ARTIST. SCHOLAR. EDUCATOR
ABOUT
A performance scholar, theatre director, and voice and speech practitioner, Laura teaches performance and theory. Recent classes include: Voice and Movement for the Actor, Acting II, Directing, Identity & Representation in Non-Western Theatre History, Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies, and African American Theatre. Her research interests include using theatre—specifically Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play—as a methodology for mapping linguistic and spatial borders of USAmerica, for understanding and unpacking nation and national history as relationships, rather than place and narrative. Her work also explores race, gender, and sexuality in performance, performance and/as citizenship, voice and sound, as well as investigations of gender, nostalgia and complicity in neo-burlesque performance.
She holds a Ph.D. from the Theatre and Performance of the Americas program at Arizona State University. She earned her Master of Fine Arts in Theatre, also from Arizona State University, with an emphasis in Theatre for Youth. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Drew University in Theatre Arts and Latin American Studies. Laura completed two voice and speech intensives (six-week workshop intensives) with the Lessac Institute, studying each time with founder Arthur Lessac.
A believer in the power of collective voice and community, she is an avid, earnest, and undying Red Sox fan.