Field Description
The graduate program (PhD) in Performing and Media Arts offers students an interdisciplinary environment in which to pursue critical studies of various theatrical and performance traditions, cinema and media cultures, and expressive behavior in multilingual, intermedial, and transnational contexts. Students may work with a strong emphasis in either theatre and performance studies or cinema and media studies, and they are also encouraged to find novel, fresh, and rigorous ways to produce work at interdisciplinary sites of contact between theatre and performance studies on the one hand and cinema and media studies on the other hand.
A student’s Special Committee is made up of three faculty members, two PMA field faculty members representing the student's major area (theater and performance studies, cinema and media studies, or theatre theory and aesthetics) and a third, from outside the PMA field faculty, representing the student's minor area (e.g., Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Asian Studies). Please note that while the graduate field is not coterminous with the department and the graduate field includes many faculty members with interests in performing and media arts from other Cornell departments, every special committee must include at least one current faculty member in the Dept. of Performing and Media Arts. Chairs of special committees must hold a PhD in their major field and be a member of the PMA Graduate Field.
Students whose interdisciplinary interests encompass more areas of study may add a fourth committee member. Possible areas include (but are not limited to): Directing or Acting Pedagogy; Film and Video Studies; Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies; LGBT Studies, Africana Studies; Anthropology; Asian Studies; English; German; Latina/o/x Studies; Music; Near Eastern Studies; and American Studies.
Research Facilities
Cornell University maintains an extensive library system for scholarly research, with excellent holdings in areas relevant to the field. Olin and Kroch Libraries are the main research centers for the humanities; they house several special collections of particular interest to our program, including the world’s largest Hip Hop Collection, extensive materials on and by George Bernard Shaw and George Jean Nathan, and the Rose Golden Archive of New Media. Students work closely with Cornell's Society for the Humanities and The School for Criticism and Theory, interdisciplinary centers of intellectual exchange that draw scholars and artists from across the globe.
Data and Statistics
Field Manual
Faculty
Juan Manuel Aldape Munoz
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies; theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: performance studies, illegality and citizenship, borderlands studies, critical ethnography, and (Afro)Latinx/Latin American cultural production
Christine Bacareza Balance
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies; theatre and performance studies
- Research Interests: performance studies, popular music studies, transnational Asian American studies, critical Filipino/Filipino American studies, sound studies
Erik Christopher Born
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: German cinema (esp. silent film); media history and theory
Jodi A. Byrd
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: Indigenous critical theory, video game studies, Indigenous feminisms and queer studies
Andrew Campana
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: Japanese literature, film and media, digital media and game studies, disability studies
Debra Ann Castillo
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies; theatre practice (acting or directing); theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: drama and the theatre; theatre theory and aesthetics; theatre history; theatre practice
Naminata Diabate
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: postcolonial theories, feminist and queer theories, film studies, body and performance theory, African, African-American and Afro-Hispanic literatures
David M Feldshuh
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies; theatre practice (acting or directing)
- Research Interests: directing; acting, speaking in public
Arnika Fuhrmann
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies; theatre and performance studies
- Research Interests: performing arts in Asia; performance theory; and transmedia art in Asia
J. Ellen Gainor
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies; theatre practice (acting or directing); theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: drama and the theater; British and American dramatic literature; feminism, gender, and theater; theater history
Mitchell D Greenberg
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies; theatre theory and aesthetics
Sabine Haenni
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: American, European, Transnational cinemas, film history, silent film, migration, urbanism/geography/architecture, cinema, media and the public sphere, film festivals
Ellis Hanson
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies; theatre and performance studies; theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: drama and the theatre; theatre theory and aesthetics; theatre history; theatre practice
Karen Jaime
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies; theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: performance studies/theories; latina/o performance, film and culture
Patricia M. Keller
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: cinema, photography, literature, technologies, aesthetics of Fascism, landscape, poetics, experimental media and film
Bruce A Levitt
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies; theatre practice (acting or directing); theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: directing; dramatic literature, prison studies
Philip A. Lorenz
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies; theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: drama and the theatre; theatre theory and aesthetics; theatre history
Beth Milles
- Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre practice (acting or directing)
- Research Interests: directing; devising; public performance; new works; improvisation/discovery; street performance/clown/audience interaction; contemporization of classical work
Andrew Moisey
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: photography, documentary media, scientific illustration, film aesthetics
Timothy Conway Murray
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies; theatre and performance studies; theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: dramatic theory; comparative drama; Renaissance, media studies
Mendi Lewis Obadike
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies; theatre and performance studies; theatre practice (acting or directing)
- Research Interests: Sound Art, Sound Studies, Media Art, Performance, Poetry, and African American Studies
Jeffrey P. Palmer
- Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: film production, documentary, media studies, American Indian & Indigenous Studies
Judith Ann Peraino
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies
- Research Interests: music and performance
Natasha Raheja
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: Visual Anthropology, Legal Anthropology
Jolene K. Rickard
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: Art, Indigeneity, Colonial/Decolonial, Narrative Gender, Ecocritism, Materiality, Indigenous Media
Danielle Russo
- Campus: Ithaca - (Minor Member)
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies; theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: practice and pedagogy for choreography in site-specific to immersive dance theater, dance and performance as social practice, intermedia dance and performance, improvisational strategies, critical ethnography, the body archive and decolonizing the dance canon, history of art activism, feminist theory, curatorial practices in dance and performance
Nicholas G. Salvato
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies; theatre and performance studies; theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: 20th-century theater and culture; American drama; modernism; feminist and queer performance theory and practice
Samantha Noelle Sheppard
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: cinema and media studies
Deborah Ann Starr
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: Modern Arabic and Hebrew Literature; Cinema and Media Studies; Jewish Studies
Irina Raquel Troconis Gonzalez
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies
- Research Interests: Latin American literature and culture, digital humanities, performance studies, memory studies, border studies, literature and exile, virtual realities, cultural translation, Venezuelan studies, affect theory, material history.
Parisa Vaziri
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: Cinema and Media Studies, Iranian Studies, Black Studies, Postcolonial theory
Kristen J Warner
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: cinema and media studies
- Research Interests: Cinema and Media Studies; Media Industries; Racial Representation; Film Festivals Research
Sara L. Warner
- Campus: Ithaca
- Concentrations: Performing and Media Arts: theatre and performance studies; theatre theory and aesthetics
- Research Interests: theater history; performance studies; theories of gender and sexuality; feminist and queer performance; theater and social change