Alejandro T. Acierto is an artist and musician working in text, sound, music, and performance. His recent performance works have been presented at Counterpath in Denver, Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival (BIPAF), the Center for Performance Research, and at the Slingshot Festival for Music, Art, & Technology. He has also shown works in LA, San Francisco, Detroit, and Chicago. He is a member of contemporary chamber orchestra Ensemble Dal Niente, and can be heard on Carrier, Albany, Avant Media, and Parlour Tapes+ Records, and will be releasing a solo album of works for voice and contrabass clarinet on Prom Night Records. He holds degrees in performance and composition from DePaul University and Manhattan School of Music and currently lives and works in Chicago where he is completing his MFA in New Media Arts at University of Illinois at Chicago.
Tom Armbrecht completed his BA in French at Middlebury College in 1992 after spending a year at Paris X, Nanterre. His graduate studies at Brown University included a year at L’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, before finishing his PhD in 1999. Tom’s research interests include twentieth-century French philosophy and literature, particularly theatre as text and in performance. His interdisciplinary approach to literature has led him to write about topics as varied as the face in the works of Virginie Despentes, homophobia in German popular entertainment, and sexuality and social class in Turkey. Tom completed a translation of and scholarly introduction to Eric Jourdan’s 1955 novel, Wicked Angels that was published in 2006 by Haworth Press. His first book, At the Periphery of the Center: Sexuality and Literary Genre in the Works of Yourcenar and Green was published as part of Rodopi Press’ Chiasma Series in 2007. He is currently working on a book about polymathy and polyphony.
Oliver Bendorf is a trans-genre artist and writer. He recently earned an MFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he held the Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in Poetry and where he is now an MLIS candidate. His book, The Spectral Wilderness, won the 2013 Wick Poetry Prize and is forthcoming. His writing and visual arts have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, jubilat, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best New Poets (U.Va. Press) and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books); he also has lyric essays forthcoming from Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke UP) and Women & Performance (NYU Press). The recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and Vermont Studio Center, he has presented and taught at The Bubbler at Madison Public Library, Umeå University in Umeå, Sweden, Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, and elsewhere.
Erin Briddick is a PhD candidate in Theatre Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her performance work often presents results of matrilineal archaeology. Her current research examines the co-evolution of humans, tools, and technology, and uses posthumanism as a lens through which to investigate performance.
Molly Budke is a second year MA candidate in Theatre Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her thesis research focuses on performances and perceptions of race in American TYA. Additionally, she works as a dramaturg, playwright, puppeteer, and collaborative performer in Madison and Minneapolis.
James Burling is a doctoral student in Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he also works at DesignLab as a consultant for new media projects. He’s interested in performances utilizing virtual environments, new media interfaces, and augmented reality in performance, as well as the educational applications of theatre and site-specific learning.
Darla Courtney-Cordero is a Madison-based video artist, writer, improviser and yogini. She currently assistant directs at Madison City Channel when she’s not telling people not to touch million-dollar paintings at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. She enjoys sushi, staying up late, sleeping in late, her hi-fi system and cuddling her Maine Coon mutt, Barnaby Jones.
Laura Damon-Moore, MLIS, is a public librarian and co-founder of the Library as Incubator Project, where she and her team examine the relationship between libraries and artists. In her work as a programming and outreach librarian for a small-town library outside of Madison, Laura facilitates 1-2 weekly early literacy programs for children under five years and their families. Laura’s book, The Artist’s Library: a Field Guide by the Library as Incubator Project, is published by Coffee House Press and comes out in May 2014.
Photo by Cynthia Marie Hoffman.
Jeffrey Hobbs is a Ph.D. candidate in French History at UW-Madison. He studies representations of rebellion and state violence in 1830s France. His research is interested in how competing interpretations of violence and liberty structured the development of democracy in Europe.
