July 30, 2024
The Graduate Group in Performance Studies is delighted to welcome a new cohort of four Ph.D. students beginning in the 2024/25 academic year:
Ariah Henderson
Born and raised in the East Bay, Ariah's research draws on the cultural richness of her upbringing. She explores food as a performance mechanism and means of resistance in creative communities during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Her background in casual fine dining and dance studies guides her inquiries into how culture and memory are represented through communal food practices, the role of hospitality in cultural transformation, and the hidden narratives of Black and queer artists in avant-garde performance art. Ultimately, her work is fueled by a desire to reimagine how food can create more accessible community work and an unwavering desire to feed and be fed.
Zachary Herring
Looking through a kaleidoscopic lens that blends evolutionary theory, diasporic fugitive practice, science in vivo, and environmentalism, the intention of Zachary’s research is to help begin collapsing the distance between the “Self” and the “Other.” As polarization grows globally, his focus centers around better understanding what makes “sustainable community,” by exploring the parallels between “liberal” and “conservative” forms of festivity, the performance of family, and the various adaptive and maladaptive responses to feelings of dis-belonging. It is Zachary’s hope that through his work, he might do his part in revealing a “new” yet “ancient” sociality that has the capacity to destabilize the utility of individualism, through the return to an interdependent, supra-familial ancestral form. One that necessarily re-embeds humanity within a nonnegotiable interconnected bio-physical/spiritual world.
Leenah
Leenah is a Libyan archivist, radio producer, and open-source investigator. Her research lies at the intersection of subversive radio histories, surveillance, and Islamic dream theory. Leenah’s doctoral project centers on the sonic cultures of the Algerian anti-colonial struggle; here, she traces the routes of smuggled sound through the radio and vinyl record. Her work involves listening for and locating the emergent grammars and vernaculars of resistance that remained largely illegible and opaque to colonial forces. Leenah looks at how the collective’s performance of listening transformed the vinyl’s etched recordings and the radio’s ephemeral frequencies into an anti-surveillant vernacular—or sonic contraband. As an archivist, Leenah’s work shifts away from producing, yet another, record of Arab death; instead this undertaking is about creating an archive of Arab vitality.
AeJay Antonis Marquis
AeJay is a multi-hyphenate performance artist, scholar, educator, and activist whose work centers the decolonization of the theatrical canon, the black avant-garde, and queer political performance practice. Their current research seeks to explore Queer, Transgender and Non-Binary remixing, reclamation and reconciliation of varied Christian dogmas through performative explorations in theatre, dance, film, and music videos, and how this practice intersects with racial identity and contribute to Queer Futurist Liberation models. Their work has been seen across the Bay Area performance landscape as a director, choreographer, actor, producer, and dramaturg, and will continue to marry scholarship with practice in their doctoral journey.