Lisa L Biggs | Brown University (original) (raw)

Dr. Lisa Biggs is an actress, playwright and performance scholar. She currently serves as an Assistant Professor at Brown University in the Department of Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre.

https://lisabiggsphd.squarespace.com

Since 1993, Lisa has developed and toured her original performance works to venues across the United States, including Cultural Odyssey, Links Hall, Baltimore Theatre Project, Joe's Movement Emporium, Michigan State University, Lansing Community College, the Renegade Theater Festival, National Black Theatre Festival, NY International Fringe, Shadowbox Theatre, Dance Place, and the National Hip Hop Theatre Festival.

Her latest performance piece, AFTER/LIFE, is a 2016 Knight Foundation Detroit Arts Challenge winner: http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/arts/2016/11/03/knight-arts-challenge-2016/93233106/. This oral history based, living theatre work tells stories of the '67 Detroit civil unrest from the perspective of the overlooked thousands of women and girls. It will premiere summer 2017 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Detroit.

In addition to devising new work, Lisa has appeared in productions at Arena Stage, Lookingglass Theatre, the African Continuum Theatre Company, the Kennedy Center, and many more. She is a former member of the Living Stage Theater Company, one of the preeminent Theatre for Social Change programs in the US. There as a teaching artist, she devised hundreds of short-form improvisational theatre pieces and taught introductory performance making to students aged 3 to 103 under the direction of Oran Sandel and Rebecca Rice.

Building off her diverse experiences as an artist and activist, Lisa's current scholarship stands at the intersection of Performance Studies, African American History, Gender and Law. Her research investigates the impact of performing arts programs for incarcerated women confined to prisons and jails in the U.S. and South Africa as sites not of "rehabilitation," but women's organizing.
Supervisors: E. Patrick Johnson, Ramon Rivera-Servera, D. Soyini Madison, and Brian Meeks

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