RESEARCH AREAS: Theatre Management, Front-of-House Practice, and Production Dramaturgy

Ayobami O. Aribisala is a first-year PhD student in Theatre & Performance Research at Florida State University. Her research explores the backstage and front-of-house dimensions of theatre production, examining how house management and patron-facing operations function as sites of artistic decision-making rather than purely administrative labor. Her research explores creating a framework for theorizing front-of-house practice as a form of dramaturgy, arguing that the shaping of pre-show audience experience is itself a meaningful creative and interpretive act within a production. Ayobami holds a BA in Theatre Arts from the University of Lagos, an MA in Theatre Arts with a concentration in Design and Management from the University of Lagos, and an MFA in Theatre Management from Florida State University. Her sustained engagement with Nigerian theatre, as both a practitioner and a researcher, continues to inform her current doctoral work. Her professional background spans patron services, front-of-house operations, theatre management, and administrative coordination in commercial and university theatre settings, alongside production experience in film, events, and television commercials.

Zeeta Asare is a Ghanaian playwright, theatre artist, and PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at Florida State University. Her work is rooted in her interest in African storytelling and in the ways theatre can help us remember, question, and make sense of our experiences. Her research explores the intersections of African storytelling, African feminism, memory, and healing through theatre and performance, with particular attention to women’s stories, cultural memory, and experiences that are often silenced or overlooked. She holds an MA in Theatre from Binghamton University, an MA in Theatre for Development from the University of Ghana, Legon, and a BFA in Theatre Arts with a major in Dramatic Writing from the University of Ghana.

As a playwright, Zeeta has written several full-length plays, including 17 Letters, A Bathroom Rendezvous, Me Fie Asem, and Tales of Mrs A., as well as other plays and poetry. Her creative practice is deeply connected to her scholarly work, and she is interested in how storytelling can become a way of preserving memory, confronting difficult histories, reclaiming women’s voices, and creating possibilities for healing. Ultimately, she sees theatre as both an artistic practice and a space where stories, identities, memories, and possibilities can meet.

RESEARCH AREAS: Theatre in the Global South, Critical Dance Studies and Postcolonial Internationalism

Aryama Bej joined the FSU Theatre and Performance Research doctoral program in the fall of 2025. Her research explores elements of resistance and diplomacy in postcolonial Indian dance-drama through the archives of artists in India and the US diaspora. She is interested in understanding institutional hegemonic structures and governmentality that shape such cultural exchanges and influence the narrative and aesthetics of choreographies. She did her BA and MA in English Language and Literature from Jadavpur University. She has worked as a researcher at the Indian Institute of Management (Calcutta), a museum apprentice at the Delhi Art Gallery, and as an archive assistant for the Samaresh Basu Archive Project and Hemango Biswas Archive. She has worked as a dance dramaturg and choreographer. Developing her practice-as-research, she has presented her works at Oxford University, Johns Hopkins University, ACLA, and others. Based in Calcutta, she is a classical dancer specialising in Kathak and Odissi dance. She performs on cultural and academic platforms like the National School of Drama, Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network, and the Chandigarh Dance Festival.

Charity is a Nigerian dance artist, educator, choreographer, performer, and scholar currently pursuing a PhD in Theatre and Performance Research at Florida State University. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University at Buffalo and a BA in Theatre Arts from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, where she specialized in dance and acting. Her creative and scholarly practice is grounded in African dance forms and storytelling, contemporary dance, embodiment, culture, and performance. Central to her artistic practice is the ongoing development of Afro-modern, a movement language through which she brings African dance vocabularies into conversation with contemporary and modern movement practices. This approach informs both her choreography and teaching. Her MFA thesis, “Callings: Beyond Flesh — Choreographing the Invisible Through the Body as Portal,” explored dance and spirituality, engaging the body as a site for memory, ritual, ancestral presence, and the unseen. Her performance, choreographic, and teaching experiences span Nigeria and the United States, including artistic engagements with the University at Buffalo, SUNY Brockport, Urban Bush Women, Mahatammoho Collective and community-based arts organizations.

As she begins her doctoral studies, Charity is expanding her dance-based practice into broader inquiries within theatre and performance research while continuing to explore embodiment, culture, and artistic practice as modes of knowledge.

Andrés Laguna is a Colombian Fulbright PhD student in Theatre at Florida State University. His work explores how performance can function as a tool for education, democratic participation, and social transformation. He has developed projects that use puppetry, theatre, and social media to teach politics, gender equality, and literacy, understood as reading and comprehension skills. His work incorporates new media dramaturgies, combining technology and performance to create interactive learning experiences. His projects have been supported through international collaboration, including partnerships with governments and international NGOs, including his own La Gracia de la Democracia.

Andrés believes that his greatest achievements are the result of failed attempts and mistakes. For him, resilience through difficulties, doubts, and rejections is always an achievement.

