August 19, 2024
The Department of Theatre and Dance is thrilled to welcome a number of new tenure and tenure-track faculty members this academic year. Among the artists and academics joining the department are two Expanding Approaches to American Arts scholars, Virginia Grise in the Playwriting/Directing area and Luke Williams in the Performance as Public Practice area. Sinclair Emoghene also joins the department in the Dance area, while Katherine Freer returns to the UT Live Design and Production area as an assistant professor.
Incoming Faculty 2024-2025
Sinclair Emoghene is an acclaimed dancer and researcher whose work explores the body as a site of performance, while deconstructing how historical dance data is organized, presented and preserved. His endeavors span performance creation, localization of place, cultural studies, experimental practice and dance technology through a practice rooted in African and contemporary dance that focuses on generating new scholarly work on African dance in global contexts.
Emoghene earned his M.F.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park. Before coming to The University of Texas at Austin, he served as an assistant professor of dance at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Dance and Choreography. There, he taught a wide range of subjects, including theory, creative research and dance technique. He has produced works for a wide variety of audiences, including the Nollywood audience in Nigeria/Africa, the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and other prestigious institutions, as well as for universities in Nigeria, including the Federal Universities of Benin, Jos and Lagos.
Sinclair’s debut book, Dancing in the World: Revealing Cultural Confluences (2023), co-authored with Dr. Kathleen Spanos, is published by Routledge, UK. His ongoing research, The Living Archive: Analysis, Description, and Assemblages of African Dance, is supported by renowned organizations including the United States Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and The Association for Cultural Equity in New York.
Katherine Freer's artistic practice lives at the intersection of story, technology and civic engagement and is rooted in joy, curiosity, mutual learning and the pursuit of justice for all living beings. She is a core collaborator in All My Relations Collective, a proud member of Wingspace Theatrical Design and United Scenic Artists Local 829. Recent publications, both published in HowlRound Theatre Commons, include Design with an Equity Lens: Cultivating a Theatre Ecosystem That Can Hold Us All in Our Full Humanity and Seeding Change.
Freer’s awards and accolades include a MacDowell Fellowship (2022), winner of the 2021 Virginia Dares Cinematic Arts Award for DECOLONIZING Films and Media Projects, as well as nominations for the 2021 Cordillera Film Festival, 2021 Harlem Film Festival and 2008 People’s Choice Award. Her work has been presented Off-Broadway at The Signature Theater, Richard Rodgers Ampitheater and New World Stages, among others, as well as at the Prague Quadrennial, the Guthrie Theater and San Francisco Dance Film Festival, among others.
Freer received her Master’s of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College and her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the Tisch School of the Arts (New York University).
Virginia Grise is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award and the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press), The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press) and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Durito (Autonomedia Press). From panzas to prisons, from street theatre to large scale multimedia performances, from princess to chafa, her interdisciplinary body of work as a writer, performer, director and creative producer includes dance theatre, performance installations, guerilla theatre, site specific interventions, community gatherings and plays set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops and lesbian bedrooms.
She is a founding member of a todo dar productions, an alumna of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women’s Project Theatre Lab & the NALAC Leadership Institute. Grise has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, a Jerome Fellow at the Playwright’s Center and a Herberger Institute Projecting All Voices Fellow at Arizona State University. Currently, she is the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mía Theatre.
Grise has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women’s prisons and in the juvenile correction system. She holds a M.F.A. in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.
Dr. Luke Williams is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, organizer and critic of 20th and 21st-century Black diasporic performance and visual cultures. His in-progress manuscript titled In the Black: Figures of Racial Capitalism examines the practices of four Black emerging artists as they navigate the pressures of racial capitalism in the art market. The project charts how these artists adopted performative and aesthetic strategies of refusal to reorient frameworks of value when Black figuration sold for a market premium. Through this project and others, Williams queries narratives of freedom and the radical imagination. He is the editor of Blood, Sweat, and Time: Emerging Perspectives on Mildred Howard and Adrian Burrell, published by SmingSming Books and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.
A collaborative maker himself, Williams is often on stage or in the gallery as part of his creative endeavors. His performance practice excavates site-specific histories to devise community-based responses in the present. You can find his writing in academic journals, museums and popular outlets across the nation. Recent projects include INERTIA (Stanford Nitery Experimental Theater, 2020-2021), which offers a new ritual for grieving amidst the prolonged moment of continuous suffering arising from the COVID-19 pandemic and the percussive drumbeat of anti-blackness, as well as serving as a visiting scholar at the San José Institute of Contemporary Art and Second Street Gallery, among others.
Williams holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University, where he was a Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence (DARE) fellow. He also received his B.A. in Political & Social Thought as a Jefferson Scholar at the University of Virginia.