Using Creativity to Better Understand What it Means to be Human
SCHOLARSHIP:
CONFERENCES, PANELS, & PUBLICATIONS
"As a scholar, my work is about the development of empathy and compassion for the human experience."
-AFS
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS:
Performance Studies International (PSi)
Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA)
The American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR)
American Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE)
Theatre & Communications Group (TCG)
The National Academic Advising Association (NACADA)
SERVICE TO THE FIELD:
Board Member
Alliance Theatre Education Board
Statement of purpose, "To maintain and deepen transparency and connection between Alliance Theatre Education programming and the communities we serve to better reflect and support them."
The Alliance Theatre is Atlanta’s national theater and is the leading producing theater in the Southeast, reaching more than 165,000 patrons annually. The Alliance Theatre received the Regional Theatre Tony Award® in recognition of sustained excellence in programming, education and community engagement.
Reviewer:
Modern Drama Journal
Focusing on dramatic literature, Modern Drama features refereed articles written from a variety of geo-political points of view, both formal and historical, of the dramatic literature of the past two centuries; there is also an extensive book review section. MD is available in print and online.
Reviewer:
Journal of Peacebuilding & Development
Journal of Peacebuilding & Development is a refereed journal providing a forum for the sharing of critical thinking and constructive action at the intersections of conflict, development and peace. JPD offers a professional and respected tool for promoting dialogue and expanding networks on critical peacebuilding discussions towards coherent, constructive action.
Grant Panelist:
South Arts
South Arts was founded in 1975 to build on the South’s unique heritage and enhance the public value of the arts. South Arts’ work responds to the arts environment and cultural trends with a regional perspective. They offer a portfolio of activities designed to address the issues important to our region and to link the South with the nation and the world through the arts.
Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA)
Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas was founded in 1985 as the volunteer membership organization for the professions of literary management and dramaturgy. LMDA holds the belief that theater is a vital art form that has the power to nourish, educate, and transform individuals and their communities and that dramaturgy is central to the process of theater-making.
Founding Co-Editor
Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research (KJUR): College of the Arts Special Edition
This bienniel special edition journal is a refereed journal providing a forum for the sharing of inquiry or investigation conducted by an undergraduate student that makes an original intellectual or creative contribution to the arts as a form of critical and rigorous scholarship.
Adjudicator:
Many Voices Fellowship: Playwrights' Center (Minneapolis, MN)
Supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation, the Playwrights' Center's Many Voices Program is designed to increase access and greater support of Black people, people of color, and/or Indigenous people in the contemporary theater, both locally and nationally, through financial support, education, and opportunities to develop new work with theater professionals.
PUBLICATIONS:
2023
"Touching Back While Black:
Self-defense and the politics of Black US citizenship in Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom"
in the journal Modern Drama.
Considering the critical methods of performance studies, critical race studies, and sensorial studies, Touching Back While Black analyzes the creation of social identities through the rubric of touch—a tactile sensibility that provides a cultural foundation for the misperception of bodies as racialized subjects. Specifically attending to the early 20th century historical period of Jim Crow because of its deeply held investments in the politics of separateness, this essay examines Paul Green’s 1926 Pulitzer Prize winning play In Abraham’s Bosom as one of the rare plays during this period that actually showed Black acts of touching back on the stage—challenging the audience to contend with an oppressive Jim Crow racial regime that forced African Americans to establish alternative modes of freedom outside of more traditional expressions of autonomy. Taking up tactility as a cultural system used to mark bodies as raced and weaponized to uphold white supremacy, Touching Back While Black reveals forms of power that have historically gone under-examined in relationship to racial politics and grapples with the very present ways that American society underestimates the social, political, and cultural power that touch wields in our understanding of social identities.
2022
Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US.
Co-Edited by Angela Farr Schiller, Lindsey Mantoan, & Matthew Moore.
Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US
Troubling Traditions takes up a 21st century, field-specific conversation between scholars, educators, and artists from varying generational, geographical, and identity positions that speak to the wide array of debates around dramatic canons. Unlike Literature and other fields in the humanities, Theatre and Performance Studies has not yet fully grappled with the problems of its canon. Troubling Traditions stages that conversation in relation to the canon in the United States. It investigates the possibilities for multiplying canons, methodologies for challenging canon formation, and the role of adaptation and practice in rethinking the field’s relation to established texts. The conversations put forward by this book on the canon interrogate the field’s fundamental values, and ask how to expand the voices, forms, and bodies that constitute this discipline
2021
The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays.
Co-Edited by Angela Farr Schiller, Lindsey Mantoan, and Leanna Keyes.
SHORTLISTED: 2022 LAMBDA Literary Award
The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays compiles eight new plays by eight trans playwrights featuring trans characters. This foundational book establishes a canon of trans theater and represents a variety of performance modes and genres. Themes addressed by these pieces range from gender identity and expression to racial and religious attitudes toward love and sex.
2020
Book Chapter
"Finding Wholeness and Community in the Academy: Tales from a Sister Circle" from The Undivided Life Faculty of Color Bringing Our Whole Selves to the Academy.
Co-authored with: Kami Anderson, Roxanne Donovan, Neysa Figueroa, Ebony Glover, Nichole Gillory, Nyasha Cooper, Adrianne Randolph, Griselda Thomas, and Roneisha Worthy.
This book chapter explores the challenges of successfully navigating predominately white academic institutions for pre/post tenure women of color and how to increase work-life balance, productivity, connection, and well-being in the process via the creation of "Sista Circles" in the academy.
Kennesaw State University Publications:
“Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Staying Power in American Culture.” Dramaturg’s Note for The Scarlet Letter. Kennesaw State University. 2016.