Before beginning his doctoral studies at FSU in fall 2024, Ben Lundy earned his Master of Education in Theatre Education from Columbus State University. He was a member of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s inaugural BFA Musical Theatre class in 2018, graduating with an individually designed minor in dramaturgy. His research focuses on musical theatre, generational collaboration, educational theatre, and tourism. His master’s thesis, “Generational Theory as a Lens for Approaching Musical Theatre History, 1943-2023, or a Strange Loop,” applies the Strauss-Howe generational theory to the evolution of the Broadway musical, arguing that the theory helps define the eras of musical theatre history. His current research projects include “Lost in Time, Lost in Space and Meaning: Exclusion, Erasure, and Time Warp at Rocky Horror’s Oakley Court” and “Holy Stock, Hidden Dead: Collapse of Memory at Ford’s Theatre, Stuck in Lincoln’s Passion Play,” to be presented at ASTR’s 2026 “Taking Stock of Tourism” working session.

Ben serves as a speech instructor and the chair of the theatre department at Wallace Community College in Dothan, Alabama. He is the South Central Regional Director of the Musical Theatre Educators’ Alliance and has contributed articles and book reviews to the MTEA journal.

Jordan Mattson joined the Florida State University Theatre and Performance Research doctoral program in the fall of 2024 after completing her MA (2024) in the same department. Prior to FSU, she earned dual BA degrees in Theatre and Psychology from Arizona State University. As a theatre practitioner, she has worked professionally as a stage manager with companies such as Childsplay Theatre Company (Arizona) and Aspen Music Festival (Colorado).

Broadly, her research centers a fat studies approach, examining how performance illuminates cultural understandings of fatness. She has presented at national and international conferences, including the American Society for Theatre Research, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and the International Weight Stigma Conference. Her research presentations span topics such as the use of fat suits in performance, Renaissance depictions of fatness onstage, and the role of fat studies in academia. Her most recent publication appears in Revenge Is Mad Hard, an edited collection on James Ijames’s Fat Ham, edited by Valerie Clayman Pye and Danielle Rosvally.

Jamaal Amir McCray (JAM) is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Research at Florida State University whose research examines Carnival and circus performance, cultural policy, media representation, and cultural arts exchange. He studies how communities perform relationships to place and how those relationships are shaped by arts organizations, cultural infrastructure, public policy, and media discourse. His current work considers Carnival and circus as social practices shaped by participation, infrastructure, risk, and collective care.

JAM approaches cultural arts exchange as a practice grounded in understanding the cultural ecology of a place, including its Indigenous and everyday performances, histories, organizations, and existing systems of support. His creative scholarship combines live variety shows, documentary media, public broadcasting, and community-engaged arts practice. Recent projects include The Hungry Carnival: A Vaudeville of Scarcity, Public Access Noise, and When the Butterflies Would Visit, a multimodal exhibition developed from the Yar Burba ecological arts and sciences cultural exchange in Guna Yala, Panama. JAM holds an MFA from Towson University and a BA from the University of Maryland, College Park. He is a 2026–2027 FSU Native American and Indigenous Studies Graduate Fellow.

Meghan Nelson joined the Florida State University Theatre and Performance Research doctoral program in the fall of 2021. She earned her MA in Ethics and Public Leadership and her BS in English Literature and Theology from Johnson University. As an undergraduate, she conducted research abroad at Wycliffe Hall at the University of Oxford, where her focus on Shakespeare and African American literature deeply shaped her approach to literary and performance analysis. Beyond her academic training, Meghan brings direct leadership and artistic experience to her work. She has served as Director of Educational Programming for River and Rail Theatre Co., as well as a teaching assistant across numerous theatre courses at the Harvard Extension School, the Atlantic Acting School/NYU Tisch, and FSU. Her artistic background encompasses performance and ensemble work, including her performances in both the 2022 Broadway workshop of 1776 and at The School at Jacob’s Pillow, and intensive Shakespearean scene study with The Fontainebleau School of Acting ensemble.

Meghan’s research focuses on choreographic history, musical theatre structures, embodied nostalgia, and the cultural implications of staging choreographed narratives. Her research presentations span topics from Katherine Dunham’s Broadway interventions to social dance as a site of resistance, presented at conferences including the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the International Society of Stage Musicals, and the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her writing has also appeared in journals such as Studies in Musical Theatre and Theatre History Studies.

Lucy Oruta is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Research at Florida State University. Her research examines performance as a site through which communities negotiate memory, political life, cultural knowledge, spectatorship, and social change. Her work is particularly concerned with African and Indigenous performance practices, Theatre for Development, community-engaged performance, digital performance cultures, and the relationship between performance, embodiment, and public memory.

Her current research develops across several interconnected areas. One strand examines protest and state violence in contemporary Kenya, with particular attention to the 2024 Finance Bill protests and the ways enumeration, mourning, media circulation, music, and public performance shape the political afterlives of protest. A second strand investigates African masquerade and its circulation through digital platforms, asking how ritual performance is translated, witnessed, interpreted, and re-performed within social media environments. Her broader community-engaged scholarship builds from her work in Theatre for Development in Kenya and explores negotiated solidarity as an ethical framework for collaboration between universities and women-led grassroots communities.

