MARGARET ARANEO
Theatrical Genres: Performing Hysteria
Margaret Araneo is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Theater at Brooklyn College where she also serves as the Interim Head of the MA Program in Theater History and Criticism. She was the Managing Editor of the journal Slavic and East European Performance from 2005 to 2010. Her research focuses on the intersection of biopolitics and performance during modernism and its relationship to cultures of disability.
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Theatre History, Graduate Center, CUNY (in progress)
MFA in Acting, Carnegie Mellon University
BA in Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
ROBERT DAVIS
Topics in Performance Studies: Museums, Fairs, Sideshows
Robert Davis is an Instructor in the Tisch Drama Department. His dissertation, “Performance and Spectatorship in United States International Expositions, 1876-1893” looks at audience behavior at world’s fairs, sections of which have been published in The World’s Fair Reader (2014) and Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn? (2013). He has also published in The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (2015), Comparative Drama (2011), and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (2011, with Amanda Wrigley). Currently, he is under contract to write a game for Choice of Games about managing a theatre in nineteenth-century New York.
FRITZ ERTL
Directing Practicum; Theatrical Genres: Comedy & Performance
Fritz Ertl is a director and educator. He has produced or directed world premieres of plays by Steven Drukman, Erik Ehn, and Paula Vogel, and has worked at theatres such as Berkshire Theatre Festival, BACA Downtown, Here, and Incubator Arts Project. At NYU Fritz has directed Pentecost, by David Edgar, The Pains of Youth, by Ferdinand Brukner, and Mad Forest, by Caryl Churchill, among others. In recent years, he has been working on a series of new plays exploring the catastrophic consequences of globalization: Youth in Asia: A Techno Fantasia (aka the resistance project), written by Steven Drukman; Foxhollow (aka the animal project), by Steven Drukman; There Was and There Wasn't: An Old Iraqi Folktale (aka the queeraq project), written by Daniel Glen; and Carla and Lewis (aka the ecocide project), by Shonni Enelow. Fritz has been teaching at NYU since 1990 and is the former Managing Director of the Drama Department at Tisch. He spent the 2005-06 academic year in Dublin, where he was the program director of the Tisch Dublin Acting Conservatory. At PHTS he is the head of curriculum, and teaches directing.
JOSEPH JEFFREYS
Realism & Naturalism
Joe E. Jeffreys is a drag historian, dramaturge, and video artist whose work has received funding from the Jerome Foundation.
He has published in academic journals including The Drama Review, Theatre History Studies, and Women & Performance, essay anthologies including We Will Be Citizens: New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Theatre and Art, Glitter and Glitz: Mainstream Playwrights and Popular Theatre in 1920s America, encyclopedias and in the popular press including The Village Voice, Out, and The Advocate. Jeffreys has been interviewed about the art of drag by a wide range of media outlets including Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, Entertainment Tonight, L’Obs, Vice and Food and Wine and featured as a talking head on the subject in documentaries including P.S. Burn This Letter Please, Ruminations and Miss Rose Wood.
Jeffreys teaches a wide range of Major Playwrights courses for the Drama Department including ones on Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Samuel Beckett and the Absurdists. He has led the department’s LGBTQ+ performance class for many years including a full semester devoted to examining RuPaul’s Drag Race and its Impact.
As a dramaturge Jeffreys worked on the world premiere of Tennessee William’s last full-length play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere, the NYC premiere of William’s Green Eyes, and Michael Baron’s Charles Ludlam bio inspired play The Whore of Sheridan Square. Recently Jeffreys served as a research consultant to Tina Landau and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Steppenwolf production of their original work Ms. Blakk for President.
For the past decade Jeffreys has actively video documented the NYC drag scene and this work has screened internationally at festivals, museums and galleries including The Museum of Arts and Design and The Tate Modern. Samples of his video work can be seen at https://vimeo.com/joejeffreys.
SAJ
Theatrical Genres: Race & Ethnicity on the American Stage
SAJ (PhD) is a disabled, infinifat, queer, trans, and white working-class educator, community organizer, and McNair scholar. They have published in edited collections as well as in Cultural Dynamics, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Theatre Journal. SAJ is also a co-editor of the journal Lateral. They are currently finishing their first book, which explores twenty-first century racial capitalist ideologies and the connections between Broadway, racial class formation, and political economic practice. SAJ is also co-editing two additonal volumes, Love Letters to Sick and Disabled Queers, and Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (under contract with Temple University Press).
KEVIN KUHLKE
Directing Practicum
Kevin Kuhlke is an Arts Professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts' Department of Drama, specializing in acting (advanced scene study), directing, improvisation, and physical theatre.
