Bryant Keith Alexander is Professor of Communication Studies and is currently the acting chair of the Department of Liberal Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. His research in performance, cultural, and pedagogical studies appears in a wide variety of journals and books. He is a contributing author to the Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.), and is the coeditor of Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity. He is currently finalizing a book-length project entitled Contesting Performances: Ethnographic Explorations of Culture, Subjectivity, and Social Relations.

Michael S. Bowman teaches performance studies at Louisiana State University, where he is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication Studies. He serves as the current editor of Text and Performance Quarterly, the National Communication Association journal of performance studies.

Ruth Laurion Bowman is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University, where she teaches courses in performance studies and is the producing director of the HopKins Black Box, an experimental lab theatre. Her essays have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Topics, and various collections.

Barbara Browning is the author of Samba: Resistance in Motion (1995), which received the De la Torre Bueno Prize for the best book on dance in that year, and Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (1998). Her research concerns African diasporic expressive culture, and the conjunction of medical anthropology and performance analysis. From 2001 to 2005 she served as the Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. Browning is a member of the governing boards of the Society of Dance History Scholars and the Congress on Research in Dance. She is also a member of the editorial collective of the journal Women & Performance.

Gay Gibson Cima is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University. Her book manuscript, Early American Women Critics: Performance, Politics, Religion, Race, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. She has published widely on feminist performance history, dramaturgy, and criticism in a number of critical anthologies and journals. Her book Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage was published in 1993. She is Secretary of the American Society for Theatre Research and a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Conference of Administrative Officers.

Jan Cohen-Cruz is a scholar/practitioner of activist and community-based performance. An Associate Professor in the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Drama Department, she coordinates a minor in applied theatre, [Page 550]guiding young artists who facilitate cultural projects in city neighborhoods. She coedited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism and edited Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology. Her book on community-based performance in the United States, Local Acts, was published in March, 2005. Another edited text with Mady Schutzman, A Boal Companion, should be available in late 2005.

Dwight Conquergood was former chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University where he served as Director of Graduate Studies and Interim Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts. He was also a member of the Research Faculty for the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research. He served as site consultant for the International Rescue Committee and other human rights organizations. Professor Conquergood conducted several workshops for public defenders and consulted pro bono on capital cases involving indigent, minority, and immigrant defendants. He taught at the Bryan R. Shechmeister Death Penalty College, School of Law, Santa Clara University. His research interests were in cultural studies and performance ethnography. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork in refugee camps in Thailand, the Gaza Strip, and with street gangs in Chicago. In addition to numerous publications in journals and edited volumes, he coproduced two award-winning documentaries based on his ethnographic field-work: Between Two Worlds: The Hmong Shaman in America (1985), and The Heart Broken in Half (1990). Before his death in November 2004, he was completing a book on performance ethnography grounded in his long-term transnational field research with refugees and new immigrants in Chicago.

Tracy C. Davis is Barber Professor of the Performing Arts at Northwestern University. She is general editor of the Cambridge University Press series Theatre and Performance Theory and recently joined TDR as a consulting editor. A book on nuclear civil defense practices in Canada, Britain, and the United States. is in process. This study explores the staging of preparations for catastrophe by various populations within governmental, scientific, engineering, and social communities as they coordinate civil defense exercises affecting neighborhoods, cities, and nations on local and international scales.

Norman K. Denzin is Distinguished Professor of Communications, College of Communications Scholar, and Research Professor of Communications, Sociology, and Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of numerous books including Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture, Screening Race: Hollywood and a Cinema of Racial Violence; Performing Ethnography; and 9/11 in American Culture. He is past editor of The Sociological Quarterly, coeditor of The Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed.), coeditor of Qualitative Inquiry, editor of Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, and series editor of Studies in Symbolic Interaction.

Greg Dimitriadis is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Adjunct Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is author, coauthor, or coeditor of nine books, including Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice.

Jill Dolan holds the Zachary T. Scott Chair in Drama in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author the The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1989), Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (1993), Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (2001), and Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at [Page 551]the Theatre (2005). Her research projects include a critical memoir on lesbian feminism in the United States and a critical history of queer theatre since the 1960s. She coedits, with David Roman, the Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/QueerDrama/Theatre/Performance series at the University of Michigan Press. She is the past president of the Women and Theatre Program of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and a past president of ATHE itself. She is former Executive Director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her articles have been published in Theatre Journal, The Drama Review, Modern Drama, and Theatre Topics, among other publications. She heads the Performance as Public Practice MA/PhD Program at UT-Austin.

