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 theatre artist, scholar, 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. Through interdisciplinary engagement with Black feminist geographies, critical Indigenous studies, and decolonial critique, 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 Researchand Urban Geography and is forthcoming in Cultural Politics and Yale Theater. In addition to her academic work, she developed a community based theatre program at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, trained M.F.A. acting students in citizen artistry, served three terms as an elected board member of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed, and continues to direct, devise, and produce in both professional and university theatre. She has presented work at the American Society for Theatre Research, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, the annual conference of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed, and the Earth Matters Onstage (EMOS) Symposium. Most recently, she was a 2023 NEH Summer Institute Participant in Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Devised Theatre at Pig Iron Theatre in Philadelphia.