FACULTY

The project directors, Dr. Sarah Bay-Cheng (Bowdoin College) and Dr. David Saltz (University of Georgia), are leaders in the field of digital performance. They recently co-authored the book Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (University of Michigan Press, 2015).
David Saltz, Professor and Head, Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Georgia. Dr. Saltz has worked at the intersection of live performance and digital technology as both a scholar and practitioner for the past thirty years. In addition to his books,  Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (with Sarah Bay-Cheng and Jennifer Starbuck Parker) and Staging Philosophy, ​he has published numerous articles and book chapters about digital performance from the perspective of performance studies, philosophy, and digital humanities. He was PI of the Virtual Vaudeville, a project funded through the National Science Foundation’s digital libraries initiative. The project was designed to function simultaneously as an original scholarly contribution to the history of American popular theatre, a prototype for future projects in digital historiography, and a teaching tool for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of theatre and cultural history. It has been incorporated into theatre syllabi throughout the world and is frequently cited as a central case study in digital historiography and one of the first and most successful examples of digital scholarship in theatre. He has directed a series of productions incorporating real-time interactive digital media, including the first documented use of real-time motion capture in live theatre (The Tempest, 2000), and has created interactive sculptural installations that have been exhibited nationally. His recent work, focusing on robotic theatre, was featured in The New York Times and The Huffington Post. Dr. Saltz previously taught at Stony Brook University, where he was co-director of the Laboratory for Technology in the Arts, and is a former editor of Theatre Journal.
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Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chair and Professor of Theatre and Dance, Bowdoin College. Dr. Bay-Cheng's publications include  Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field  (with David Saltz and Jennifer Starbuck Parker), Mapping Intermediality in Performance (with C. Kattenbelt, A. Lavender and R. Nelson, eds.), Poets at Play: An Anthology of Modernist Drama (with Barbara Cole, eds.), and Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre. A leading expert on intermediality, she has published articles and book chapters on digital performance, historiography, and culture, including, among others, “Digital Historiography and Performance,” Theatre Journal 68.4 (2016),  “Digital Culture” in Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts and Theories (Palgrave, 2014), and “Theatre History and Digital Historiography” in Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions (University of Michigan Press, 2010). In 2015, Bay-Cheng was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and served as visiting faculty at Utrecht University in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. She frequently lectures on these issues at universities throughout the world and serves on the editorial boards and as Associate Editor for the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, among others. Bay-Cheng now co-hosts the On TAP Theatre and Performance Studies podcast. She taught previously at the University at Buffalo, where she was the Founding Director of the Technē Institute for the Arts and Emerging Technologies, and at Colgate University.

The co-directors will be joined by twelve visiting faculty members including many of the world’s foremost scholars, theorists, and practitioners in digital humanities and performance.
Philip Auslander, Professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Philip Auslander was appointed to the Georgia Tech faculty in 1987 and has been a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication since 1999. Dr. Auslander teaches primarily in the area of Performance Studies with particular interests in the performance of music, performance and technology, and the documentation of performance. He is a contributing editor to several journals in theatre or performance studies based in the US or the UK. Auslander is the author of six books and editor or co-editor of two collections, including Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (University of Michigan, 1992), From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1997), Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge, 1999; second edition in 2008), Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (University of Michigan, 2006), and Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation (forthcoming University of Michigan Press, 2018). He received the prestigious Callaway Prize for the Best Book in Theatre or Drama for Liveness. He is the editor of Performance: Critical Concepts, a reference collection of 89 essays in four volumes published by Routledge in 2003 and, with Carrie Sandahl, co-editor of Bodies in Commotion: Performance and Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2005), winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education's Research Award for Outstanding Book in 2006. In addition to his work on performance, Auslander has also worked as a freelance art writer and contributed art criticism to ArtForum International Magazine for ten years. He has written catalogue essays for museums and galleries in Austria, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United State and  is the editor of The Art Section: An Online Journal of Art and Cultural Commentary. As of the spring of 2013, Dr. Auslander has been active on the Atlanta film scene as an actor, appearing in over 15 projects since then.
