B.A. in Theatre Arts, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota; M.A. in Applied Theatre Arts, University of Southern California
Rebecca Struch centers social justice and community engagement in her work as a performance scholar and artist, applied theatre practitioner, educator, and cultural organizer. Her dissertation makes the racialization of space and the spatialization of race central to the study of site-specific performance in the United States. With an emphasis on three geo-racial regimes—settler colonialism, plantation slavery and its afterlives, and racial capitalism—she makes visible the racemaking and spacemaking consequences of an expansive archive of aesthetic and activist performances staged on location. Her writing has been published in Performance Research, Yale Theater, Urban Geography, and Cultural Politics. In addition to her scholarly work, she developed a community based theatre program at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, trained M.F.A. acting students in citizen artistry, managed arts research programs at the Stanford University Arts Institute, served three terms as an elected board member of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO), and continues to direct, devise, and produce in both professional and university theatre. She has presented work at the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, the annual conference of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed, and the Earth Matters Onstage (EMOS) Symposium. She currently serves on the Editorial Review Board of the PTO Journal, and in 2023 she was a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Participant in Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Devised Theatre at Pig Iron Theatre in Philadelphia.