Dartmouth Fellows: Iyabo Kwayana, Kianna M. Middleton, Carlos Minchillo, Alisa Swindell
Iyabo Kwayana (Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies)
Iyabo Kwayana is an independent filmmaker and cinematographer who uses sensorial and immersive techniques in cinematography, directing and editing in order to amplify the more discreet, often hidden aspects of film narratives, compelling viewers towards an immersive, supra-sensorial, and transformative experience. She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships including the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the Edie and Lew Wasserman film fellowship, the Stanley Kramer Fellowship in Film Directing and the Women in Film Foundation's Loreen Arbus Fellowship in Cinematography. Her film Macarrão is a BAFTA shortlisted film. She won Jury Prizes at Zanzibar International Film festival and BlackStar International Film Festival as well as the Hellen Hill Jury Award at IndieGrits film festival. Amongst the places she has screened are Visions du Réel, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Camden, AFI Docs Festival, Chicago UndergroundFestival, and Museum of Moving Image . Other works to which she is a key collaborator have screened widely both domestically and internationally.
Kianna Middleton (Assistant Professor, African and African American Studies)
Kianna M. Middleton's research examines 20th and 21st century literary representations of Black disabled and queer people in African American fiction and within American medical literatures and archives. Middleton is currently working on her first manuscript wherein she theorizes a Black feminist disability framework to account for the ableist and racist intersex medical protocols developed during the United States' post-World War II era. Toward a fuller accounting of race, intersex, and disability, Middleton puts medical literature in conversation with intersex-led fictional novels from American Ethnic literatures.
Carlos Minchillo (Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese)
Carlos Minchillo holds a Ph.D. on Brazilian literature from the University of São Paulo, and his main areas of interest include modern and contemporary Brazilian prose, inter-American cultural diplomacy in the 20th Century, and the contemporary spoken word scene in Brazil. He has published several articles in scholarly journals both in Brazil and the United States, and his book Erico Verissimo, escritor do mundo [Erico Verissimo, World Writer] was awarded the 2018 Casa de las Américas Prize. The book examines the impact of the U.S. Good Neighbor policy on the career of Brazilian novelist Erico Verissimo and the international circulation of Brazilian literature. Minchillo is current working on fictional representations of civic insurgency in Brazilian literature, theater, cinema, and popular music
Alisa Swindell (Associate Curator of Photography)
Alisa Swindell is an art historian specializing in the history of photography with a focus on race and sexuality. Most recently she was a curatorial research associate at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. She has been an independent curator, a Romare Bearden Minority Graduate Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and a Dangler Intern and curatorial researcher in the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Photography. She is completing her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago with a concentration in gender and women's studies; she holds MAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of New Orleans as well as a BA from Bryn Mawr College.
Institute Directors: Misty De Berry, Laura Edmondson, and Analola Santana
Misty De Berry
Misty De Berry is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. She works across the fields of performance studies, Black Feminist thought, queer of color critique, aesthetic criticism, and critical theory. Both her scholarly and artistic work take up the relationship between Black women, durational performance, and everyday behavioral practices under late capitalism in the U.S. She is currently working on a book manuscript, In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt, which explores routine modes of debt and indebtedness in the lives of Black women’s, and their subsequent engagement with both aesthetic and everyday performance to dismantle such routines. Misty’s current performance piece, little sister: an Afro-Temporal Solo-Play, tells the story of a nomadic child spirit who shape-shifts across several incarnations of Black queer women—spanning the Antebellum South to present moment Chicago. In addition to her research and performance work, Misty engages in building communities through her training in transformative justice and Reiki healing modalities. Misty is both a co-organizer of the Institute as well as a Fellow.
Laura Edmondson
Laura Edmondson is Professor of Theater and faculty affiliate of African and African American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of two books, Performance and Politics in Tanzania: The Nation on Stage and Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire, both of which were published through the African Expressive Cultures series at Indiana University Press. She has also published in GLQ, Theatre Journal, TDR, Theatre Research International, and Qualitative Inquiry, as well as in anthologies from Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, and Intellect Books. She received the 2021 Oscar Brockett Best Essay Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research for her article in Theatre Journal, “Faustin Linyekula and the Violence of Plague,” which is related to her new book project on medical justice and performance in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She is currently the editor of Theatre Journal. Her most cherished role is being the proud single mom of two amazing daughters, who inspire her to keep working toward feminist and antiracist futures.
Analola Santana
Analola Santana is an Associate Professor of Theater at Dartmouth College and a faculty affiliate of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies. She is the author of Teatro y Cultura de Masas: Encuentros y Debates (México: Editorial Escenología, 2010) and Freak Performances: Dissidence in Latin American Theatre (University of Michigan Press, 2018), which considers the significance of theatrical practices that use the "freak" as a medium to explore the continuing effects of colonialism on Latin American identity. She is also the co-editor of Theatre and Cartographies of Power: Repositioning the Latina/o Americas (Southern Illinois UP, 2018); Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre (Routledge, 2022); and Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Disqualification (Routledge, 2022). She has published articles in several journals, including GESTOS, Latin American Theatre Review, Letras Femeninas, Paso de gato, Chasquí, Cuadernos de literatura, Theatre Topics, and Theatre Journal. In addition, she works as a professional dramaturg and is a company member of Mexico's famed Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes.