B.S. in Performance Studies, Northwestern University
Max Abner is a PhD candidate, musician, and curator who hails from Louisville, KY, has deep roots in Chicago, and is currently based in Oakland. Working from an anti-colonial settler positionality, he draws together discourses from sound studies, Indigenous studies, and critical theory to approach what he calls settler sound, a concept that accounts for the ways in which contested relations to colonized land play out in aural aesthetics. His dissertation attends to settler sound in the Bay Area experimental music/sound art...
Rikki Amani is an essayist, family archivist, and a proponent of the Black Radical Tradition. Amani focuses on African American and diasporic aesthetic practitioners, particularly those whose lives converge at the intersection of both domestic and erotic performance.
Rikki’s work questions the materiality of staged performances as they slip into the performances of everyday life and everyday objects. She contemplates the creative and radical embodiments of Black mothers, sisters, and daughters through her...
BFA in Dance, second major in Art History, New York University; MA in Dance Education, New York University
Deborah Black is a doctoral student in Performance Studies. Her research brings her artistic lineage of experimental dance/theater practice/philosophy into interdisciplinary connections with critical pedagogy, post-structural philosophy, queer studies, and decolonization. Originally from rural Pennsylvania, she spent over two decades in New York City (and a few in Europe) working as an artist, educator, and writer. Deborah is...
B.A. in Sociology, Harvard University; M.F.A. in Art, Carnegie Mellon University
Lena Chen is an artist and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research examines the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City. An internationally exhibiting artist, she has been awarded grants from Mozilla Foundation, Sundance Institute, and the Center for Cultural Power.
B.A. (Honors) in Music, University of Cambridge; M.St. in Musicology, University of Oxford
Leia is a writer, composer, and dance-learner from Singapore. Her research interests span music/sound philosophy, queer theory and performance, aesthetics under 24/7 capitalism—and whatever will catch her fancy tomorrow! She is fascinated by the intersection of creative and academic writing, and is working to refine a writing idiom (drawn from literary, argumentative, and musical styles) best suited to the performing art traditions she takes as subjects of research. She finds...
B.F.A. in Modern Dance, minor in Native American Studies, University of Utah
Talia is an enrolled member of the Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians. She aspires to research and document the performance of her peoples' culture and identity within both historic and contemporary contexts. Her research interests are informed by her years of practice as a movement artist, as well as the connection to place her family has maintained for millennia in the coastal mountain region of San Diego County California. She graduated cum laude with an Honors B.F.A. in Modern Dance and minor in Native...
B.F.A. in Community Arts, minor in Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies, California College of the Arts; M.A. in Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Laila Guadalupe is the daughter of a Roma mother and Mexican father, raised by her grandmother and aunties in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. She is an artist whose practice centers on the making of altars as rituals for the healing of the personal and the collective social body. Laila's research focuses on public altars, memorial murals, graffiti, ceremony, dance and other forms of ritual performances...
B.A. Eugene Lang College, The New School; B.F.A. Parsons School of Design, The New School; M.A. Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University
Juliana's dissertation project deals with how SWANA cultural practices and gestures are re-routed through certain forms of Latinidad, with specific emphasis on music, dance, and the figure of the dancing harem girl in the world culture industry. Juliana has performed and presented artistic work throughout the U.S. and internationally.
Research interests include how dreams and fantasy are embodied in...
Born and raised in the East Bay, Ariah's research draws on the cultural richness of her upbringing. She explores food as a performance mechanism and means of resistance in creative communities during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Her background in casual fine dining and dance studies guides her inquiries into how culture and memory are represented through communal food practices, the role of hospitality in cultural transformation, and the hidden narratives of Black and queer artists in avant-garde performance art. Ultimately, her work is fueled by a desire to reimagine how food can...
Looking through a kaleidoscopic lens that blends evolutionary theory, diasporic fugitive practice, science in vivo, and environmentalism, the intention of Zachary’s research is to help begin collapsing the distance between the “Self” and the “Other.” As polarization grows globally, his focus centers around better understanding what makes “sustainable community,” by exploring the parallels between “liberal” and “conservative” forms of festivity, the performance of family, and the various adaptive and maladaptive responses to feelings of dis-belonging. It is Zachary’s hope that through...
