Katherine Brewer Ball is a writer based in New York. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Theater Department and affiliated faculty in African American Studies at Wesleyan University, where she previously served as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities from 2013-2014. She is also faculty at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. Brewer Ball earned her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2013. Her research and teaching interests include theater, visual culture, Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o aesthetics, feminist theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis. Her current book project, The Only Way Out Is In: The Black, Brown & Queer Performance of Escape, traces contemporary literature, theater, and performance works by Glenn Ligon, Tony Kushner, Sharon Hayes, and Junot Díaz. Brewer Ball is currently conducting research on a second book project which focuses on contemporary Alaska Native performance and art. Brewer Ball is a member of the Sexual Politics Sexual Poetics queer theory collective and in 2015 she was named a finalist for the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Artforum.com, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Criticism, RECAPS, Little Joe, Dirty Looks, ASAP/Journal, Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, and by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.
Amanda Davidson’s chapbook Arcanagrams: A Reckoning is forthcoming on Little Red Leaves’ Textile Series. Her fiction chapbook Apprenticeship (New Herring Press) was a finalist for the 2013 Calvino Prize. Davidson has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Art Farm Nebraska, and the Millay Colony. Recent performance works have appeared at Dixon Place and Brooklyn Arts Exchange in New York, and at Artists’ Television Access and the Graduate Theological Union in the Bay Area. She is currently at work on a performance novel about the mystic Swedenborg.
Ann Pellegriniis Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University and has directed the Center for Sexuality and Gender Studies since 2008. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; and co-author, with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico, of “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People. She has also published two anthologies: Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Danial Itzkovitz; Secularisms, co-edited with Janet R. Jakobsen. With José Esteban Muñoz she co-edits the book series “Sexual Cultures” for New York University Press. She is also the general editor of States of Devotion.
