July 22, 2026
The Graduate Group in Performance Studies is delighted to welcome a new cohort of four Ph.D. students beginning in the 2026/27 academic year:
Nia Abeni
Nia Abeni is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work examines (dis)embodiment within racialized and late-capitalist regimes of power. Her current research focuses on the performance of the wound within Black diasporic expressions of release investigating how these practices negotiate conditions of subjection and displacement. Drawing on Black feminist studies, affect theory, and cultural geography, Nia asks how performance can intervene in patterns of self-fragmentation to reconfigure embodiment through new forms of agency and relationality.
Rodrigo Arenas Ibacache
Rodrigo (He/Él/Fey) is a researcher, educator and performance art creator from Antofagasta (Chile), who developed his path in Guatemala. His current research explores the possibilities and complexities of bodily stillness, particularly within the context of neoliberalism in Latin America. His interests also include the evolution of Latin American performance art, comedy as a political and creative tool, and film studies. Rodrigo has led performance art workshops across multiple territories, authored poetry books, worked as a film critic, and developed research projects in Guatemala and Mexico.
AshEL Eldridge
AshEL SeaSunZ Eldridge, Chicago born, living in Oakland by way of NY. He has West African/Blackfoot ancestry. He has been working internationally with various shamanic practices since 2005. His ceremonial leadership includes Dagara divinitory and ancestral healing, Japanese spiritual purification, and Galactic Language Activation/Soul Cleansing via Tian Gong. He is Co-founder/Co-Director of Esphera, (umbrella for (EFAM, Solestial Church, and Earth Amplified), creating liberation through regenerating ecosystems and communities by remembering our divinity. The work spans from recovery support from addiction with the Oakland unhoused to indigenous international hip-hop to Elemental Activism: Rites of Repair (Tantra, Transformative Justice, Quantum Physics, and Divination).
Miranda Luiz
Miranda Luiz is a musician, writer, and doctoral student in Performance Studies. Her research practice, improvisative studies, lies at the intersection of new materialism and critical improvisation studies. Miranda is interested in how apparatuses of representation––both technological and cognitive––construct the world as we know it, formed by self/other, subject/object, and human/nonhuman binaries. Through particular scores for improvisation, improvisative studies explores the blurring of human, technological, and environmental agencies––displacing the dominance of the ‘human’ subject and showing how systems of representation, and consequently systems of power, function and conceal themselves.
Through this interdisciplinary research, Miranda aims to explore how embodied epistemologies can serve as an access point to entangled/ecological thought. As this practice is fundamentally collaborative, community-based, and place-based, Miranda is also interested in how creative pedagogy can function as an engaged social praxis.