Paul Edwards is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University and the recipient of the 2002 NU Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award. He has directed more than 40 original stage adaptations of fiction for campus and professional settings. His adaptation of John Barth's The End of the Road received a 1993

Joseph Jefferson Citation (for non-Equity production); his adaptation of Geoff Ryman's Was received a Joseph Jefferson Award (for Equity production) and an After Dark Award. From the National Communication Association he has received two awards: the Leslie Irene Coger Award, honoring lifetime achievement in performance, and the Lilla A. Heston Award for outstanding scholarship in performance studies. His essays and monographs have appeared in such publications as Shakespeare Quarterly, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Theatre Annual.

Derek Goldman is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Georgetown University and is Founding Artistic Director of the StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, an award-winning professional theatre company that has produced over 50 productions in 13 years. He has also directed Off-Broadway and at numerous other venues including the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, and he has had more than a dozen of his own plays and adaptations produced professionally. Current projects include his adaptation of Studs Terkel's Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith (Steppenwolf); his jazz musical My Swan: the Passions of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York), and Hymn to Elsewhere, an original piece inspired by the life and work of Salman Rushdie and the iconography of The Wizardof Oz.

Bruce Henderson is Professor of Speech Communication at Ithaca College, where he also served as department chair for five years and is currently coordinator of Health Communication. He is co-author with Carol Simpson Stern of Performance: Texts and Contexts and also serves as an Associate Editor of Text and Performance Quarterly. He has written about modern poetry, children's literature, queer theory, and disability studies.

Shannon Jackson is Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is head graduate advisor of the doctoral program in Performance Studies, core faculty of the Art Research Center, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies. She has published Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (2000), Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004), and dozens of articles in edited collections and journals of theatre, performance, and cultural studies. Jackson has received publication awards from the American Studies Association, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Association for Theatre in Hgher Education, [Page 552]and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Spencer Foundation.

E. Patrick Johnson is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Departments of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity and coeditor (with Mae G. Henderson) of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled, Sweet Tea: An Oral History of Black Gay Men of the South.

Joni L. Jones/Olorisa Omi Osun Olomo is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance, and Associate Director of the Center for African and African-American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an artist/scholar who is currently engaged in performance ethnography around the Yoruba deity Osun, and is writing a collaborative ethnography on the use of a jazz aesthetic in theatre. While on a Fulbright Fellowship in Nigeria (1997–98), Dr. Jones taught at Obafemi Awolowo University and contributed theatre for social change workshops to the Forum on Governance and Democracy in IleIfe. Her articles on performance and identity have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, The Drama Review, Theatre Topics, and Black Theatre News. Her performance ethnography includes Searching for Osun, sista docta, and Broken Circles: A Journey Through Africa and the Self.

Kristin M. Langellier is Mark and Marcia Bailey Professor at the University of Maine where she teaches communication, performance studies, and women's studies. Her research interests are narrative performance, family storytelling, and Franco American cultural identity. Her numerous publications include Storytelling in Daily Life: Performing Narrative (2004), coauthored with Eric E. Peterson. She is a former editor of Text and Performance Quarterly.

Jon McKenzie is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he teaches courses in performance studies and civil disobedience. His works include Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2001), the essays “Democracy's Performance,” “Laurie Anderson for Dummies,” and “Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design: etoy, etoys, and TOYWAR,” and a 1996 broadcast commemoration of the 1986 shuttle disaster titled “CINC: A Challenger Radio Drama.” Jon's texts have been translated into Croatian, French, German, Japanese, Polish, and Portuguese. He has also worked in the new media industry as a writer and information architect.

Lisa Merrill is Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Rhetoric, and Performance Studies at Hofstra University. Merrill is a gender and performance historian and specialist in American studies. Her research focuses on nineteenth century theatrical and everyday performances of nationality, race, gender, and sexuality and their reception. Merrill is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities senior scholar award, the Lilla Heston Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies, and visiting fellowships and professorships at Cambridge University, England; La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia; and Northwestern University, United States. Her most recent book, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators was awarded the Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book in Theatre or Drama by an American author.