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Stephen Berry, Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era in the Department of History, University of Georgia. Dr. Berry’s research explores the intersections of race, class, gender, family, depression, disappointment, and death in the nineteenth-century South. He is the author or editor of four books on America in the mid-19th century, including House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War, which was the Book of the Month Club main selection for March 2008, designated a We the People project by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and chosen by Owensboro Community and Technical College for its campus-wide Common Reading program. All That Makes a Man: Love & Ambition in the Civil War South (Oxford University Press, 2003) was a finalist for the 2004 Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship. His edited volumes include Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln (University of Georgia Press, 2017), A House Dividing: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (“Dialogues in American History” series, Oxford University Press, 2015), Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges (University of Georgia Press, 2011), and Princes of Cotton: Four Diaries of Young Men in the South, 1848-1860 (University of Georgia Press and the Southern Texts Society, 2007). He currently oversees the web project “CSI Dixie: The View From the South’s County Coroner’s Offices, 1800-1900” (csidixie.org). This project is the winner of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Innovation Award, and has been featured in Slate, The New York Times, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Berry helps head the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Georgia, where he is Associate Academic Director for Digital Humanities at the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Berry is also co-director, with Claudio Saunt, of the Center for Virtual History. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others. 
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Mark Coniglio, co-founder, Troika Ranch. Recognized as a pioneering force in the integration of dance and media, composer/media artist Mark Coniglio creates large-scale performance works that integrate music, dance, theater and interactive media. A native of Nebraska, Mark received his degree in music composition in 1989 from California Institute of the Arts where he studied with electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick. From that early time, Coniglio’s artistic practice has included the creation of custom interactive systems that allow performers to manipulate video, sound, and light in real-time. His first technological breakthrough came in 1989 when he created MidiDancer, a wireless system that allowed a performer to interactively control music. His passion for giving control to the performer led him to create the award-winning software Isadora, a flexible graphic programming environment that provides interactive control over digital media. Mark's writings about new media in performance have appeared in numerous books and journals, including “New Visions In Performance”, “La Scena Digitale: Nuovi Media Per La Danza” and Movement Research Journal. He relocated from New York to Berlin, Germany in 2008.

Troika Ranch co-founders Coniglio and Stoppiello have been honored with the 2012 World Technology Award in The Arts; a 2011 nomination for the Alpert Award in dance; a 2005 ‘Eddy’ Award from Live Design Magazine; a 2004 Statue Award from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA; a 2004 Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica Cyberarts Competition; and a 2003 New York Dance & Performance ‘Bessie’ Award. The company has received major support from The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), the National Endowment for the Arts, the MAP Fund, the Arts Council England, and the Jerome foundation, among others.
Peter Eckersall, Professor of Theater, CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Eckesall is a specialist in new media dramaturgy, contemporary performance, and Japanese Theatre. He was as co-chief investigator for an international research project titled New Media Dramaturgy: How New Media Transform the Composition and Reception of Live Performance (2012-14) that includes comparative perspectives on performance dramaturgy from Japan, Europe, the US and Australia. He serves as the Vice President of Performance Studies international (PSi) and is the co-convenor of the PSi Dramaturgy and Performance Studies working group. He is co-founder and co-editor of Performance Paradigm and serves on editorial advisory boards for About Performance and Museum Tusculanum Press (In Between States series).  He is a visiting fellow in the Centre for Interweaving Performance Cultures, Berlin, and resident dramaturg for the Melbourne-based performance group Not Yet It’s Difficult. Major publications include: Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory (Palgrave 2013), Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era (co-authored with Denise Varney, Barbara Hatley and Chris Hudson, Palgrave 2013), We’re People Who Do Shows: Back to Back Theatre: Performance, Politics, Visibility (co-edited with Helena Grehan, Performance Research Books, 2013), Kawamura Takeshi’s Nippon Wars and Other Plays (ed. and translation, Seagull Books 2011), Theorising the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan 1960-2000 (Brill Academic, 2006).  He has published in journals such as TDR, Theatre Research International, Japanese Studies and Australasian Drama Studies. Prior to coming to CUNY, he previously taught at the University of Melbourne and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo, Rikkyo University, and the University of Copenhagen. Eckersall is working on a project to theorize the work of Japanese media-performance pioneers Dumb Type. 
