Graduate Student

Zihan Loo

Ph.D. Student, Performance Studies

M.F.A. in Studio Practice, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; M.A. in Performance Studies, New York University

Zihan is a queer artist from Singapore with a research focus on distended and pragmatic gestures of resistance under illiberal regimes. His work strives to reconcile the tension between the flesh of the body and the bone of the archive, while interrogating the fetish of materiality in our orientation towards a post-human world. He emphasizes the malleability of memory through various representational strategies that includes performance re-enactments and essay films....

AeJay Antonis Marquis

Ph.D. Student, Performance Studies

AeJay Antonis Marquis (They/Them) 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...

Fernando Martinez

Ph.D. Student, Performance Studies

B.A. and M.A. in Communication Studies, California State University Northridge

Self-proclaimed L.A. trash, Fernando is a performer and spoken-word artist whose research is centered in areas of Chicano and Central-American issues informed by Racial-Cultural Geographies, Ritual, Spatial Politics, and Abject Performance from L.A. to the Bay Area.

Dahlia Nayar

Ph.D. Student, Performance Studies

M.F.A. in Dance/Choreography, Hollins University

Dahlia’s project studies embodied manifestations of Quiet in multiple mediums of minoritarian performance. Her study curates a constellation of contemporary artists working in dance, theater, sound, and visual art with an attention to how Quiet emerges through bodies in relation to layered contexts and multiple subjectivities. She proposes that, as a minoritarian aesthetic, Quiet activates an ephemeral commons through resonance and attunement that allows expansive possibilities of relationality. Prior to her doctoral studies, Dahlia...

Pablo Paredes

Ph.D. Student, Performance Studies

B.A. in Ethnic Studies, minors in African American and Chicano Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Pablo is the son of Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian migrants, a US Navy veteran/war resister, student-parent, spoken word artist and Bombero from the South Bronx, New York. With permission from local Bomba Maestraxs and elders, his research archives and digitally chronicles the identity formation, healing, resistance and solidarity work that Afro-Taino Bomba ceremony performs in the Puerto Rican Diasporic communities of California.

Vincente Perez

Ph.D. Student, Performance Studies

B.A. in Anthropology, Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, University of Chicago

Vincente Perez is a poet, scholar, and writer working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop, and digital culture. He makes work that refuses binary thinking, which allows him to be in conversation with people, places, and things that refuse to make sense in a Western framework. He is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Performance Studies program at UC Berkeley and holds a B.A. in Anthropology and Comparative Race & Ethnic Studies from The University of Chicago. They were a 2021–22...

Evan Sakuma

Ph.D. Student, Performance Studies

Evan Sakuma (he/they) 'comes out' from the East Asian ethnic enclave of Monterey Park, CA. Their work, hardened further by the 'Queerantine', centers the performance of care within queer communities of color. While a theory head at times, Evan incorporates praxis of 'Gaysian' community building and artistry to actively seek safe spaces for his Asian queer community so head, heart, and home can be found—always.

Maria Silk

Ph.D. Student, Performance Studies

B.A. in Theater and Performance Studies, M.A. in Art History, Stanford University

Maria Silk’s research focuses on artistic communities in the San Francisco Bay Area from the Summer of Love to the present. At Berkeley, she intends to study Bay Area countercultures through the lens of broader themes including migration and intercultural performance, gentrification and displacement, and the history of psychoactive drugs. Having worked in Bay Area queer nightlife as a drag performer, DJ, and producer since 2014, Maria continues to produce two monthly drag shows and...

Crystal Song

Ph.D. Student, Performance Studies

B.A. in History, Ethnicity & Race Studies, Columbia University

Crystal is a dancer and PhD candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation examines Asian American ballroom dance cultures, with a focus on how model minorityness is negotiated and reorganized through embodied practice. Her work has been published in TDR and Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, and is forthcoming in The Black Scholar and International Journal of Screendance. In addition to her research and...

Rebecca Struch

Ph.D. Student, Performance Studies

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...