Current Doctoral Students
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Marketa Nicole McCoy (MA, Ph.D student, mnmccoy@uci.edu) is from Hattiesburg, Mississippi; she holds a BA in English, Language, and Literature from William Carey University and an MA in Theatre Studies from Baylor University. Her scholarly work examines the structural components of lynching dramas, including accusation, mob action, witnesses, souvenirs, and social effects. Marketa Nicole’s research interests center on the relationship between antilynching plays and historical social movements, investigating how theatrical representations contribute to broader conversations about violence, racial justice, and collective memory. |
| Vicky Michalopoulou (BS/MS, MA/MFA, Ph.D. student, vmichalo@uci.edu) is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar from Greece, whose driving force has always been Acting. Her Acting training is very rich and diverse, including the graduate-level Acting for the Camera professional program at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been performing for more than twenty years and has participated in international festivals and award-winning projects. She holds a BS-MS equivalent in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a double Master's (MA/MFA) in Digital Arts from Athens School of Fine Arts and Paris 8 University. She is a theater maker who calls herself a Performing Engineer and a theater scholar specialized in the Performativities and Anthropologies of Medicine, Science, and Technology Studies. No matter the research focus (e.g., artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, liveness, human-machine interaction, ethnographic fiction), she engages with it through an embodied and meditative way. She believes in practice-based research and transgressive pedagogies. |
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An-Ru Chu (MA, MFA, Ph.D. student, anruc@uci.edu) holds an MA in Art Market Studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY, an MFA in Acting from Taipei National University of the Arts, and a BA in Radio and Television from National Chengchi University. Her current research examines the intersections of performance, East Asian modernities, folklore, and religious studies, with an emphasis on "ghosts and performances" in Taiwan. She is also a journalist, translator, and actor. Her acting credits include Jia-Jen Lin's Treading On Thin Ice (2022), Jen Liu's Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Electropore (2021), Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's Bucchetino (2011-2015), and Craig Quintero's Amnesia (2011). |
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Diana Fathi (MA, MFA, Ph.D. student, fathiram@uci.edu) is a multidisciplinary theater artist and Ph.D. candidate. Her research explores speculative historiography, archival traces of female representation, and autotheory, weaving together feminist theory, performative writing, and black studies. Diana’s work focuses on photographic representations of Iranian women, uncovering forgotten narratives and repairing untold hi/stories while challenging archival silences. She received a Helen Krich Chinoy Research Fellowship (ASTR) in 2024 to support her dissertation research. With a BFA and MA from Tehran Art University and an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University, Diana brings extensive experience in acting, directing, and dramaturgy. Most recently, she served as a Dramaturg Consultant in Education for the Broadway production of English. As a director, her selected credits include Romeo and Juliet at Two River Theater, Thirteen at Odyssey Theater, and Third Person Singular at Columbia University. Balancing her artistic practice with academia, Diana is committed to reshaping narratives, amplifying marginalized voices, and reimagining what theater can do. |
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Tianding He (MA, Ph.D. student, tiandinh@uci.edu) is a scholar, multidisciplinary artist, and arts leader, originally from China. She holds a Master’s Degree in Performance Studies from New York University and a second MA from Hunter College in Theatre. As an experimental theatre director and dramaturg, Tianding works bi-coastally in the US and internationally. She is the founding artistic director of B·O·N·D International Virtual Performance Festival, an inclusive platform for global artists to share their experiences and ideas with unprivileged audiences. Tianding is also an arts leader of NYFA’s Incubator for Arts & Culture Leaders of Color. Her research focuses on theatre with technology, non-human performance, affect theories, and the methodology of practice as research. Tianding is a firm believer in the transformative power of art and its intersection with academia. She continuously endeavors to expand her artistic and scholarly horizons, pushing the boundaries of both spheres to craft innovative and thought-provoking works. |
| Emily Parise (MA, Ph.D. student, eparise@uci.edu) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Drama and Theatre. Her primary areas of research include Shakespeare studies, dramaturgy, theatre history, early modern politics and popularity, and stage properties. Her dissertation, "Visible Bullets: Subversive Stage Properties in Shakespeare’s English and Roman Histories," asks: how do we make history visible, and what is the political and dramaturgical impact of those visual symbols? The project turns away from disembodied methods of reading Shakespeare, looking instead towards the drama’s live event, and Shakespeare’s stage, its props, performers, and audiences. She has also published an essay on James Ijames's Fat Ham, titled "'They eat. They talk shit': The Role of Barbecue in Fat Ham’s Queer Utopia," in the collection Revenge is Mad Hard, edited by Valerie Pye and Danielle Rosvally (Palgrave MacMillian). |
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Carly Amber Shaw (MA, Ph.D student, carlys1@uci.edu) is currently a fifth year doctoral candidate at University of California, Irvine. She holds a Masters in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a Bachelors in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her current research explores affective overwhelment, transversality, and identity construction within a theoretical foundation that incorporates discourses of trauma, drama therapy, affect, and childhood as she engages with theatre for younger audiences. Her research seeks to generate a space for subjective shifts and transversal possibilities through theatre so that children can come to better understand their sense of self and the reality around them. |
| Chengyuan Huang (MA, PhD student, chuang12@uci.edu) obtained her Master’s in Theatre and Performance Studies from Washington University of St. Louis, and her Bachelor’s in Theatre and Math from DePauw University. Chengyuan is always intrigued by what theatre is capable of beyond the playhouse. A Ph.D. candidate, her current research explores embodied knowledge and corporeal epistemology through Chinese medicine and the various forms it takes in contemporary American society. Chengyuan is also interested in community-based practices and decolonial methodologies. |
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Talin Abadian (MA, PhD student, tabadian@uci.edu) holds a Master’s Degree in Theatre Studies from the University of California, Northridge, and has an MA from Tehran University of Arts in Drama. Her research centers around performance theory and its capacity in meeting environmental discourses. As a senior pedagogical fellow, she also works on strategies to implement decolonial and anti-racist theatre pedagogies. As a playwright and an avid translator, she has published on theatre in Iranian newspapers and journals. She has also published translations of plays, a playwrighting textbook, and a collection of essays in Iran. |
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Deni (Denise) Li (MFA, PhD student, lid@uci.edu) Deni (she/they) holds an MFA in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. Deni is interested in approaching altered or expanded states of consciousness as discursive sites of alterity and alternative forms of knowledge production, by situating performance at the intersection of psychedelic (and more broadly, consciousness) studies, and queer, feminist, and trans* epistemologies. These areas of inquiry include psychedelic culture (as quotidian performance) and spirituality, intersections between psychedelia and digital media, as well as performance art and writing that involves practices of cultivating perception and intuition, re-visioning reality, and psycho-spiritual healing, that might be included in a “psychedelic” archive. Deni is also interested in issues of neurodiversity, embodied mind theories, extrasensory perception, mask work, practice as research, and intersections between performance-making, writing, and theory/scholarship. |
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