Rachel Anderson

At Stanford, Rachel Anderson directed Act One of Chekhov’s The Seagull, Lisa Rowland’s senior project Crossroads, Edvard Radzinsky’s She: In Absence of Love and Death, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and Femi Osofisan’s Farewell to a Cannibal Rage for Stanford Summer Theater. Her research interests include Russian theater and theatrical ensembles.

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Sebastián Calderón Bentin

Sebastián Calderón Bentin is a second-year graduate student, actor and director in the Department of Drama. He is a native of Panama and Peru and holds an M.A. in Performance Studies and a B.F.A. in Theater (with Honors) and Anthropology form New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. As a performer he has collaborated with Anna Deavere Smith; John Jesurun; Witness Relocation; International Contemporary Ensemble; and Tim Etchells and Matthew Goulish's Institute of Failure, among others. His main areas of research include critical theory, empire studies and the avant-garde in Latin America

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Ileana Drinovan

Ileana Drinovan is a fifth-year graduate student whose dissertation will focus on theater during antiquity. Her secondary area of study is the baroque period.

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Angela M. Farr Schiller

Angela M. Farr Schiller received her B.A. in theatre from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her final year of study at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She has also studied at the University of Ghana at Legon, Accra and the University degli Studi di Siena, Italy. As a performer, she has appeared onstage with the Emmy Award winning Kaiser Permanente’s Educational Theatre Programs, the National Dance Company of Ghana, the Tony Award winning Old Globe Theatre and the La Jolla Playhouse. Recently, Angela received her Master’s Degree in Africana Studies from New York University and has been teaching in Germany, where she also received her European Language Certificate in German. Her academic areas of research include late 20th century and contemporary African American performance and history, race, gender and identity politics, memory, oral history and documentary theatre.

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Douglas A. Jones, Jr.

Douglas A. Jones, Jr., a third-year PhD candidate in Drama and the Humanities, researches nineteenth-century theater and performance with particular emphasis on antebellum culture and politics, abolitionism, and historiography. His writing on the period has appeared in Theatre Topics. In Fall of 2008, he was dramaturg for Berkeley Repertory Theatre's production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone (dir. Delroy Lindo). He has presented papers at national and regional conferences including the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), where he also serves on the BTA-ATHE executive board as the graduate student representative. Douglas holds an MA in Theater History and Criticism and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (with Honors) in Theater and the Honors Certificate in Theatre Studies from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. He is also an instructor in the Prison University Project at San Quentin.

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Lindsey Mantoan

Lindsey Mantoan is a first year doctoral student in the Department of Drama. She holds an A.B. in Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin. Her master’s thesis, “Telling Stories: Documentary Theater as Trauma Archive and Historiography” examined the relationship between documentary plays and traumatic memory. She has presented papers at CUNY's "Engaging the (Theatre) Canon" conference and at the Mid America Theatre Conference. She has worked as a professional director, music director, and dramaturg.
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Ljubi Matic

Ljubi Matic was born and grew up in Serbia, where he received his MFA in Theatre Directing from Belgrade University of Arts. At Stanford he directed Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh, a play dealing with teenage angst and infatuation with music, as well as Roberto Zucco by Bernard-Marie Koltès, a play dealing with a young man’s killing spree and infatuation with violence, death and, strangely enough, invisibility.

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Aida Mbowa

Aida Mbowa is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Drama. She is a Ugandan national who was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and she received her BA in Performance and Identity Studies from Mount Holyoke College. She researches dramatic literature and music in the wake of political movements, such as decolonization in East Africa and the African American Black Power Movement. With a primary emphasis on the 1960s and 1970s, Aida locates East African cultural practices and ideas within African American conceptualizations of a black aesthetic. Aida's directorial interests include plays that implicitly or explicitly explore post-colonial African sociopolitical issues. In 2009, she directed a multidisciplinary performance project, Beyond My Circle: Performing Intercultural Exchange, at the Ugandan National Theater and later at Stanford University, using a team from both Makerere University in Uganda, as well as Stanford University. She is a member of, and partakes in conferences with, the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the African Literature Association (ALA), and Black Performance Theory (BPT).
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Derek Miller

Derek Miller is a second-year graduate student researching musical theater, particularly Rodgers & Hammerstein. He is interested in the musical as an American cultural export and as a lingua franca among American performers. As an actor, he has studied at Boston University, the Atlantic Theater Company, and with Anne Bogart and SITI Company. He has appeared onstage at Williamstown, the New York Fringe Festival, Columbia University and in numerous productions at Yale, from which he graduated with a BA in English. His other interests include classical music, opera, and the audience/performer dynamic.

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Florentina Mocanu

Florentina Mocanu is a graduate of Theatre Arts University, Targu Mures, and of San Francisco State University. At Stanford she translated/directed Mr. Leonida by I.L. Caragiale and Frenzy for Two or More by Eugene Ionesco. Her dissertation research focuses on groundbreaking directorial practices with a special emphasis on the state controlled theater and film of twentieth-century Romania. Other interests include stage design, translation, performance as research and research as performance.