Lynn C. Miller is Professor of Theatre and Dance in the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin. Miller is the coeditor of Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women's Autobiography (2003) and author of the novels The Fool's Journey[Page 553](2002) and Death of a Department Chair (in press, 2006). Miller has adapted the works of many contemporary writers for the stage and has toured performances of Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Katherine Anne Porter. Miller teaches courses in adaptation of literature for stage and screen, performing autobiography, performance art, and performance and culture. Currently, she's writing a libretto for her play (coauthored with Laura Furman), Passenger on the Ship of Fools, which has been performed in Saratoga Springs and at Louisiana State University.

José Esteban Muñoz is Chair of the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He is author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) and the coeditor of several volumes including Pop-Out: Queer Warhol and Everynight Life: Music and Dance in Latin/o America. He is completing two manuscripts, Feeling Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance and Cruising Utopia.

Eric E. Peterson is Professor at the University of Maine where he teaches in the Department of Communication and Journalism. His research and teaching interests are in narrative performance, media consumption, nonverbal communication, and communication diversity and identity. He is coauthor with Kristin M. Langellier of Storytelling in Daily Life: Performing Narrative (2004) and coeditor of Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest (2003).

Della Pollock is Professor of Communication Studies in the areas of performance and cultural studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hll. She is the author of Telling Bodies Performing Birth (1999) and editor of Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History (1998) and Remembering: Oral History Performance (2005). She coedits the journal Cultural Studies with Lawrence Grossberg.

Sandra L. Richards's teaching interests center on American drama, African-American and African theatres, and black feminist theories. She has taught dramatic literature and directed African-American, Caribbean, and African plays at Stanford University, San Francisco State University, Northwestern University, and the University of Benin (Nigeria), where she was a Fulbright lecturer from 1983 to 1985. She has published articles on such African-American playwrights as Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and on Nigerian dramatists Wole Soyinka, Bode Sowande, and Zulu Sofola in Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, and in the collections Critical Theory and Performance and Performance and Performativity. Her full-length study, Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan, was selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic publications of 1997. Other collections in which her work has appeared include Horror and Human Tragedy Revisted, African Drama and Performance, and The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Self-Fashioning. From 1998 to 2001, Richards served as the Chair of the African American Studies Department, and from 2001 to 2004, she held the Leon Forrest Professorship of African American Studies, both at Northwestern University. Currently, she is researching issues of cultural tourism to slave sites throughout the Black Atlantic.

Rebecca Schneider is Associate Professor and Head of the MA and PhD programs in Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance as well as numerous essays, most recently “Solo Solo Solo” in After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance. She is a contributing editor to TDR and coeditor, with Gabrielle Cody, of Re: Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide on twentieth century directing theory and practice.

Mady Schutzman is a writer, scholar, and theatre artist. She is author of The Real Thing: [Page 554]Performance, Hysteria, and Advertising and coeditor with Jan Cohen-Cruz of two anthologies on the work of Augusto Boal. Her performative essays have been published in journals ranging from The Drama Review to The Journal of Medical Humanities. Schutzman's current research focuses on humor as resistance and divinatory practices. She teaches and serves as Assistant Dean of the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts.

Nathan Stucky is the Chair of the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale where he writes and directs performances and teaches courses in performance studies. He is coeditor of Teaching Performance Studies, and he formerly edited Theatre Annual: A Journal of Performance Studies. Hs essays have appeared in Cultural Studies<-»Critical Methodologies, Text and Performance Quarterly, Communication Education, Journal of Pragmatics, and The Journal of Language and Social Psychology.

Jacqueline Taylor is the Director of the DePaul Humanities Center and teaches performance studies, women's studies, and gender and communication at DePaul University. She is the author of Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives, and of chapters in Queer Words, Queer Images and Readings in Cultural Contexts. Her essays have been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Southern Speech Communication Journal, and Women's Studies in Communication. Her coedited volume (with Lynn C. Miller and M. Heather Carver), Voices Made Flesh: Staging Women's Autobiography contains fourteen scripts and essays on women's autobiographical performance.

Kristin Bervig Valentine is Professor Emeritus of Communication and Women's Studies at Arizona State University. Her research within communication is focused on performance studies and ethnography. For more than 30 years she has been a volunteer teacher for incarcerated women and continues to work for alternatives to prisons. Valentine has published earlier information about her work with incarcerated women in Women's Studies in Communication, 21 (1998) and will contribute to a white paper on incarcerated persons to be published by NCA in 2006.