Holly Walter Kerby has worked as a chemist in industry, a researcher in science education, a teacher in high school and community college, and a playwright with credits in regional theaters and Off-off Broadway. In 2006 she founded Fusion Science Theater (FST), a National Science Foundation-funded organization that use tools of theater to create outreach shows that promote learning and assessment of big ideas of science. Kerby currently teaches chemistry and playwriting at Madison Area Technical College where she received the NISOD Excellence in Teaching award in 2007. In 2012 she was named the national Community College Faculty of the Year by the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT).
K. Frances Lieder is a joint PhD student in Theatre Research and Languages and Cultures of Asia at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her current research interests include the ethics of witnessing and the role(s) of violence in performances in “the global south,” political performance in public spaces, and the performance of gender in popular culture in South Asia.
Megan Marsh-McGlone is a PhD student in Theatre Research at UW-Madison, where she also works in the department of Molecular Biology. Megan served on the Board of Directors for Mercury Players Theatre for six years and has also worked with Madison theatre companies StageQ and Broom Street Theater. Her current work focuses on lactation, medical science, and societal expectations of new motherhood.
Eva Odessa Maxwell is an artist and educator. She is interested in the ways that people communicate, the methods they use to share ideas, thoughts, and emotions, and the effectiveness of those methods. Body language, body kinesthetics, and dance are also hot topics of discussion for Eva.
Jon McKenzie is Director of DesignLab and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of Perform or Else and co-editor of Contesting Performance. Jon has produced a series of video essays, including The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r, and gives workshops on performative scholarship and smart media.
Dijana Mitrović is a PhD candidate in Literary and Theatre Studies at UW-Madison. Her dissertation focuses on the representation of the body in interwar theatre of modernism and avant-garde, while her additional interests include performance art, theory, and ethics.
Miranda Nell received her PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research in 2012. She is interested in embodied knowledge, the complex relationship between expression and understanding, and the nature of reflective judgment. As a scholar of the Ancient Greeks and dialogical philosophy, the connection between theatre and philosophy is a natural part of her research.
Frédéric Neyrat is a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a French philosopher, and former program director at Collège international de Philosophie (Paris). He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes and the author of several essays.
Angela Richardson: Born in Brooklyn, New York, I searched for treasures under the Coney Island boardwalk as a kid. After moving to the Midwest, my hunt for beauty continued in the garden out back. I am still a passionate collector. Selective accumulation is central to my practice as a visual artist and performer. I create elaborate, artful procedures that allow interaction and collaboration with audiences. Conversational gleanings get reshaped into cryptic, cursive text drawings. Strangers’ secret stories are reworked into artifacts of connectedness. Drawing, installation, and dialogue form the foundation from which my interdisciplinary, alchemical work emerges. I am a long-time Madison resident and community-based artist. Currently, I’m also a graduate student in the Art Department’s MFA program at UW-Madison.
SALYER + SCHAAG is a collaborative team that makes scripts, videos, tableau installations, and intimate, site-specific performance events. Their work explores communication, intimacy, theatricality, failure, and identity. They have performed at the Performance Studies International Conference at Stanford University and at the Chazen Museum of Art, and their work is published by Ugly Ducking Presse (Brooklyn, NY).
Andrew Salyer is a conceptual artist, curator, and PhD student in Art Theory and Practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His current project involves a critical investigation of the structures that subtly, and peripherally, shape and construct identities with a focus on cultivated failure, disruption, humor, masculinity, minimalism, politics, power, and race.
Katie Schaag is a scholar-artist who works with text, audio, video, performance, and installation. Her artwork investigates artifice, power dynamics, and queering genders. She is a PhD candidate in English Literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison, researching performativity, plasticity, and intersections of scholarly inquiry and creative practice.
Charles Schultz is a first-year MA student in the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a BA in Performance Studies and Art History from Northwestern University, a degree that he obtained in three years. His research interests lie primarily in avant-garde drama and performance art, with a particular emphasis on European modernism.
Chelsea White is a first year PhD student in Theatre Research at University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her MA in English Literature from George Mason University in 2013. Her research interests include post-war British drama, queer performance, immersive theatre, and interdisciplinary civic change projects.
MAD THEORY 