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Matthew Moore

Matthew Moore is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Drama. He holds a BA in English and Theater from Muhlenberg College and has worked as a director in various theaters on the East Coast. At Stanford, he directed the premiere of a short play by Mac Wellman last spring and Caryl Churchill’s Far Away. Matthew is interested in the interplay of theater and politics during times of artistic and political revolution, and is especially concerned with the collisions of Modernism and Post-Colonial discourse in the early twentieth century.

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Ciara Murphy

Ciara Murphy is a native of Ireland, and holds a BA in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College Dublin. At Stanford, she has directed Bedbound by Enda Walsh and Splendour by Abi Morgan. She is currently assisting media and film artist Lynn Hershman Leeson on a forthcoming film concerning the history of feminist art in the United States.

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Jessica Nakamura

Jessica Nakamura is a first year doctoral student in the Department of Drama. Jessica received her BA with High Honors in Theater from Swarthmore College. Recently, she returned to Hawaii to attend the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she received her MFA in Asian Directing. There, she directed Gao Xingjian's Wild Man for her masters thesis, trained in Nihon Buyo (Japanese Classical Dance) for three years, and played in a Balinese Gamelan orchestra. Jessica's research interests include Traditional and Contemporary Japanese Theater and Multicultural theater.

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Virginia Preston

Virginia Preston is a third-year graduate student, director and performer in the Department of Drama. Her interests include art performance, dance and trauma studies. She works on early modern performance and contemporary, interdisciplinary dance theaters, and she comes to theater research via contemporary dance. Virginia was a scholarship student at the American Dance Festival and Le Groupe de la place Royale, and she trained professionally at Les Ateliers de Danse Moderne de Montréal. She is Canadian and has lived and worked most recently in Berlin, Warsaw and Montreal. Her previous degrees include an MA in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University and a BA from the Liberal Arts College and studies in interdisciplinary fine arts at Concordia in Montreal. She has papers at Performance Studies international (PSi 2009, 2010) on interdisciplinary theatrical works, focusing on transnationalism and francophone artists. Her paper Imag/ing Theatre: Wajdi Mouawad's Seuls appeared in TheatreForum 35.

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Michael St. Clair

Michael St. Clair is a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Drama. He received a BA from Case Western University. At Stanford, he has directed Sam Shepard’s Action and Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer.

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Ryan Tacata

Ryan Tacata holds a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied briefly at the Experimental Performance Institute at New College of California with an emphasis in queer activism. His current research is invested in bridging critical theory with performance architecture through feminist and queer investigations of dwelling, place and paratheatrical space. Other interests include the postdramatic, postcolonial theory, the economics of live-art and (re)examing site specificity in performance. Most recently he completed a DIY residency at Mama Calizo's Voice Factory with the debut of Anal Foreclosure and is currently a director of The Good Shop Co-op in San Francisco, Ca.
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Arden Thomas

Arden Thomas is writing her dissertation on contemporary theater, dance, and performance art that engages with issues of ecology and environmentalism. At Stanford, she has directed Bug by Tracy Letts, A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee for the Dragon Theater in Palo Alto, Museum by Tina Howe for the Palo Alto Pew Players, and Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht and One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace for the Department. Recently, she taught “Dance and Live Art in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries” in the Dance Division of the Department of Drama.

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Giulia Vittori

Giulia Vittori obtained both a BA and a MA summa cum laude in Theatre History from the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice. She is interested in modern and contemporary theatre history and in aesthetics. She published an essay from her thesis: Giulia Vittori, Ethics of space. Space according to Robert Wilson. In Kandinsky’s footsteps, “Il Castello di Elsinore” 58, University of Turin. She has been for many years performer and vocal trainer for an indipendent vanguarded theatre group in Venice, ItinerisTeatro. She is also a musician and a teacher of music.

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Nia Witherspoon

Nia Witherspoon is a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Drama. After receiving a BA from Smith College in American Studies with a focus on race and the visual and performing arts, she worked with the Sankofa Kuumba Cultural Arts Center as Project Coordinator and Head Teacher for the Creative You After School Program in Hartford, Connecticut, as well as a dancer in the Sankofa Kuumba Afro-Caribbean Dance Company. At Stanford, Nia has been fortunate enough to expand her interests in directing film/video to directing for the theater. Last year she directed Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and assistant directed Stan Lai’s Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. Nia also traveled to New York to assist filmmaker Hima B. with her upcoming film Liscence to Pimp. In May 2008 she will direct Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and other STDs) at Stanford.

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Isaiah M. Wooden

Isaiah M. Wooden is a second year graduate student and director-dramaturg in the Department of Drama. His research interests include cross-cultural performance, popular culture, and the politics, poetics, and performances of identity in contemporary African American drama. Isaiah received his Bachelor’s degree in Government and Theater from Georgetown University (2004), where he was an adjunct faculty member and Artistic Director of the Black Theatre Ensemble (BTE) between 2005 and 2008. In the summer of 2009, he traveled to Kampala, Uganda where he co-devised and co-directed the multidisciplinary performance project, Beyond My Circle: Performing Intercultural Exchange, with collaborators from Stanford and Makerere Universities. Isaiah serves as the Junior Co-Chair of ATHE’s Graduate Student Subcommittee (GSSC) and is the Graduate Student Representative-elect for the Black Theatre Association (BTA). This fall, he will stage Eisa Davis’s Bulrusher at Stanford.

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