Ashley Ferro-Murray, Curator of Theater and Dance at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Ferro-Murray is a curator and scholar whose work investigates the intersections among movement, digital culture, and interactive technology. Before coming to EMPAC, Ferro-Murray was the Andrew W. Mellon Creative Time Global Fellow at New York City’s public arts organization, Creative Time. She is currently working on a book project, Choreography in the Digital Era: Dancing the Cultural Difference of Technology, which charts international artists who make space for feminist, queer, disability, and postcolonial perspectives in the engineering industry, global networks, biomedicine, and borderlands. Ferro-Murray has also conducted extensive research on online instruction and the arts, for which she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning dissertation research grant. This research led to in an online course titled American Cybercultures and an original choreography titled MOOCing?. Ferro-Murray has also worked as a choreographer, exploring the relationship between the moving body and technology – culturally, politically, and aesthetically. In her choreography, she defines “technology” broadly to include anything from fabric-based prosthetics, to industrial fans, to chalk, to wearable accelerometers. She premiered her autobiographical solo Through Practice in April 2016 at AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island. In her most personal piece, Ferro-Murray explored the biopolitics of patient experience in a reflection on her own battle with leukemia. She has also performed and exhibited at ZERO1 Biennial, San Jose; Cornell University, Ithaca; The Milk Bar, Oakland; and University of California, Berkeley and her work has been featured in InDance, HASTAC, and Dancers Using Technology and she  has published in Media-N Journal, The Drama Review and Dance Research Journal. She has been a featured contributor on the -empyre- new media listserv,  HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) and In Media Res. Ferro-Murray’s co-authored chapter “Technologies of Performance” is forthcoming in A Cultural History of Performance: The Modern Age from Bloomsbury Press. 
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Amy Hughes, Associate Professor of Theater History and Criticism, Department of Theater, Brooklyn College, CUNY. Dr. Hughes investigates the relationship between theater/performance and visual, print, and material culture in the US during the nineteenth century. Her first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2012), received the 2013 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). In fall 2018, University of Michigan Press will publish A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor, a critical edition featuring selections from Watkins's diary, co-edited by Dr. Hughes and Dr. Naomi J. Stubbs (LaGuardia Community College). To supplement this volume, Drs. Hughes and Stubbs are preparing a digital edition comprising the entire text of the manuscript, which they encoded in XML using a custom schema inspired by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). It will be freely accessible online through UMich Libraries' Digital Collections. Dr. Hughes is also writing a monograph, An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in Nineteenth-Century US America, exploring how Watkins's account constitutes an "alternative theater history" centered on workaday labor.
John Kundert-Gibbs, Associate Professor, Department of Film and Theatre Studies, University of Georgia. Dr. Kundert-Gibbs specializes in 3D computer modeling and animation, motion capture, and modern drama. Prior to coming to UGA, he was director of the Digital Production Arts program at Clemson University. He has authored or co-authored numerous publications on Maya and 3D computer graphics that have been translated into nine languages, including (among others) Mastering Maya (multiple editions), Maya Secrets of the Pros, Maya 4.5 Savvy, and Action!: Acting Lessons for CG Animators (with DVD). He is also author of No-thing is Left to Tell: Zen/Chaos Theory in the Dramatic Art of Samuel Beckett (1999), and co-editor of Pinter at Sixty (1993). He has created effects for live-action projects and designs electronic media for theatrical productions. 




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Vijay Mathew, HowlRound, Emerson College. Vijay Mathew is the Cultural Strategist and a co-founder of HowlRound, based at Emerson College, Boston, USA and is privileged to assist a talented team by leading HowlRound's development of commons-based online knowledge sharing platforms and the organization's notions of cultural innovation. Prior to his current position, he was the Coordinator for the National Endowment for the Arts New Play Development Program for two years, as well as a Theater Communication Group New Generations Future Leader grant recipient under David Dower's mentorship in new work at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Vijay has a MFA from New School University in New York City and a BA from University of Chicago. He is a board member of Double Edge Theatre located in rural Ashfield, Massachusetts, USA.

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Emily McGinn, Digital Humanities Coordinator, Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab, University of Georgia. Dr. McGinn oversees the Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab in a role that includes advising, consulting and managing new digital projects, designing new DH curriculum, and outreach. Prior to this position, she was a CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at Lafayette College. There she served as a liaison between the library’s Digital Scholarship Services team of developers and faculty. She co-authored a digital edition of Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” that compares six versions of the short story through TEI markup. She has also published book chapters on Latin American modernist literature, and presented numerous talks on both Modernist Studies and digital humanities. Her research primarily focuses on the intersections of science, technology, and global modernism. Her dissertation, The Science of Sound: The Impact of Sound Recording on Vanguard Narrative Form, is a comparative study of Irish and Latin American modernisms and the literary responses to the advent of recorded sound.  

