Graduate Students

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Rahul Bishnoi is a theatre practitioner and performance studies researcher from India. He is trained in physical theatre, Pochinko clowning, and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed repertoire. His work focuses on thinking of theatre as a method of research to explore the poetics of space, particularly the question of cities and experience of the urban as the strange. Rahul adopts practice-led approaches combined with narrative cartography to develop collaborative theatre performances that trespass the boundaries of proscenium spaces and imagine new worlds within public spaces. He holds a B.Tech in Biotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati and an MA in Society and Culture from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. He has been awarded the President’s Gold Medal and Institute Gold Medal from IIT Gandhinagar for his research, and the Maison Julien Gracq residency in France to develop his cartographic storytelling. Apart from theatre, Rahul is also the OCLW Global Majority and Underrepresented Writing Scholar for the year 2025–26 and writing a deeply personal memoir about his mother. To know more about his work, please visit www.rahulbishnoi.in.

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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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Grace Evans is a PhD student whose research explores performances of solidarity and stagings of neoliberal violence within the US labor movement. She also uses a performance studies lens to scrutinize rats as figures of shame, disgust, and exclusion. Grace received her MA in Theatre & Performance Studies from Tufts in 2024. She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a BA 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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Rosemary Ewing is a fat femme educator and playwright from Northern Virginia whose work centers on queer racial formation through fat performance on the early modern stage. Her broader academic interests include premodern critical race feminism, classical French comic performance, queer ecopoetics, and anything fat studies. Rosemary earned her BA in Theatre Arts and French Studies from Smith College and holds an MA in Shakespeare Studies from King’s College London, in partnership with the Globe Theatre, along with an MEd in International Education from the Université de Bordeaux.

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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 BSJ in Magazine Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2014.

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Sung-Min Kim is a Theatre and Performance Studies doctoral student at Tufts University. She received her BA (American Studies and Art History) and MA (Theatre and Performance Studies) from Tufts University. Sung-Min's research looks to the sky as a site of passage and transformation for Asian/Asian American bodies in flight. Drawing from her lived experience growing up transnationally between South Korea and the United States, Sung-Min interrogates what the sky can offer as a metaphorical and material space of untethering, belonging, grief, and futurity. Her most recent publication with Theatre Journal begins this work by examining Operation Babylift through a reparative and performative reading. 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. Currently she serves as a board member in the Friends of the Chinatown Library advocating for community involvement in the construction of the new library branch. 

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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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A. Elisa Peebles is a Black deathkeeper, researcher, and award-winning creative strategist who works across storytelling, creative nonfiction, performance, and sound to channel apocalyptic prophecy and noncolonial belonging. She was born and raised in Haudenosaunee territory and is a guest of the Caribbean archipelago of Borikén. Peebles received a B.S. in Media, Culture and Communication Studies from New York University, and is an alumnus of the radical pedagogy collective Rhythm, Race, and Revolution. Her research considers the intersections of Black Atlantic spirituality and anticolonial futurity.

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Sarah Berry Pierce (they/she) is a second-year PhD Student in Theatre and Performance Studies. She is a theater director and scholar whose practice and research centers on fat femme performance, fat girlhood, disability studies, and queering social performances of fatphobia. Interested in studying and re-orienting representations of fat bodies on the stage and screen, Sarah Berry examines the ways that theatricality has shaped the unique, embodied subject experiences of fat girls. She has presented on her work at the American Society for Theatrical Research, was a panelist at the NYU Performance Studies Graduate Symposium and has directed for Tufts’ Children’s Theater. She received her BA from Vassar College in May 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. Originally from Mississippi, Sarah Berry hopes to draw on their experiences as a queer, fat person raised in the South to inform their approaches to the intersections between fat studies and performance studies. To learn more visit: www.sarahberrypierce.com

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Elijah Estolano Punzal is a queer Filipinx 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, Off-Broadway at WP Theatre, and with the Amado Khaya Initiative (formerly the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies at UC Davis). Elijah received their MA in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University in 2025 with their qualifying paper “Contested Choreographies on the Dance Floor of Broadway’s Here Lies Love (2023).” Elijah was also one of the recipients of the ASTR José Esteban Muñoz award in 2024 for their project on Here Lies Love. Relaying a fond memory from the past year, Elijah starred as Player 1/Eddie in the touring world premiere of Learning How to Read by Moonlight by Gaven D. Trinidad, directed by Natsu Onoda Power, and co-produced by CHUANG Stage and Company One Boston. Since beginning his PhD, Elijah has worked in different artistic capacities at Central Square Theatre, Fresh Ink Theatre, CHUANG Stage, Company One Boston, Boston Theatre Company, The Playground Experiment, CIRCA Pintig, Pork Filled Productions, Tufts Children’s Theatre, and Tufts University.

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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 Boston-based interdisciplinary theatre artist, performance curator, and PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University. They teach and research in Asian/American Studies, minoritarian aesthetics, studies of race, gender, and sexuality, and spiritual ecologies. Their dissertation project Ancestral Fabulation attends to how queer and trans Asian North American artists return to, mythologize, and imagine their diasporic lineage and ancestral spirits through contemporary ritual performance. They are currently developing their solo performance becoming ancestral mud 成为泥土, a love letter to their ancestral village and the abundant femme and spiritual practices intimately rooted in the soil of Shaanbei. With support from New England Foundation for the Arts, their forthcoming public art Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams curates a series of site-specific rituals of place-making, remembrance, and healing in Boston Chinatown. They are an Artist-in-Residency at Pao Art Center in 2025. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in the Routledge anthology of Applied Theatre and Racial Justice and Tufts University Art Galleries’ “an archive and/or a repertoire” exhibition brochure. Their scholarship has been supported by Tufts University Tisch Library and the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+) academic fellowship. They hold a BA in Theater from Wesleyan University and an MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University.