Graduate Students

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Whitney Brady-Guzmán is a PhD student whose research includes resource extraction, cultural citizenship, and depictions of national prosperity in Latin America. Current work examines how cultural heritage sites in Mexico are oriented around strategic performances of nationhood, colonial legacy, race, and territory. She received a BA in Drama and Religion from Vassar College, and an MA from Tufts University with a thesis titled “Processing the Pain of Others: Witnessing Semana Santa Penitents in Taxco Through Procession.” She is serving as the ATHE Latinx, Indigenous, and the Americas Focus Group Graduate Student Representative throughout the 2021-2023 academic years. Whitney is also an award-winning lighting designer who has worked professionally throughout the northeastern United States.

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Steve Drum is a PhD candidate at Tufts. His research interests include celebrity performance, film history, and LGBTQ popular entertainments. He has presented his work at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the International Celebrity Studies Conference, the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association, and the Northeast Modern Language Association. Steve works as a Writing and Public Speaking consultant for the Academic Resource Center at Tufts. He also serves as chair for the Academic and Career Development committee in Tufts' Graduate Student Council. He earned a BFA in Drama from New York University and an MA in Cinema Studies from Savannah College of Art and Design.

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Amelia Rose Estrada is a queer, Latina-Jewish interdisciplinary artist and Ph.D. Candidate in the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies Department. Her dissertation research examines how dance participates in the cultural and national imaginary of Dominicanidad in Dominican Republic and in the diaspora. She received her M.A. in Theater and Performance from Tufts in 2022. As a performance maker, Amelia is interested in crafting work that speaks to identity, gender, queerness, and intergenerational ancestral relationality. Her work draws on methods from dance, performance art, and theater. Amelia frequently collaborates with Elle Jansen, under the company name MELLE., and with Gabriel Mata. Her choreography has been presented at The Kennedy Center (co-choreographed with Gabriel Mata), The Rockwell (co-directed/choreographed with Elle Jansen), Arrow Street Arts, University Settlement in NYC, SPACE in Portland, Maine, and at Cuerpo Mediado Festival de Videodanza in Rosario, Argentina, among others. As a theater creative, she co-choreographed CarmXn, a modern adaptation of the opera Carmen with Hogfish, was the associate choreographer for Moonbox’s 2023 production of Sweeney Todd, and co-directed and choreographed the musical adaptation of Twelfth Night at Tufts in spring 2024. Favorite performance credits include performing with Eventual Dance Company at Jacob's Pillow, with Gabriel Mata at Queer MVMT Fest in San Diego, Romeo and Juliet with the Philadelphia Orchestra, “Dancing Dead” with Brian Sanders JUNK, and with Leilani Chirino at the Outlet Dance Project. For more info visit: www.aremoves.com

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Grace Evans is a PhD student whose research explores performances of solidarity and stagings of neoliberal violence within the U.S. labor movement. She also uses a performance studies lens to scrutinize rats as figures of shame, disgust, and exclusion. Grace received her M.A. in Theatre & Performance Studies from Tufts in 2024. She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a B.A. in Social Studies and a secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights. Grace previously organized for union recognition and worker power in the hospitality industry. She then taught students at Somerville, Cambridge, and Malden public high schools through the local workforce development board. Grace aims to produce interdisciplinary scholarship that is accessible and provocative for those active in movement work.

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Jenny is a PhD candidate whose research explores the intersections of place-making, performance, sound, and sexual violence. Her dissertation project foregrounds artists as critical geographers, analyzing the works of Nina Simone and Tanya Tagaq, among others, to illustrate how these performers powerfully connect the survival of sexual violence with interrogations of place in the U.S. and Canada. Jenny has taught and assisted courses on popular culture, performance, public speaking, and decolonial and literary theory at Tufts and Harvard University. Jenny is presently an AY 2024-25 American Fellow with the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She is also a practicing creative nonfiction writer and critical essayist. Jenny received her M.A. from Tufts and her B.A. from Miami University of Ohio.

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Mac Irvine is a queer writer, curator, and PhD candidate in Theatre & Performance Studies at Tufts University. Their interdisciplinary dissertation project, titled "Making a Clubscape: Space, Race, Labor, and Performance in Austin's Queer Nightlife" explores the gendered and racialized labor of identity, community, and movement making in nightlife and performance spaces in Central Texas. Their scholarship has been supported by the Tufts’ Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Fung E.M. Humanities Summer Fellowship and the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Mac teaches courses on feminist, queer, and trans studies and performance studies. Mac is a regular curator and collaborator with Texas-based performers and organizers p1nkstar, Turito (f.k.a. Y2K), Thee Gay Agenda, and others. They have also worked with performance, educational, and nonprofit organizations including OUTsider Festival, the Chicago Black Social Culture Map, Honey Pot Performance, Badgerdog, OutYouth, and The Austin Chronicle. In 2019, Mac received an MA in Women's & Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, where their performance ethnography of queer nightlife creators in Chicago was recognized with the department's award for outstanding thesis. Mac received their B.S.J. in Magazine Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2014.

