Congratulations to Alison Mahoney for finishing course work and Victoria LaFave for passing her comprehensive exams!
Victoria LaFave served as the dramaturg for Pitt Stages’ production of August Wilson's Seven Guitars and shared her experience as part of the "Encounters in the August Wilson Archive" panel at the 2023 August Wilson Society Colloquium. She was awarded a Humanities Center Graduate Student Summer Research Fellowship to begin archival research for her dissertation. She currently serves as the Graduate Student Representative for the Performance Studies Focus Group at ATHE and is organizing the Performance Studies Emerging Scholars Panel.
Alison Mahoney will be presenting their paper "Staging Freak Performers in New Disability Theatre: John Belluso's Traveling Skin" virtually at this summer's IFTR conference as part of the Disability and Performance working group. Alison also will be directing Will Arbery's Corsicana for Pitt Stages in the fall.
Frederick Miller recently presented his paper “Enter the Mouse: How Disney ‘Transformed’ Broadway with a Beauty and a Beast” at the 2023 Mid-America Theatre Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in addition to serving on the conference’s planning committee. His play Charley/Nik/Charlie/Nick will receive its world premiere at the Harrisburg Area Community College in April 2023.
This spring, Chris Staley returned to Toga Mura, Japan, for more training and field work with the Suzuki Company of Toga. He also produced a new play, West of Jesus, with students and faculty at Juniata College, which will premiere at Teatro Uno Mas in Nuevo Vallarta in May.
Hansel Tan is honored to have been named in Chatham Life & Style's 2022 "Outstanding Performance" Category for his turn as DHH in David Henry Hwang's Yellowface at Theatre Raleigh and was recently featured in award-winning composer Andrew Gerle's new immersive Electro-Swing concept album Whisper Darkly, to be released by Broadway Records later this year. In the summer, he also appears as a vocalist in Andrew Lippa's (The Addams Family, Big Fish) Oratorio I Am Harvey Milk with Mr Lippa conducting the Princeton Symphone Orchestra and has been selected to participate in the National Endowment for the Humanities' Summer Institute for Higher Education on "Preserving and Transmitting American-Based Ensemble Devised Theatre," hosted by the OBIE-Award winning Pig Iron Theatre Company. In July, Hansel is thrilled to join the faculty for Juilliard's Summer Performing Arts program at the Nord Anglia schools (Orlando, FL) as a director-instructor, sharing his love of the craft with young artists from all over the country.