Contributors

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Biographies:

Anel Rakhimzhanova

Anel Rakhimzhanova is a MA Performance Studies candidate with her BA in Economics and Literature. Her research interests include surveillance, cyberspace, the performativity of big data, digital bodies and post-colonial studies.

Camila Arroyo Romero

Camila Arroyo is a Brooklyn based performer, choreographer, and movement director from Mexico City.  She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, which she completed with the support of Fundación Jumex de Arte Contemporáneo. She is currently a first year PhD candidate in the Performance Studies program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.  

Carolina Davila

Carolina Dávila is a first year PhD Student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. Prior to this she earned a Master in Law in Human Rights and a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing. In 2011 she earned the National Prize for Literature in Colombia with her book Como las catedrales (2011).

Her research interests include feminists and queer theories; feminized corporality and the construction of gender´s subjectivity in the field of contemporary literature, visual arts, performance and the hybrid artistic manifestations produced in Latin-America; and the relationship between gender, extractivism and globalization.

Cati Kalinoski

Cati Kalinoski is an MA Candidate in the Performance Studies Department at NYU. She has obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theater at NYU in 2019 where she graduated with honors. She also was the recipient of the Artist and Scholar award for her academic and artistic work. Her research interests include theories of time, performance theory and history, and studies of the Anthropocene.

Cynthia Hilda Melendez

Cynthia Meléndez Montoya is a PhD student at the Spanish and Portuguese department at New York University. Prior to this work, Cynthia earned a Master in Arts in Latin American Studies and a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in Photography. She uses these mediums to explore issues of gender, race, place, space, identity and belonging. A native of Peru, Cynthia attended Pontifical Catholic University of Peru where she earned a bachelors degree in Hispanic Literature in addition to engaging in performing arts and gaining a professional certificate of Photography. Her latest research focuses on queer Peruvian identity, memory, archives, and artivism in social justice work.

Dantae Garee Elliott

I am a first year PhD student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, my research consists of the theory of double consciousness by W.E.B. DuBois, and applying it to the colonial world, in Latin American Literature. With this I aim to analyze the Afro-Latino population in Latin America and the Caribbean, revealing how the paradigms of the dominant groups are formed and how marginalized groups, namely the Afro-descendant population in many Latin American countries, are forced to deny their racial characteristics and their cultural manifestations that make up their cultural identity.

Desiree A Fernandez

Desiree Fernandez is a first year masters student in the Performance Studies program at NYU. She graduated from San Diego State University in 2019 with her first masters in theatre studies in which she focused on dramaturgy with an emphasis in movement/dance studies. Desiree is focusing on post colonial studies in which she is thinking about the metaphysical dilemma of women of color and how physical dramaturgy practices are connected to epigenetics focusing on the rewriting on genetic memory. Along with being a scholar, Desiree is a performer, practicing dramaturg, and choreographer. 

Eva M Reyes

Eva Reyes is a master’s candidate in Performance Studies at New York University. For the past 5 years she has investigated the educational, familial, artistic, and political experiences that socially construct the Afro-Latinx subject. Eva is particularly interested in how the acceptance or denial of Blackness functions to displace Afro-Latinx individuals and communities. Her research explores interpersonal relationships, racial socialization, government documents, and concepts of Afro-Latindad that are born from a hailing into socio-political damnation. This work is guided by the principle that racial and ethnic contexts are crucial to studying Afro-Latinx subjects across the Americas and the Caribbean.

Henry A Wilcox

Henry is a Masters candidate in the Performance Studies department at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Their research interests include trans- studies and performance, cybernetics and information, affect and energy, cryptology, death/dying, psychoanalysis, poetics, and speculative fiction.

Jonathan R Coker

Jonathan Coker is from Houston, Texas. After receiving his BA in English Writing & Rhetoric from St. Edward’s University, he moved to New York City to work in the Fashion Industry. He has assisted in numerous campaigns for brands such as Converse, Vogue Paris, and Fenty. He is currently an MA candidate in Performance Studies at New York University. His academic and research interests include Music, the Politics of Fashion, as well as Black and Queer Studies.

Jose Gabino Alba Rodriguez

My name is Jose G Alba Rodriguez. I am a second-year masters student in the school of Individualized Study at Gallatin. With my research on theatre and performance, I explore the way dramaturgical theories intersect with politics. I seek to ask the following questions: How can one bring the theatricality of politics that influence voters to engage in presidential elections to the relationship between theatre and audiences? Can a theatrical performance persuade, motivate, or influence to change the spectators’ consciousness and act? Is theatre an avenue in which art can function as a practice of freedom?

