Graduate Group Faculty

Brandi Wilkins Catanese

Associate Professor; Associate Dean, Graduate Division

Joint appointment in African American Studies, Affiliated faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies

Professor Catanese's work addresses the role of performance in constructing our understanding of black identity, both through aesthetic production and the practices of everyday life. She is the author of The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (2011), and articles in venues including Theatre Journal and Performance Research. She is currently the Associate Editor of Theatre Survey and is working on two book projects, one analyzing black...

Abigail De Kosnik

Associate Professor; Director, Berkeley Center for New Media

Abigail De Kosnik is the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, an Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and an affiliated faculty member of Gender & Women’s Studies. She researches popular media, particularly digital media, film and television, and fan studies. She is particularly interested in how issues of feminism, queerness, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies.

De Kosnik’s...

Julia Fawcett

Associate Professor, Head Graduate Advisor

Julia Fawcett's research looks at the origins of concepts of privacy and publicity—as well as of domesticity, imperialism, and urban space—in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature and performance in the circum-Atlantic world. Her first book, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801 (University of Michigan Press, 2016), was a Finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. It examines the performance and...

Peter Glazer

Associate Professor

Professor Glazer is a professional director and playwright whose plays, adaptations, collaborations and directing projects include Woody Guthrie’s American Song (Bay Area Drama Critics award, with Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations Off-Broadway and Joseph Jefferson Award winner in Chicago), O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music (Delaware Theater Co.), Michael, Margaret, Pat & Kate (Marin Theater Co., Victory Gardens Theater), Measure for Measure, Seven Lears, Murder of Crows, and Marisol (UC Berkeley), Heart of...

Shannon Jackson

Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, and former Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design. Jackson’s research focuses on two overlapping domains: 1) collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms and 2) the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change. Her most recent books are Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and the Social (Northwestern University Press, 2022), and The Human Condition: Media Art from the Kramlich Collection (Thames & Hudson, 2022). Her...

Roshanak Kheshti

Associate Professor

Roshanak Kheshti is an anthropologist, feminist, queer and race theorist, born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work sits at the intersection of sound, the senses, film and performance studies with an emphasis on diaspora and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015) and Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 33 1/3, 2019). She is currently completing her third book, tentatively titled “We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Hermeneutics”. She...

SanSan Kwan

Professor, Department Chair

SanSan's research interests include dance studies, Asian American studies, and performance studies. Her recent book, Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration (Oxford UP, 2021), is winner of the 2022 de la Torre Bueno© Award. She is also author of Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (Oxford UP, 2013) and co-editor, with Kenneth Speirs, of Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects (University of Texas Press, 2004). Her article on cartographies of race and the Chop Suey circuit, a group of Asian American cabaret entertainers...

Angela Marino

Associate Professor

Angela Marino is author of Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution (Northwestern University Press, 2018); co-editor of Festive Devils in the Americas (Seagull Press/University of Chicago Press, 2015) and is published in the Latin American Theater Review (2008); Harvard Revista (2014); e-misférica Journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (2013); and Cultural Anthropology (2014). Prof. Marino works as Affiliate Faculty with the Latinx Research Center (formerly known as the Center for Latino Policy...

Shannon Steen

Associate Professor; Associate Dean for Programs & Planning, College of Letters & Science

Shannon Steen writes and teaches about a variety of topics, but primarily about performance in its social and political contexts. Her book The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea will be published with the University of Michigan Press in 2023. Prior to that she authored Racial Geometries: The Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific, and American Theatre...