He has acted with Anne Bogart, Robert Wilson, Mabou Mines, the Builders Association, the Iowa Theatre Lab, and the Holderness Company regionally and in New York including Lincoln Center, the Public Theater, PS 122, Danspace, MOMA, the Franklin Furnace, the Culture Project, and La Mama.
Directing work includes over 30 productions in various venues including the Atlantic Theater Company, Seattle Rep, the Huntington Theater Company, Theater for a New Audience, ICA (London), Warsaw Theater Festival, Moscow Arts Theater School, the City Theater (Iceland) A.R.T. Institute, and theatre schools in New York, the Netherlands, and Greenland.
Work ranges from classics such as Romeo and Juliet, The Bacchae, The Seagull and Miss Julie to contemporary plays The Swan, Fool for Love, The Mud Angel, Footfalls, as well as several original plays and devised pieces. His production of O, Pioneers! with Mary McDonnell was televised nationally by American Playhouse PBS. His play Winesberg: Small Town Life was produced at the Perseverance Theater. He has taught master acting and directing classes in Cuba, Iceland, England, Switzerland, Holland, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greenland and in several American Universities and training programs including CalArts, Naropa, A.R.T, University of Wisconsin, Yale, and Playwrights Horizons.
He has served as a mentor for the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Lab. He was the director of the Experimental Theatre Wing at Tisch Drama from 1991-2001 where he produced more than 100 productions. He was also chair of the Drama Department from 2001-2008. He is the founder and director of the Tisch International Theatre Summer Training program in Amsterdam and the Tisch spring actor training program in NYU Berlin.
ASH MARINACCIO
Political Theatre: Theatre & Social Justice
Ash Marinaccio is a multidisciplinary documentarian and artist dedicated to storytelling that highlights the socio-political issues defining our times. She is committed to creating work that evokes a deep sense of compassion and justice. As a theatremaker, photographer, and filmmaker, her work investigates complicated questions about class, violence, patriotism, and identity.
In 2021 Ash founded Docbloc, a company dedicated to bringing together artists, scholars, and journalists working across nonfiction genres for creative collaborations in live performance. Ash is the founding artistic director of the United Nations-recognized NGO Girl Be Heard and the theatre collective Co-Op Theatre East. She's a two-time TED speaker. Ash is listed as one of Culture Trip's 50 Women in Theatre You Should Know, a recipient of a Drama League First Stage Residency, and a New York Public Humanities Fellow.
As a theatremaker, her work has been seen off-Broadway (Joe's Pub, Primary Stages, Rattlestick, Culture Project), at TED conferences, The White House, The Apollo, United Nations, and on tour throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Her work has received critical acclaim from The New York Times, New Yorker, Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, Ebony, NY Press, Time Out NY, Backstage, Show Business and has been featured in segments on Buzzfeed, NBC, BBC, Al Jazeera, MTV, VH1, and NY1.
Currently, Ash is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Her research investigates theatre practices in war zones and documentary theatre. Ash holds her MA in Performance Studies from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She is a proud member of AEA and SAG/AFTRA.
EMILY MENDELSOHN
Materiality in Ecology and Puppetry
Emily Mendelsohn is a theater director working at the intersection of aesthetic experiment, contemplation, and social change. With an ensemble of artists from East Africa and the US, she staged Erik Ehn’s Maria Kizito, Deborah Asiimwe’s Cooking Oil, and Doreen Baingana’s Hills of Salt and Sugar in the US, Rwanda, and Uganda. She has directed and/or developed new work by playwrights Kristina Wong, Caridad Svich, Katori Hall, Virginia Grise, and Rachel Jendrzejewski. She taught directing for over ten years at The Powerhouse Theater Apprentice Program has worked as a guest artist at CalArts, Brown, Lewis and Clark, Fordham, and Pace. She has written about her work for anthologies published by Toronto, TCG, and No Passport Press. She is a Fulbright Fellow, a multiple recipient of TCG’s Global Connections program, and a New Georges Affiliate Artist where she recently completed an Audrey Fellowship.
STEPHANIE OMENS
Theatre & Therapy
Stephanie Omens is a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist, and Mental Health Counselor, Registered Drama Therapist, Board Certified, and Certified Child Life Specialist. Stephanie Omens is in private practice having previously worked in the hospital setting with medically compromised children whose lives are affected by hospitalized circumstances. She has been an adjunct instructor at New York University, since 2005. Explaining to children complicated bereavement is her research and upcoming publication, Fall 2023 by Rutledge Press, Drama Therapy And the Bereaved Child: Telling The Truth To Children About Death and Dying.
