W.E.B. Du Bois and we’ll also think about Du Bois as a performer, as a theorist of performance, and as a prophet of préformance, which is an underconcept or a noncept, that we’ll attempt to discover and/or invent in the class. Another way to put all this is that we’ll consider the relay between what Du Bois calls “the strange meaning of being black” and what emerges as a fundamental object and mode of study for him under the rubric of "the general strike."
Performative Writing | B. Browning
PERF-GT 2618.002 (19203)
This course will invite students to read about, discuss, and produce performative writing. By performative writing, we refer both to writing that compellingly addresses, conveys and analyses performance practices, and also writing that performs in the world: that is, writing that makes something happen. This latter concept was articulated by the linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin and has been developed and critiqued by subsequent theorists – though as we’ll also see, it’s arguably been both practiced and theorized in other historical and cultural contexts. Through readings and performance/writing exercises, students will explore various formal techniques for writing in a compelling way about the aesthetic and/or conceptual features of a given performance practice; identify some of the specific possibilities and challenges afforded by the current historical moment (including new technologies and the politics of representation) in taking up the question of writing about performance; and define several notions of the performative capacities of writing itself, including spells, poetry, fiction and correspondence. We’ll also consider some of the terms recently coined or invoked to describe such experiments in literary performativity: parafiction, fictocriticism, and autotheory.
Topics in Latin American Performance: Decolonial Theories and Practices | D. Taylor
PERF-GT 2407.001 (16864)
“There can be no discourse of decolonization, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice.” – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
Emerging predominantly from Latin America, ‘decolonial’ studies call attention to the fact that coloniality is not only not over, not post, but that it permeates almost all aspects of our lives: subjectivity, race, gender, language, as well as our epistemologies and pedagogies. This course will examine some of the basic elements of coloniality and the theories and practices that scholars and artists have developed to contest ongoing practices of “epistemicide.” Readings start with Columbus’ First letter (1493) and the Requerimiento (1513) and fast forward to works by Quijano, Sousa Santos, Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rivera Cusicanqui, Juan López Inztin, Wynter, and others. While the course focuses on decolonial struggles coming out of the Americas, students will be invited to question the geographies of thought that place Caribbean theorists (Fanon, Césaire, Hall, etc) in debates about colonialism that all but exclude the Americas.
Topics in Critical Theory: Performing Capital | M. Castañeda
PERF-GT 2100.001 (19199)
In this course, our aim is to examine the legacy of Marxian thought within critical theory. This legacy has run the gamut from wholehearted embrace to incisive critique. Critical thinkers following Marx have re-examined his philosophy in its original historical context and extrapolated it to others—often, in this process, revealing its limitations and flaws. Yet all of these responses, we propose in this course, have been extraordinarily generative. In particular, we examine the Marxian legacy within feminist, critical race, and anti-colonial theory, as well as the political economy of artificial intelligence and related technologies.
Class units will be organized around key terms including surplus value, primitive accumulation, means of production, subsistence, alienation, and the commodity. Each unit will pair a text by Marx introducing one of these key terms with a reading by another thinker that complicates, challenges, or expands it. Potential authors may include Iyko Day, W.E.B. Du Bois, Silvia Federici, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Paulo Freire, Verónica Gago, Stuart Hall, Robin Kelley, Leopoldina Fortunati, Anibal Quijano, Cedric Robinson, Amalia Orozco, Kathi Weeks, Melinda Cooper, and Sylvia Wynter.
Cultural Studies: Divinations | J. Tang
PERF-GT 2311.001 (19206)
This course examines old and recent performances of divination, their acts of reading, and contexts of study. These include the semiotics of discerning celestial and organic worlds, and collective orientations towards the future, stories of creation and apocalypse, speech acts of prophecy, and materials of talismanic use. We will study histories of quotidian everyday rituals, trials and tests, along with acts deemed implausible, ridiculous, heretical and miraculous, to ask how and why divinatory practices have been needful, authorized or persecuted. We will consider the work that acts of divination have performed under colonial administration, feudal and agrarian transitions to capitalism, relations of enclosure, property and extractivism, and within regimes of political power and social hierarchy, the control of reproductive labor and kinship. In doing so, we will critically reassess performance studies’ roots in the study of ritual. We will also question how esoteric, spiritualist and speculative practices have been studied in anthropology, iconology and history, used as avant-garde and experimental techniques in visual, media and performing arts, and commercialized in popular ritual cultures. Expect to parse excerpts from the Bible, I-Ching, accounts of juridical proceedings, works of visual and live performance and scholarly writing from history, art history, anthropology, medieval and environmental studies. This class will not promote any particular cultural or religious practices, nor does it encourage or emphasize practical magic. This is a seminar based on reading and analytical discussion with a final research paper.
Studies in Dance: Movement Theory | A. Lepecki
PERF-GT 2504.001 (19202)
The premise of this course is that “movement” is a bio-techno-racial-gendered political substance. Our approach will be less historical than archeological: we will focus particularly on how some key political philosophers and choreographers have developed and enacted theories of movement and embodiment to approach compositional practices and problems linked to issues of command and obedience; embodiment and discipline; movement and freedom; ephemerality and the political ontology of dance. A particular focus will be given to how efforts to capture and control of movement by contemporary as well as historical systems of “power/knowledge” illuminate choreographic productions of movement theories.
Topics in Queer Theory: Black Queer Horror | M. De Berry
PERF-GT 1035.001 (19198)
Black horror films have long served as aesthetic containers—assembling, disarming, reflecting, and refusing the horror of living while Black under the daily ruses of U.S. white supremacist terror. At the same time, their screenings double as intra-community gatherings: sites of camaraderie, laughter, stylized critique, and nuanced joy.
This class is less about screening suspenseful Black horror than re/visiting canonic Black queer cinema through the lens of horror. From sound and score to script and psycho-somatic text, we will mine subtle terrors—where the exhaust of anti-Blackness lingers. Our work attends to what is displaced off screen yet hyper-visible in the frame; what remains unscripted yet choreographed across and against the Black body as moving image.
To guide us, we turn to a congress of Black feminist scholars theorizing visual culture within Performance Studies—its methods, analytics, and world-making investments. After spending time with Nicole Fleetwood, Kara Keeling, and Kimberly Juanita Brown, how might we reorient affect and perception in the act of “seeing” the Black body? Staging a conversation between Tina Campt, Krista Thompson, and Meg Onli, what emerges at the intersection of aesthetic capture and collective improvisation? What insights, possibilities, and limits surface when Black queer horror is refracted through satire, musical, family drama, or the archive?
Films include Blackula (1972), Vamp (1986), The Wiz (1978), Eve’s Bayou (1997), the archival work of Cheryl Dunye (1996—ongoing), Get Out (2017), and Swarm (2023).
This course also centers the ritual of Black cinematic audience-ing as creative musculature—a Black feminist practice for building and sustaining counter-publics, especially during heightened moments of racist harm on the national stage.
Assignments consist of workshopping a professional critical document (e.g., personal statement, artist statement, or syllabus) and a two-part final that inter-animates and distinguishes between intellectual inquiry and artistic (or felt) pursuit. The final, for example, may take the form of a polished, argument-driven paper alongside a creative component—such as a storyboard of an omitted scene from a (favorite or not) Black queer horror film.
Dissertation Proposal | A. Lepecki
PERF-GT 2301.001 (19205)
This course is for Ph.D. students who passed their Area Examinations the preceding semester. The course operates as a workshop in which students draft their dissertation proposals in preparation for Dissertation Colloquia at the end of that semester, during which their dissertation committees will evaluate their proposals and determine whether or not to advance the student to ABD status.