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Sung-Min Kim is an MA/PhD student who received a BA from Tufts University in both American Studies and Art History with a focus on Asian American Studies and art created by marginalized communities. Sung-Min grew up transnationally between South Korea and the United States and her research stems from her bodily experience of being in flight and searching for landing as an immigrant in a settler nation. Sung-Min has a deep relationship with Boston Chinatown where she worked as a project manager, researcher, and youth worker. In a multimedia art project called "Washing," Sung-Min worked with artist Lily Xie to showcase community stories and the legacy of the I-93 and I-90 highways built through Boston Chinatown. "Washing" received the MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative Grant to recreate the art installation online, in which Sung-Min's research was put directly in conversation with resident quotes, creating a collage of oral history and historical/theoretical research. Like so, Sung-Min seeks to ground her research in community and vice versa. Sung-Min's research interests include performances of belonging by Asian Americans in the context of US settler colonialism, asociality and invisibility as critical performance, and the sky as a site of transformation for Asian American bodies in flight.

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DeVante Love (he/she/they) is a queer performer dedicated to helping people find inner peace. As a monk, martial artist, and medicine woman, their research focuses on rituals of death and rebirth for queer folks of color. They explore the death and rebirth rituals embedded in popular culture and performed in the Ballroom community through voguing, drag, and modeling—highlighting the ways these different modes influence each other. Their work intersects queer theory, dance studies, affect theory, ritual studies, performance studies, blending reflections from their private spiritual practice and rehearsals with those of the drag/Ballroom scene in New England, Bay Area, and East Asia. Their meditations on these topics have been featured in *The Creative Lifebook 1* (2023), *Applied Theatre and Gender Justice* (2024), *QED* (2024), TEDx (2023), *Out Magazine* (2023), Pop Culture Association (2023), Creating Change (2024), and CBS News (2022). Before joining Tufts, they completed an MA in clinical psychology from Columbia University’s Teachers College and an artistic residency in Texas, where they wrote, directed, and starred in an immersive ritual choreoplay called *Healing the Father Wound*. Another passion of theirs is running Healing Kung Fu, a spiritual martial arts school where Sifu DeVante develops movement practices that increase emotional intelligence and break free from constricting heteronormative ways of being. Traveling the world to perform and share their teachings, they strive to achieve their life mission of helping people find inner peace through culturally specific healing practices.

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Manjari Mukherjee is a PhD student whose research interests include trauma studies, gender and citizenship studies, and race and minority studies in India. She completed her MPhil in Theatre and Performance Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. Her dissertation focused on the legitimate and illegitimate performance practices the Anglo-Indians community between 1940 and 1950 in Calcutta and Bombay. As an academic, she has presented her research at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) and Indian society for Theatre Research (ISTR) and has published a part of her dissertation with the Theatre Research International (TRI). Manjari is a trained Kathak dancer and a theatre practitioner. Prior to joining the graduate department at Tufts, Manjari worked as an Arts Manager for Mojarto, India's largest curated e-commerce art portal. Manjari completed her bachelors (BA) in English Literature (Honours) from Presidency College, Kolkata; and masters (MA) in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

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Elisa (Ayorinde) Peebles is a PhD candidate, creative strategist, and griot originally born and raised in Haudenosaunee territory, and currently finding refuge in the Caribbean archipelago of Borikén. Her research interests include Black Studies, Caribbean Studies and anti-colonial futurity, with a specific focus on the role of Black Atlantic Spirituality in the pursuit of liberation and the production of Otherwise worlds. She earned a BS in Media, Culture and Communications Studies from New York University.

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Sarah Berry Pierce is a first year PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University. She is a theater director and scholar whose work primarily focuses on girlhood, queerness, and fatness. Originally from Mississippi, Sarah Berry examines the ways theatricality and status quo conceptions have shaped the unique subjectivity, lived experiences, and social perceptions of fat girls. She is also interested in exploring representations of fatness on the stage and screen and has presented her work on historical fat theatrical performances at the American Society for Theatre Research. She received her BA from Vassar College in May of 2022 with Honors in Women’s Studies and Drama and completed her MA in Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2023. Sarah Berry hopes to use their experiences as a queer, fat girl raised in the South to reorient the ways in which fat performance is made, studied, and experienced. 

