Performance Studies trains students to document, theorize, and analyze embodied practices and events. Areas of concentration include: contemporary performance, dance, movement analysis, folk and popular performance, postcolonial theory, feminist and queer theory and performance theory.
Interested in a Double Major or Minor in Performance Studies? Email Alejandra Rodríguez at ar4784@nyu.edu for more information.
CONTACT US: performance.studies@nyu.edu or 212-998-1620
Last updated: March 23, 2026
Fall 2026 Undergraduate Course Offerings:
Note: please consult Albert for class meeting time and location.
Introduction to Performance Studies | M. Castañeda
PERF-UT 101.001 (19185) & PERF-UT 101.002 (Recitation - 19186)- 4 credits
To enter the field of Performance Studies is to proceed with a willingness to forgo strict definitions of art “objects” and “events.” The field encourages engagement with everyday life, performers from a variety of media, things inside and outside cultural institutions, and an expansive sense of the stage to reflect on how performance impacts our sense of the world. Music, theater, visual art, dance, and film are not divided into separate areas of study, but are necessarily engaged all together. While the question, “what is performance?” has mystified the minds of many, this course moves beyond this question to investigate: what does performance do? And how does performance help us to ask questions about aesthetics, politics, and the social world? The question “what does performance do?,” opens the line between theory and practice; a line that falsely separates the performer from the critic. Students will work together across these divides. In addition to deepening an understanding of the field of Performance Studies, students read texts that vitalize critical thinking in the humanities. The course engages theories of the field as they emerge from performances themselves, especially from the robust creative repertoires of New York City.
Performative Writing Workshop | B. Browning
PERF-UT 204.001 (21173) - 4 credits
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.
Performance Theory | J. Tang
PERF-UT 102.001 (19189) - 4 credits
This course examines the diverse issues and methodological questions raised by different kinds of performance. Where “Introduction to Performance Studies” asks, “What is performance? What counts as performance, and what is its cultural significance?” this course asks, “How can we interpret and analyze performance? What is ‘theory’ in this context, and how do theory and practice inform each other?” Readings introduce students to key concepts in the field such as “ritual,” “performativity,” “liveness,” and “affect.” Material for the course (readings, videos, and other media) exemplify the interdisciplinary nature of performance studies by drawing from work in aesthetics, anthropology, architecture studies, ethnic/area studies, queer studies, religious studies, legal studies, literary studies, etc.
Queery Politics and Performance: Black Queer Horror | M. De Berry
PERF-UT 302.001 (19188) - 4 credits
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.
Performance and Politics | A. Pellegrini
PERF-UT 104.001 (19187) - 4 credits
Enrollment is limited to 15
This course focuses specifically on the political aspects of performance -- how it reflects, enacts, and shifts political discourse and practices. Beginning with a broad construction of “politics” and “the everyday” and the understanding that “the personal is political,” the course encourages students to study events and practices that produce political effects. How can performance and performance theory help us think about the relations between politics, power, subjectivity, and social change? Please note that this is a device-free classroom: no laptops, tablets, or cell phones without explicit permission of instructor.
Performance Histories | J. Tang
PERF-UT 205.001 (19193) - 4 credits
Countering the “presentist” critique of performance studies as a field (i.e., that its emphasis on “liveness” limits it to analysis of contemporary practices), this course will examine both the long history of performance (and the specific research methodologies that are required for that examination), and the history of performance studies as a mode of social inquiry. How have performance, and the writing about performance, been deployed historically, and to what ends? How can contemporary researches access the archives that house answers to these questions, and how do archives in themselves constitute an historiographic “performance”? Students will consider the impact of performance in the contexts of (post-)colonial history, aesthetic genealogies, and other historiographic projects.
Topics in Performance Studies: Repair Work | K. Shimakawa
PERF-UT 305.002 (19191) - 4 credits
How can performance teach us ways of putting broken things back together? In this course, we’ll read about methods of repair from a wide range of disciplines: carpentry, medicine, ceramics, textiles, botany, zoology, gastronomy, etc. How and why do living (and other) beings put things back together? Each week, we’ll take up the concept of “repair” in a different discipline, to learn how and why it approaches that task. Then we’ll consider how we might take these various methods of repair as (literal or figurative) performance strategies. How does “repair” happen through performance practices?
Every week there will be required readings focused on basic principles of “repair” in various fields/disciplines. In addition to completing the reading, students will write short weekly reading responses (150-200 words), reflecting on how the practices described in the reading might illuminate some performance practice. Students will be asked to bring in their own examples that illustrate these connections to performance. In addition, groups of students (depending on enrollment, 2-4 per group) will do “deep” research on a particular method of repair, that they will, in turn, teach to the rest of us. There will be a written midterm exam (in class, week 6) and an oral final exam (20 minutes each, during the last week of class and the exam period).
Performance Studies Supervised Internship Course | L. Fortes
PERF-UT 307.001 (19194) - 1-4 credits
Note: OPEN TO PS MAJORS ONLY. The department does not place students in internships, students are responsible for procuring their own internships. Majors should speak with Alejandra Rodríguez (ar4784@nyu.edu) before enrolling in this course.
Performance Studies is a discipline which has sometimes addressed the performance of workers in the labor market, offering a theoretical perspective on some very practical questions: What are some of the professional skills that training in our field offers to students? What are some of the professional contexts within which this training is most useful? How might one employ some of our field's insights in the work environment? This course provides an opportunity for students to establish working relationships with organizations or institutions relevant to the field of Performance Studies, and to process and discuss their on-site work experiences with their peers and a supervising instructor. The class will touch on some of the theoretical dimensions of the experience of interning but will also offer students a space to work through real-world challenges and opportunities.