Lucy holds an MFA in Theatre for Youth and Community from Arizona State University and a BA in Theatre Arts and Film Technology from Kenyatta University. Her work as an artist-researcher, lecturer, teaching artist, and applied theatre practitioner brings together performance scholarship, storytelling, pedagogy, and community-based artistic practice. Her earlier Theatre for Development work in Meru, Kenya, examined sexual and gender-based violence through collaborative performance practice and contributed to her ongoing research on negotiated solidarity, ethics, and community partnership. She continues to develop this work toward a broader model for accountable partnerships between academic institutions and grassroots cultural organizations. At Florida State University, Lucy’s research and teaching interests include theatre and performance theory, African performance histories, sensory studies, museum education, digital humanities, and community-engaged research. Her scholarship approaches performance not only as an artistic object but also as a method for understanding how bodies, communities, institutions, and publics make meaning together.

Dee Selmore is a Theatre and Performance Research Ph.D. candidate whose research examines performance theory and pedagogy, with particular interests in decolonizing actor-training practices, the intersections of spirituality, creativity, and performance, and the experiences of Black women in theatre and performance. Her dissertation explores the racial, cultural, historical, embodied, and spiritual dimensions that shape Black actors and their performance practices in the United States. Her scholarship informs her development of the Fusion Method, an emerging Afrocentric approach to culturally responsive actor training. Selmore brings extensive professional theatre and performance practice to her scholarship. A member of Actors’ Equity Association, her work spans regional theatre, film, directing, teaching, coaching, and community-based arts practice, providing an experiential foundation for her research. Selmore holds a BA in Theatre Performance from Florida A&M University, an MS in Theatre from Florida State University, and an MS in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Full Sail University. She is the founder of Olusé Performing Arts and co-founder of Essential Theatrical Associates.

Ryan Hope Travis is a TaPR doctoral candidate at Florida State University and an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Florida. He is an award-winning filmmaker, theatre-maker, writer, director, and actor whose interdisciplinary practice spans film, performance, and devised theatre. His work has been presented at regional theatres and film festivals across the United States and Europe. As an actor, he has appeared in HBO’s Watchmen and Apple TV’s Manhunt, as well as in a range of theatre, film, and commercial projects. He is the founder of Arcable, a film and theatre production company focused on stories of social change.

RHT’s creative and scholarly work integrates filmmaking and performance to explore storytelling as a mode of cultural inquiry and community engagement. His research centers on recovery and re-membering, with particular attention to African American histories and narratives that have been marginalized or excluded from traditional archives. His dissertation examines the life of Powhatan Beaty, Civil War soldier, actor, and community leader, investigating how performance can recover lost plays and histories while expanding understandings of Black theatre in the post-Reconstruction era. His scholarship has been published in the journal Theatre Topics.

Maria White (she/they) is a queer Romanian-American performing artist, educator, and doctoral student in Theatre and Performance Studies at Florida State University. Dance is their first love, especially floorwork and contact improvisation; they perform neo-burlesque as Lovina Tease, a tribute to their grandmother Maria. Based in Tallahassee, White studies neo-burlesque as a form of community-building and mutual support among performers, examining how performance helps artists sustain themselves financially and socially. Their work develops a framework they call communal toughness: collective care practiced across differences of background and identity. Now in comprehensive exams, White serves as house mother and co-director of Maison D’Arielle (founded by Nikayle Richardson) and founded its Queer Performing Artists Fund Florida, which supports performing artists in financial need. They have presented at MATC, the Florida Restorative Justice Conference, BurlyCon, and DSA, and performed internationally with Structures For Change and Fleur Darkin in Berlin and Riga. Their current project, draglesque Călușari, reworks a Romanian men’s folk dance to ask who is permitted to care openly and where.

Rob’s research interests include documentary theatre and adaptations, long-form improv, and professional wrestling. They have published essays and interviews in Texas Theatre Journal and Playing Harry Potter: Essays on Fandom and Performance and presented their research at the Mid-America Theatre Conference and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Prior to enrolling as a PhD student at FSU, they worked as an improv teacher and theatre artist in their home of Austin, TX, serving as faculty at The Hideout Theatre and Fallout Theater. Their work received award nominations from the B. Iden Payne Council for Best Fight Choreography and Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy for American Berserk Theatre’s Killer Girls. Rob also conceived and directed The Kindness of Strangers: Improvised Tennessee Williams Plays and For Time and Eternity: The Secret History of Mormonism’s Elect Lady and her Sister Wives.

As a documentary filmmaker, Rob directed local art is not a SCAM, an official selection for OutloudFilmFestival, Follow Your Heart NY (semi-finalist for Best Documentary), and the Tallahassee Film Festival. Rob also spent time in the funeral industry. Buy them a coffee and they’ll tell you stories for days. They have a BA in Theatre Arts from Rollins College and an MFA in Directing from Baylor University.