Jose Gabriel Figueroa Carle

Gabriel Carle (San Juan, 1993) completed a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, with Minors in Modern Languages (French and Portuguese), Hispanic Studies (Caribbean Literature), and Gender and Women’s Studies. Their creative and academic research interests center on queerness in the Hispanic Antilles and on contemporary speculative fiction. They have won various literary prizes at UPR-Río Piedras and U. of Houston. In 2018, they published their first short story collection, Mala leche, and started the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University, where they currently teach undergrad Spanish.

Kristen M Kelso

Kristen Kelso is an MA Candidate in Performance Studies. She is a theatre director, writer, actor, literary translator and arts administrator. Her research interests include bilingual performance, the politics and performance of code-switching, and translation studies. She graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BFA Theatre Studies and a BA in Spanish Language and Literature. She has a Masters’ of Arts in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas in Translation Studies.

Laura Rojas

Laura Rojas (Bogotá, Colombia) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. Her research focuses on migration, displacement and community relations.

Lee Xie

Lee Xie is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Languages and Literature at NYU. Her research focuses on transpacific ties between China and Mexico dating back to the colonial period, as well as cultural transmissions between China and Latin America.

Maria Paz Almenara

Maria Paz Almenara is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. She holds a B.A. with Honors in Modern Culture and Media and Political Theory from Brown University. Her current research interests include processes of deterritorialization, ecologies of migration and technologies of capture. 

Menghang Wu

Menghang Wu is a performing artist. She is interested in how body related to feminism movement. She loves reading Rosa Luxemburg and Chantal Mouffe.  She hopes that she can contribute to gender equality in the future.

Michel Nieva

Michel Nieva is a first-year PhD student at NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He holds a degree in Philosophy from University of Buenos Aires, where he taught at the Department of Ancient Philosophy. He also worked as a researcher of CONICET and of the Instituto de Literatura Hispanoamericana. His research interests focus on Latin American science fiction, history of science and technologies, museums and exhibitions, Amerindian ontologies and processes of extractivism in the Southern Cone.

He is author of two science fiction novels: ¿Sueñan los gauchoides con ñandúes eléctricos? (2013), and Ascenso y Apogeo del Imperio Argentino (2018).

Naima-marilyn Mazic

 Naïma Mazic founded the association more2rhythm and the n ï m company in 2016. She concentrates on the rhythmicality of Jazz music as a tool of communication between dancers and musicians, such as uneven meters and polyrhythms. She has been resident choreographer at K3 Tanzplan/Kampnagel Hamburg, is doing her MA in Performance Studies at NYU TISCH, studied at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, the Iceland Academy of Arts and the Conservatory Vienna. Naïma was part of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and Impulstanz DanceWeb. She is dancing for Talia De Vries, has been choreographic assistant to Athina Tsangari, Erna Òmarsdottir and Alix Eynaudi and developed her work also in Havana, in collaboration with dramaturg William Ruiz-Morales. www.more2rhythm.com

Susana Costa amaral

Susana Costa Amaral is an artist and researcher working at the intersections of the fields of politics, performance, and feminist & queer theory. She holds an MA in Performance Arts from UFRJ and is pursuing her Ph.D. at NYU in the department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she lives and works in New York.

Xiao Liu

Xiao, a current NYU performance studies MA student, is a theatre worker and an actress with a five-year experience in creating and acting. Xiao specializes in theatre devising and educational theatre, she regularly attends international theatre festivals to show her own theater pieces, she applies different theatre techniques to her own works, from improvisation to mime. A strong believer in the power of theatre in education, Xiao regularly develops youth theatres to assist teenagers with effective theatrical trainings. Xiao enjoys a good Netflix binge but can also be found on Dance Marathon with friends from all over the world.

Yi Wang

Yi is currently a MA candidate in Performance Studies, whose research interests include the study of narratives, affect theories, film and feminism.

Diana Taylor (Professor)

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the award winning author of multiple books, among them: Theatre of Crisis (1991), Disappearing Acts (1997), The Archive and the Repertoire (2003),  Performance (2016), and ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (forthcoming). Taylor is director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics which she helped found in 1998. In 2017, Taylor was President of the Modern Language Association. In 2018 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Annie Sansonetti (Graduate Assistant)

Annie Sansonetti is a PhD candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.