NOAH ORTEGA
Theatrical Genres: Freaky Theories of Performance
Noah Ortega (they/them) is an interdisciplinary performance artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Utilizing their background in performance, speculative philosophy, and queer politics, they have come to develop an artist/scholar practice that is deeply personal, constantly chaotic, and furiously DIY. Their practice is a gasping, flailing process of Mad worlding; phenomenology oriented and somatically realized. Manifesting through the constantly shifting mediums of performance, sound, imaging-making, and text, their work functions as an experimental machine intended to manifest post-capitalist futurity through embodied investigations of queerness, neurodivergence, alienation, and alterity. Most recently they have presented work as part of Ice Factory at The New Ohio Theatre, NYU PS PRAXIS, Performancy Forum, and The Brick Theatre, in addition to dozens of independent public projects. They currently work as an adjunct lecturer in Drama/Theatre Studies at NYU Tisch and in Visual and Critical Studies at The School of Visual Art.
Education:
Goddard College, Interdisciplinary Arts (performance creation), Masters of Fine Arts, Jan. 2021
New York University, Performance Studies, Masters of Art, May 2016
Hofstra University, Rhetorical Studies, Masters of Art, May 2015
Brigham Young University, Political Science, Bachelors of Art, Dec. 2011
JOHN OSBURN
Studies in Shakespeare: On Film
John is Associate Director of CONNECT, a theatre-based communication training program at the Cooper Union. He has taught at Vassar College and New School University, served on the literary and outreach staff of the Denver Center Theatre Company, and worked as an arts editor, critic, and director.
LYNN SALLY
Topics in Peformance Studies: Performing Gender: Camp, Drag & Burlesque
Dr. Sally received her PhD from the Performance Studies Department at New York University and her MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Theory from The New School. Her primary areas of research interest include American popular culture, gender, and performance. Her work has been published by Routledge Press and in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Journal of Popular Culture, Senses & Society, New York History, and others. Currently on sabbatical, she is completing a book-length academic monograph for Lexington Press tentatively titled Neo-Burlesque as a New Sexual Revolution: Performances of Gender, Excess, and Desire.
COREY F. SULLIVAN
The Villain
Corey Sullivan is an artist, teacher, and producer working internationally in theater and film. He holds degrees from Bard College, Moscow Art Theater, and Harvard University, where he was also a Teaching Fellow. As Research Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi, he taught and trained in theatrical forms all over the Middle East and South East Asia, including the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, India, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, and Japan. He has also been an invited guest lecturer at Bard College, Southern Methodist University, the United States Embassy in Egypt, the Indian Embassy in the UAE, and several international theater festivals. He is currently Adjunct Professor at New York University Tisch School of the Arts in the Undergraduate Theatre Studies Department and Graduate Film Program.
Since 2001 he has been an Associate Artist of Theater Mitu, with whom he has been a resident artist at the Sundance Institute, New York Theater Workshop, and the Watermill Center. He has performed at the Public Theater, New York Shakespeare Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Vineyard Theater, New Victory Theater, American Repertory Theater, Williamstown Theater Festival, Powerhouse Theater, Los Angeles Theatre Center, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. His international credits include the Moscow Art Theater and the Chekhov Estate in Russia, the Kontakt Theater Festival in Poland, the Cairo International Festival of Contemporary and Experimental Theater in Egypt, and Teatro Duoc UC in Santiago, Chile.
MANUEL VIVEROS
Theatrical Genres: Acting Spanish
With a Bachelor's in Dramatic Arts from Universidad del Valle, specialized training in Arts Education from Universidad de Valladolid, and a specialization in African American Theater from the University of Louisville, Manuel Viveros is a versatile professional. Holding a Master's in Government from Universidad ICESI and another in Theater from the University of Louisville, Professor Viveros is an accomplished actor, theater director, and researcher.
Having participated in numerous international theater festivals, Professor Viveros has also made notable contributions to Colombian film and television, featuring in productions such as "Escobar el Patrón del mal" (2013), "Manos Sucias" (2014), and "Candelaria" (2017). Professor Viveros played a significant role in the Laboratorio Teatral Univalle (2002 and 2006) and served as the Coordinator of the Bachelor's Degree program in Dramatic Art at the Universidad del Valle Sede Pacífico from 2011 to 2016.
During the period of 2013 to 2015, he collaborated with and was a Fellow of the Corporación Manos Visibles. Later, between 2017 and 2019, Manuel Viveros was recognized as an inaugural Fellow of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University.
His expertise extends to actor training and research in Spanish Golden Age theater. Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature in Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. He focuses his dissertation on exploring the dynamic relationship between Afro-American theater and Afro-Colombian theatrical expressions.