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Elijah Punzal is a PhD student and scholar-artist with research interests in contemporary Filipino American theatre and performance. He hopes to examine how these contemporary Fil-Am performances engage with diasporic imagination and cultural (re)memory surrounding how Filipino Americans come to know or remember their history. They graduated from the University of California Irvine with a double major in Drama and Education Sciences, minor in Urban Studies, and departmental honors in Dramatic Literature, History, and Theory. Prior to joining Tufts, Elijah worked at Berkeley Repertory Theatre as the 2022 Education & Community Engagement Fellow as well as Off-Broadway at WP Theatre as the 2021 Data Associate & Gala Assistant. With his work as a community facilitator, Elijah’s research interests are largely influenced from their time in LGBTQ+ and API community organizations, most notably with the Amado Khaya Initiative (formerly the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies), UCI Filipino American Alumni Chapter, and UCI LGBT Resource Center. Relaying a fond memory from the past academic year, Elijah presented on the Filipino Boy’s Love franchise Gameboys at the 2024 Pop Culture Association Conference where he examined the franchise’s depictions of queer (virtual) intimacies and choreographies of longing within the Philippine’s COVID-19 and larger sociopolitical context. Select artistic credits and involvements include: Co-dramaturg for Twelfth Night the Musical (Tufts University Spring 2024), Playwright of duma-dara-ting, or The Arrival (Company One Boston’s Volt Lab 2024/Reshaping the American Theatre Showcase), Playwright of Sharing Slices, or The Unfortunate Way I Still Love You (Boston Theatre Company’s Queer Voices Festival 2024), Playwright of Children of the Basement (Voices of America Writer’s Workshop 2023), as well as Dance Instructor, Choreographer, and Playwright for Tufts Children’s Theatre – Creative Arts (Summer 2024).

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Jo Michael Rezes (they/them) is a nonbinary theatremaker & transmedia artist in Greater Boston dedicated to the development of new, queer works which feature transgender artists and fabulously grotesque aesthetics. Selected acting credits: Rocky Horror Show (Entropy Theatre); Nosferatu, The Vampyr (Sparkhaven Theatre); The Inheritance (SpeakEasy Stage—Elliot Norton Award, Outstanding Ensemble); Things I Know to Be True (Great Barrington Public Theater—Berkshire Theater Critics Award Nominee, Outstanding Supporting Actor; Broadway World Award, Honorable Mention). Directing: Trans [Plays] of Remembrance (HowlRound.TV); Cloud 9 (AD, The Nora – Elliot Norton Award, Outstanding Direction); Melancholy Play (Vassar College);
The Interrobangers (Tufts University); The Rocky Horror Show (Central Square Theater); Queer Voices Festival (Boston Theater Company, Spring 2024). Jo instructs gender and performance courses across the country (Yale Dramatic Association, UMass Law, Tufts, The Theater Offensive) and serves as a contributor & gender consultant nationwide with the Gender Explosion Initiative at StageSource. Their TEDTalk, A Playful Exploration of Gender Performance, is available online! Jo is developing a monograph, Fractals: Nonbinary Acting Methods, and facilitates workshops on the topic. At Tufts, Jo has instructed Introduction to Acting, Public Speaking, and Devised Performance through TDPS, and they teach Camp: Humor, Bad Taste, Cult-Classics through the Tufts Experimental College. Their dissertation project, “Tastes Like AIDS: Sweet Aesthetics, Bitter Humor, and the Viral Flavors of HIV/AIDS” prioritizes sensation and taste to explore the aesthetic contaminations of queerness & race on public perceptions of the ongoing, global HIV/AIDS crisis. Jo has held academic appointments at Boston College, Emerson College, and Harvard University, and is the Curriculum Developer for The Theater Offensive's True Colors programs. A proud Vassar College alum (BA, English & Drama) and Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre & Performance at Tufts University. Jo is ABD and open to full-time positions: JMRezes.com

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Hernan Sanchez Garcia is a PhD Student in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University. His research interests revolve around the digital use of humor/comedy by minoritarian performers to critique, challenge, and circumvent state-sanctioned categories of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship through memes, social media, or alternative media. He received his MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University, BA in English and History from the University of Rochester, and his AA in the Humanities/Liberal Arts from Nassau Community College. Outside of Tufts, Hernan is a comedian and can be seen performing around the Boston area.

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J Michael Winward is an interdisciplinary artist: dancer, storyteller, organizer–working at the intersection of movement, memoir, memory, and care. Michael is the director of Steps in Time®: an organization that brings social partner dance programs to assisted living & mind care communities. He is a lead coordinator of Dancing Queerly: a platform for LGBTQ+ dance & performance artist support. Michael has a BA in Liberal Arts from Bennington College, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College.

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Wenxuan Xue is a PhD candidate, artist, dramaturg, and curator. They teach and research Asian diasporic performance, gender and sexuality, and decolonial ecologies. They are currently working on their dissertation, tentatively titled Ancestral Fabulation: Unruly Return and Performance across Asian/America, attending to how Asian North American artists mythologize and fabulate their diasporic lineage, ancestral spirits, and place-based relations through contemporary performance, ritual, and storytelling practices. Wenxuan is an Advanced Doctoral/Dissertation-Level Fellow at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer (BBQ+) Studies and a Graduate Research Fellow at Tufts University Art Galleries. They co-founded the Graduate Humanities Circle (GHC), an interdisciplinary graduate-led working group on the studies of race, gender, sexuality, and empire. As an interdisciplinary artist, they have worked closely with CHUANG Stage, Company One, The Orchard Project, The Lark, and ArtsEmerson.