Biographies

Angela K. Ahlgren

Angela K. Ahlgren is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator in Theatre at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of Drumming Asian America: Taiko, Performance, and Cultural Politics (Oxford, 2018) and is working on a series of essays on Asian influences in American dance and an ethnography of stage managers, gender, and invisible labor.  

Nobuko Anan

Nobuko Anan is Professor in the Department of Foreign Language Studies at Kansai University, Japan, where she teaches Japanese and British theatre and performance studies. Her publications include a monograph, Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics (2016 Palgrave), and articles in TDRTheatre Research International, among others. 

Jyana S. Browne

Jyana S. Browne is Assistant Professor of Premodern Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland. Her areas of research include early modern Japanese performance, Japanese puppetry, and the intersections of performance, sexuality, and embodiment. Her current book project examines performances of love suicide in eighteenth-century Osaka.

Rosemary Candelario

Rosemary Candelario received the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies. She co-edited The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance. Rosemary is Associate Professor of Dance at Texas Woman’s University and holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA.

Michelle Liu Carriger

Michelle Liu Carriger is Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA, where she researches and writes on historiography, fashion, and performance of self in everyday life, including cultural appropriation, Japanese street fashion, and historical reality television. She has been studying the Urasenke tradition of Tea (chado, chanoyu, or “tea ceremony”) since 1999, including one year in the Midorikai program at the Urasenke Gakuen in Kyoto. 

Peter Eckersall

Peter Eckersall teaches in the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the department of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. His research interests include Japanese performance, dramaturgy and theatre and politics. Recent publications include, Okada Toshiki and Japanese Theatre, (coedited with Barbara Geilhorn, Andreas Regelsberger, Cody Poulton, 2021), Curating Dramaturgies (ed. with Bertie Ferdman, 2021), and Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan (2013). He is cofounder/dramaturg of Not Yet It’s Difficult. Recent dramaturgy includes: Sheep #1 (Sachiyo Takahashi, Japan Society), Phantom Sun/Northern Drift (Alexis Destoop, Beursschouwburg, Riga Biennial).

Barbara Geilhorn

Barbara Geilhorn is a Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo and an Adjunct Researcher at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University. Publications include Okada Toshiki & Japanese Theatre (co-edited with Peter Eckersall et al., Performance Research Books 2021) and Fukushima and the Arts (co-edited with Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, Routledge 2017).

Kyoko Iwaki

Kyoko Iwaki is a tenure-track Lecturer of Theatre and Performance Studies at University of Antwerp. Her research focuses on Japanese and European theatre of environmental, feminist, and more-than-human philosophies with strong investment in Buddhism. Prior to entering academia, she worked for over a decade as a theatre critic. She is the co-curator of the Theater der Welt 2023 festival in Frankfurt-Offenbach.

Mariko Okada

Mariko Okada is a Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, J. F. Oberlin University, in Tokyo, Japan. She received her Ph.D. from Waseda University in Tokyo in 2011. She was awarded the 2013 Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities. She also has several English-language articles, such as the chapter in Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia (edited by Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox, 2020). Her current research interests are in the diversities of kabuki culture.

Katherine Saltzman-Li

Katherine Saltzman-Li is Associate Professor of premodern Japanese performing arts and literature at University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published on kabuki playwriting (Creating Kabuki Plays: Brill, 2010), kabuki plays, early-modern professional texts and treatises, commercial materials associated with kabuki, and theatre-related woodblock prints.

Eun Young Seong

Eun Young Seong is Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Williams College. Her research focuses on cultural interactions between Japanese and Koreans in the process of decolonization, with particular interest in the history of Zainichi Koreans.