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Derek Miller, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, Department of English, Harvard University. Dr. Miller joined the Harvard English Department in 2013. His research considers the material relationship between the performing arts and industry, particularly the effects of law and economics on artistic production. He draws on both traditional archival and digital methods in his work. Other research interests include musical theater and music-as-performance. His first book, Copyright and the Value of Performance, explores the implicit legal theories of the performing arts in nineteenth-century Anglo-American copyright law and is under contract with Cambridge University Press. His current research project is Visualizing Broadway, a project in the digital humanities that combines data mining and visualization with close readings of plays to explore mid-century Broadway and the long history of theatrical production. The project investigates theater as a field of cultural production defined by competition for scarce resources, in which success is the exception, mediocrity and failure the rules. In addition to his book projects, Miller's recent articles include "On Bow and Exit Music," which examines the use of underscoring during curtain calls in the musical theater, and "Average Broadway," which outlines the ideas underlying his digital humanities research. Other articles and reviews have appeared in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Contemporary Theatre Review, Musicology Australia, TDR, and Studies in Musical Theatre. His experience as a theater practitioner includes work as an actor, writer, music director, and dramaturg. More information at scholar.harvard.edu/dmiller and visualizingbroadway.com.
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Kiri Miller is Professor of American Studies and Music (Ethnomusicology) at Brown. Affiliated with American Studies Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. Kiri Miller is an ethnomusicologist whose work focuses on participatory culture, popular music, interactive digital media, and virtual/visceral performance practices. Her latest book, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media, investigates how motion-sensing interfaces teach choreography, cultivate new embodied experiences of popular music, and stage domestic surveillance as intimate recognition (forthcoming in March 2017 from Oxford University Press). Her previous monographs are Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford, 2012) and Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (Illinois, 2008). She has published articles in Ethnomusicology, New Media & Society, Game Studies, American Music, 19th-Century Music, the Journal of American Folklore, Oral Tradition, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Miller is also editor of The Chattahoochee Musical Convention: A Sacred Harp Historical Sourcebook. Miller was a Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta before joining the Brown faculty in 2007. In 2010-11 she held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the American Council of Learned Societies. From 2013-15, she was also part of the AHRC Research Network “Guitar Heroes in Music Education? Music-based video-games and their potential for musical and performative creativity”, led by David Roesner (University of Kent), funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council, United Kingdom. Her articles have won the Richard Waterman Junior Scholar Prize for the “best article by a junior scholar in the ethnomusicological study of popular music” and an honorable mention for the Jaap Kunst Prize for “the most significant article in ethnomusicology written by a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology.” Miller's regular course offerings include Musical Youth Cultures, Digital Media and Virtual Performance, Introduction to Ethnomusicology, Music and Technoculture, Ethnography of Popular Music, and World Music in Theory and Practice. 
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Dawn Stoppiello, co-founder, Troika Ranch. Dawn Stoppiello was recently named Assistant Professor of Practice, focusing on Dance and New Media, at USC Kaufman, the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance at University of Southern California. Trained as a choreographer and dancer whose career was spent as a harmoniously dancing host-body for homemade computer-interaction systems, her focus was on choreography for bodies interfaced to computers through sensory systems physically conducting digital material. Her interests have shifted from using the body to enliven the digital sphere to using digital material to generate digitally-infused choreography. She began her career in Portland, Oregon at the Jefferson High School for the Performing Arts and received a BFA in dance from California Institute of the Arts in 1989 and an MFA in Dance from George Washington University in 2014. Stoppiello has received multiple honors from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA over the years including a 1987 Dance Scholarship, two Special Project grants in 2004/2009 and the foundation's highest honor, the Statue Award in 2004 for her continued excellence in her field. While still a student at CalArts, her first professional performance was with Jazz Tap Ensemble in 1986. After graduation she became a member of the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company where she remained until 1992. Stoppiello’s writing has appeared in many books and journals on live-media art practices and she has taught and lectured at arts institutions across the US, Canada, Australia and Europe. As co-founders of Troika Ranch, she and Mark Coniglio have received numerous awards (as listed in the biography for Coniglio above).