Spring 2026 Undergraduate Courses

4 pts; refer to Albert for course time and meeting location.

This course offers an introduction to the histories, theories, and practices of studying and developing theatre and performance by, for, and about young people. We will explore childhood as a performance: as a stage upon which young people resist and contest their construction as empty, blank, violable, bad, or impressionable. Our goal is to assess the potential for theatre and performance to forge solidarity with and among children in an adult-centric world that often operates against them. Readings in theatre and performance studies and childhood studies will be complemented by literature, theatre, film, and visual art by, for, and about young people. At the end of the course, students will develop and workshop a fully realized theatre production for young audiences inspired by the children we meet in our weekly readings and A/V materials.

4 pts; refer to Albert for course time and meeting location.

Note: OPEN TO PS MAJORS ONLY. Majors should check with Alejandra Rodríguez (ar4784@nyu.edu) before enrolling in this course.*

Students in this course will build on a research paper/project that they originated in another PS course, with the goal of extending, refining, and further developing it in order to synthesize what they have learned, as well as further hone their research, analysis, and writing skills.

4 pts; refer to Albert for course time and meeting location.

This course explores convergences between trans/queer art and theory in the twentieth and twenty first century. We will read texts by authors who have defined and shaped queer and trans studies, queer and trans of color critique, and the role of art and artists in their writing. We will also study works of art and writing by artists, to consider how artists have transformed theorization across a range of forms, media. The course emphasizes transgender and queer theory engaged with performance studies, art history, visual culture and cultural studies, in addition to historiography of these fields. Coursework involves written papers and responses, with an optional creative project. We will study work by artists and writers including: Lauren Berlant, Zach Blas, Douglas Crimp, TJ Cuthand, micha cárdenas, Patty Chang, Chitra Ganesh, Sharon Hayes, Elizabeth Freeman, Gayatri Gopinath, kara keeling, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong'o, Sunil Gupta,  fierce pussy, Julie Tolentino, Chris Vargas, Andy Warhol.

4 pts; refer to Albert for course time and meeting location.

This course has a double task. On one hand, it introduces students to theories of expressive movement: how movement is stored in the body, how it is passes between generations, how it signifies, how it improvises and innovates. And on the other hand, this course looks at another scale of movement: the movement of diaspora and the very distinct conditions surrounding the planetary travel of particular communities. These two scales of movement come together in Flamenco, a complex performance culture that emerged in Southern Spain. The transcontinental movement of the pueblo gitano (Romani community in Spain), the role of southern Spain in the transatlantic slave trade, the expulsion of the Moors during the Reconquista, and Spanish trade routes between Asia and the Americas are only some of the diasporic conditions that influenced the evolution of Flamenco. We will study how these histories are reflected in the palos (musical forms) of Flamenco and its expressive movements, including footwork (zapateado), clapping (palmas), and the iconography of hand gesture. Throughout the course, we will study an array of contemporary Flamenco artists and researchers like Silvia Perez Cruz, Israel Galván, Yinka Graves, Phyllis Akinyi, Niurca Marquez, El Niño de Elche, Pedro G. Romero, Yoko Komatsubara, Raúl Rodríguez, Nelida Tirado, Lénica Reyes Zúñiga, Shoji Kojima, Érika Suárez, K. Meira Goldberg, and others, who are digging into the transcultural histories of Flamenco and experimenting with form.

4 pts; refer to Albert for course time and meeting location.

This course thinks of race and ethnicity as already performances. We base this claim on the premise that the term race, as demonstrated by Leerom Medovoi, used to mean a defect in clothing. In the late European Middle Ages, it began to be used by people to distinguish Jewish converts from “pure” Christians: the former were seen as a defect in the social fabric. In this sense, race was something that was acquired. Like a garment, it was something that could be taken off and put on. An action. A performance.

The course objective is to understand and work with the terms race and ethnicity with a critical eye. The authors and artists who compose it, mainly from Latin America, analyze, resist, and reformulate these concepts. Comprehending race and ethnicity as performances allows us to destroy and rebuild them: they are not fixed concepts but malleable. In this way, the objective is also to ask how we can appropriate these concepts to propose paths of understanding race and ethnicity that do not result in the brutal forms of discrimination we see today.

4 pts; refer to Albert for course time and meeting location.

A founding tenet of the Performance Studies field is the significance of the site where performance takes place – including its metropolitan environment. This course serves to introduce students to the performance culture of a given city (whether New York or one of the other Global sites), and to the ways in which any urban environment is staged by its residents and visitors. The class will take the city itself as its “text,” exploring its history, its significant performance venues, and the public spaces where the population gathers in a collective spectacle of social relations. Readings in urban performance studies will be supplemented by class trips to performances, from the opera to skateboarding ramps to public parades.

4 pts; refer to Albert for course time and meeting location.

“Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities… Walking is how the body measures itself against the earth.”

― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

In 1988, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, the then-lovers and collaborators of 12 years, walked for 90 days from opposite sides of the Great Wall of China and met in the middle to end their relationship. This performance course interrogates the theory and practice of walking  in body-based performance and contemporary art, as well as a mode of research/investigation. Students will push the limits of their bodies through time, space, site, repetition and gesture. What does it mean to slow down in this age of accelerations, to think every step as a gesture? To think of how walking which we do daily can influence and guide our creative and research practices. We will explore performance as a practice that blurs the lines between art, life and the politics of moving through space with our bodies, the history of walking, pilgrimage, protest and mapping. We will learn through making, moving, exploring and falling, each week will build upon the last. Students in this class will be asked to several performance projects aimed at investigating the practice of walking in their lives as well as a social, cultural and political act.  The final project will be a performance and creative essay that brings together the investigations and findings of the entire semester. This is a class that involves movement and will often meet outside the classroom, and investigate the relationship of our abled-bodies to NYC the most walkable city in the United States.

4 pts; refer to Albert for course time and meeting location.

A history of the theater in relation to the senses – and specifically the interplay of table and stage, the staging of food as theater, and the theatrical uses of food – remains to be written.” Performance theorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett challenges us to imagine what such a history would look (and taste) like were it composed from the perspective of the gustatory and the olfactory: from the earth to the kitchen, the plate to the mouth, inside the stomach and back out again. This course explores food as artistic medium and performance of, along, and about the alimentary canal as a prime (and delicious) opportunity for radical political praxis. Together, we will trace how food moves through bodies and across borders, how it stages power and pleasure, and how it performs cultural memory, violence, resistance, and care. Some areas of investigation include avant-garde cookbooks, performances in and of the kitchen, feminist rituals of radical hospitality, andalternative epistemologies of the gut. Readings and viewings draw from critical and performance theory, food studies, and interdisciplinary works of experimental art, featuring figures such as Filippo Marinetti, Martha Rosler, Alison Knowles, Bobby Brown, Judy Chicago, Barbara T. Smith, Joseph Beuys, Carolee Schneemann, Daniel Spoerri, Adrian Piper, Marina Abramović, Pope.L, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Carmelita Tropicana. Combining experimentation with critical inquiry, the course examines how food functions theatrically – from preparation and presentation to consumption and digestion – and how performances that taste and smell can challenge normative frameworks and open new avenues of feminist, ecological, and decolonial critique.

1- 4 pts – In-Person

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.