Moderator: Michael Peterson

Michael Peterson is an artist and a scholar of performance and popular cultures. He is Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a founding faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies graduate program. His teaching includes studio courses in performance making and art-life, a Gender and Women’s Studies course in feminist theatre, seminars in performance studies, and a course for first-year non-arts majors called “How to Live? Art and Politics in the Everyday.”  His scholarship includes Straight White Male Performance Art Monologues (Mississippi UP), as well as articles on performance, food, animals, cruelty, human rights, and activism published in journals such as TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies and Performance Research.

Peterson is co-founder, with Laurie Beth Clark, of the internationally-known art group Spatuala&Barcode. Their social-practice, participatory arts projects have been commissioned around the world; their publications on participatory art, food studies, and memorial culture have appeared in diverse journals and collections; they have co-edited special issues of Performance Research “On Generosity” and “On Hunger” (with Jazmin Llana).Peterson also continues to make “solo” performances that are in fact collaborations with individual participants or small groups of spectators.

Interlocutors:

Anna Jayne Kimmel is a performance studies scholar invested in the intersection of legal humanities, dance studies, and critical social theory. This framing informs her pursuit of community-engaged research in carceral studies, including collaboration with artists-in-confinement and engagement as a restorative justice facilitator for alternative accountability programs in the DMV area.

Kimmel is an Assistant Professor of Dance and affiliate faculty for the Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service at George Washington University. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Stanford University and an A.B. from Princeton University. Her scholarship appears in Dance Research Journal, Performance Research, Lateral, The Drama Review (TDR), and The Brooklyn Rail, alongside various edited volumes. Her current book projects, Performing Law (co-edited with Peter Goodrich and Bernadette Meyler) and Legal Moves: Choreographies of Race, Law, and Empire, are forthcoming.

Dominika Laster is a transdisciplinary artist, performance maker, writer, and researcher with a with a vigorous creative and curatorial practice advancing interdisciplinary research-driven creative work that is deeply committed to issues related to precarity, inclusivity, practices of care, decoloniality, and critical utopias.

Laster is the author of Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work and editor of Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland. She is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of New Mexico. She is the curator of Decolonial Gestures: A Symposium on Indigenous Performance and Performance in the Peripheries (ongoing).

James McMaster is Assistant Professor of American Studies and English at The George Washington University. His forthcoming first book, Racial Care: On Asian American Suffering and Survival, examines how twenty-first century Asian American artists have used art to contest their neglected position within the unjust distribution of racialized caring relations that subtends everyday life and death in the United States. His interdisciplinary research program spans a range of interests including care and social reproduction theory; Asian American theatre, performance, and visual culture; imperial, state, and interpersonal violence; queer and trans Asian American subcultures; and abolitionist social movements. His scholarly writing has appeared in American Quarterly, the Journal of Asian American Studies, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and a number of edited volumes including Unsafe Words: Queer Perspectives on Consent in the #MeToo Era. With Olivia Michiko Gagnon, he is the co-editor of The Between: Couple Forms, Performing Together, a special issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory focusing on co-authorship and collaboration. He has also published popular writing in national and local venues including Teen Vogue, HowlRound, and VICE.

Jazmin Llana is a professor in the Department of Literature, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines whose research focuses on issues of performance, theatre, and politics, as well as environmental studies and activism. Her more recent work delves in issues of hunger and food studies through site-specific performances for action.

Jisha Menon is the Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies at Stanford University. She is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and (by courtesy) of Comparative Literature and serves as the Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies. She is the author of Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India (Northwestern UP, 2021) The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013) and co-editor of two volumes: Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (with Patrick Anderson) (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) and Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (with Milija Gluhovic) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.) She is currently working on a new monograph, Confessional Performance: The Cultural and Legal Arts of Personhood.

SAJ, PhD, is a writer, editor, and organizer, as well as an independent scholar and a recovering adjunct. They are a co-editor of Lateral and their work can be found most recently in Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (Temple UP, 2025), Theatre Journal, and Cultural Dynamics. SAJ’s research explores performance, symbolic power, and the impacts and ideologies of US bourgeois liberalism at the turn of the millennium.