“In the Blood and Everywhere Else: Sex, Oppression, and Gender in Suzan-Lori Parks In the Blood.” Dramaturg’s Note for In the Blood. Kennesaw State University. 2017.
“Three Sisters at the Turn of Century.” Co-authored by Sami McBryer. Dramaturg’s Note for Three Sisters. Kennesaw State University. 2017.
“Yoruba Gods Take the Stage: In the Red and Brown Water by Tarell McCraney.” Co-authored by Meagan Dilworth. Dramaturg’s Note for In the Red and Brown Water. Kennesaw State University. 2017.
“Can’t We All Just Get Along?”: Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.” Co-authored by Skylar Jackson. Dramaturg’s Note for Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Kennesaw State University. 2017.
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC PODCAST
Editor's Conversation:
The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays
co-edited by Angela Farr Schiller, Leanna Keyes & Lindsey Mantoan
2021
The Bloomsbury Academic Podcast is more than just a book talk. Each episode is its own unique forum, bringing Bloomsbury authors and experts to the front of the conversation and tackling key issues in today’s culture, both in academia and beyond. This show is for everyone interested in expanding their learning outside the classroom and exploring the difficult discussions taking place in society every day.
CONFERENCE PANELS & PRESENTATIONS
CANONICITY, THEATRE, AND PERFORMANCE IN THE US
ATHE 2022
Detroit, Michigan
This roundtable discussion continues the work of our anthology of the same name (Routledge 2022), in which 51 contributors hold 21 dialogues addressing the problems and promises of canons and canonical thinking across the fields of theatre and performance. Together we confront the ways in which a white, Euro-centric, male canon has dominated ways of making, valuing and thinking about theatre in this country. Mapping exclusions, charting personal relationships with “great men,” and narrating theatrical histories and forms of knowledge that a canonically-driven white American theatre complex obscures, we survey systematically submerged landscapes of American theatre. We seek to name, promote and centralize ways of knowing through theatre that too often fail to appear in American classrooms, training programs, academic and professional seasons, and publishing practices (including Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Arab American, Queer, Trans, and non-Western performance traditions).
TROUBLING TRADITIONS
Facilitator
Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE)
August 2021
The canon has occupied center stage in curricula and production seasons in ways that are exclusionary to BIPOC and LGBTQ people, that reify the notion that white male narratives are the most important to tell, and leave little space for other innovative and important work. This session starts from the premise that “the canon” must move to the wings, and we ask what kinds of formations can occupy the spotlight for this next act of theater and performance.
RE-FOCUSING NEW PLAY DRAMATURGY FOR THE FUTURE
Advice, Guidance and Wisdom from some of
the leading dramaturgs in the field
Panelist
Literary Managers &
Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA):
May 2020
This panel was a roundtable of new play dramaturgs from across the country exploring:
What does it mean to be a dramaturg in the time of Covid-19? How will we guide and nurture our playwrights through this confusing time? What advice can we offer them to help ground and build their careers when our industry is in crisis? What can we do as new play dramaturgs to support our community during Covid-19? How can we encourage our playwrights to make space for creativity, in a time when distraction and emotions run high?
Facilitator
Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE)
August 2019
THE NEXT ACT: APPROACHES TO THE PROBLEM OF THE CANON IN
UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION
This session starts from the premise that “the canon” must move to the wings, and we ask what kinds of formations can occupy the spotlight for this next act of theater and performance. We delve into gritty questions such as: is it productive to replace the canon with a multiplicity of canons? Given that the (assumed) canon is so well-known, and educators and artists have so little time, how do we create resources for people to learn new texts? We are especially interested in how teaching practices engage, reject, and revise the tradition of texts and practices that constitute “the canon”, if we are even able to speak with certainty about such a monolithic and abstract ephemeral entity.
Panelist
Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE)
August 2018
STAGING REVOLUTIONS: PLANNING AND DIRECTING THE MAINSTAGE SEASON
This session established a forum for dialogue about the past and future of season selection practices, sharing current practices and, in the spirit of revolution, to challenge normalized models of selection.
CREATING SISTA CIRCLES: CHRONICLES FROM A WOMEN FACULTY OF COLOR PRE-TENURE SUPPORT GROUP
PANELIST
Conference Presentation in Preparation for a Longer Book chapter
Southeastern Women's Studies Association Conference (SWSA)
March 2017
This panel explored the challenges of successfully navigating predominately white academic institutions for pre/post tenure women of color and how to increase work-life balance, productivity, connection, and well-being in the process.
Conference Presentation
Theatre and Communications Group Conference (TCG)
July 2017
CONFRONTING WHITE BIAS IN THE THEATRE
Leading Atlanta area Artistic Director, Freddie Ashley (Actor's Express) and lighting designer Prof. Rebecca Makus engage in a frank discussion about the state of whiteness and the contemporary American theatre landscape. This comprehensive and honest discussion grapples with: the politics of diversity, representation, equity, and white bias as seen through the lens of the Atlanta theatre community. A conversation focused on how our majority white run institutions continue to be racially stalled even in the face of decades of calls for more diversity, a dynamic that is being experienced on a national theatre scale.
THE MEMORY OF TOUCH: RACE, VIOLENCE, AND THE HAPTIC IN THE ERA OF JIM CROW
Conference Presentation
International Society for Oral Literature of Africa (ISOLA)
June 2016
This project considers how the time of memory serves as one of the ways that African Americans have in the words of Suzan-Lori Parks, “reached back” in an effort to look forward. The Memory of Touch suggests that the act and time of remembering for African Americans functions as a performance of subversion and agility against the oppressive Western narrative of modernity.