Faculty and students engage in a wide range of scholarly and creative research practices that explore performance, media, storytelling, and cultural expression across historical and contemporary contexts. Through critical inquiry, artistic production, and interdisciplinary collaboration, research in the department connects theory and practice while fostering engagement with diverse communities, technologies, and forms of expression.
Faculty Research Highlights
Faculty research includes race and gender studies, environmental humanities, documentary and nonfiction media, histories of performance and the moving image, and theatrical production and performance methods. Faculty contribute to national and international scholarly and creative communities through publications, conference presentations, artistic productions, filmmaking, directing, design, and playwriting.
Ibby Cizmar, assistant professor of theatre
Social Justice Acting Studio: Restructuring the Classroom Environment for Equity and Inclusion
The Santa Clarita Performing Arts Center awarded scholar-artist Cizmar with a one-week residency, “Diversifying Acting Approaches for the Global Majority.” As part of her residency, she held a symposium titled “The Social Justice Acting Studio: Restructuring the Classroom Environment for Equity and Inclusion.” This research derived from Cizmar’s junior faculty teaching fellowship where she leveraged scholarship from the social sciences and critically analyzed her acting classes. Significantly, societal dynamics permeate inside the classroom walls where educators are just as much a part of the unjust world as the students.
The symposium centered on performance-based classes, offering strategies for instructors to create a more equitable environment and establish effective grading methods to serve all students. With this work, Cizmar fundamentally encourages teachers to rethink course material and grading assessments to yield a more equitable and inclusive experience. Cizmar also received the Santa Clarity Performing Arts Center’s EDI Impact Award for recognition of her book, Ernie McClintock and the Jazz Actors Family, and its contribution to equity, diversity, and inclusion in teaching and scholarship.
Christin Essin, professor of theatre
Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography
Essin received the American Theatre and Drama Society’s John Frick Book Award for her second monograph Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography. It was also listed as a finalist for the Theatre Library Association’s George Freedley Memorial Book Award, a finalist for the American Society for Theatre Research’s Bernard Hewitt Book Award, and a winner of CHOICE’s Outstanding Titles.
The book illuminates the work of New York City’s theatre technicians, shining a light on the essential contributions of unionized stagehands, carpenters, electricians, sound engineers, properties artisans, wardrobe crews, makeup artists, and child guardians. The awards it received recognizes its contributions to theatre studies and labor studies, exploring the politics of the unions that serve backstage professionals by protecting their rights and insuring safe working conditions.
Jonathan Rattner, associate professor of cinema and media arts
“As an artist, I’m concerned with narrative construction: how we tell our stories and the structure we use to form these stories. I do have a particular shooting and editing practice I designed to achieve a fresh sensual experience in production, postproduction, and in theater. During production, I shoot like an observational photographer. When I see something I want to photograph, my normal practice is to turn on the camera and stay still for a long period of time, waiting until I see something, an action, a color, a sound, that I did not notice when I turned on the camera. Once I’m in the editing room, I work very much like a collage artist. I take visuals and sounds from different times and places and look to create moments that act like those long durational shots by way of editing. Ideally when I screen my films, the audience experiences a glimpse into these worlds, which are real but also truly unfamiliar.” —Jonathan Rattner
Read the full conversation with Rattner, “A Filmmaker Bears Witness to the Great Frontier”
Watch a trailer for Rattner’s film The Interior, which is observational work shot on both 16mm and digital video. It is a sensory journey that follows Brent Sass, an award-winning dog musher, and his community of dogs living in isolation in the rural inland of Alaska.
Kristyl Tift, assistant professor of theatre
Tift and student Olutobi Akisanya wrote a paper titled “The Ever Present Narrative : A Comparative Analysis of Sally’s Rape and Confederates.” Akisanya was invited to present the paper at the Black Theatre Network’s conference in St. Louis in July 2023.
Student Research Highlights
Students pursue original research and creative work both inside and outside the classroom through coursework, production experiences, mentorship, and internships. These opportunities help students develop critical and creative skills while preparing them for graduate study and professional careers across the arts and media.
Bo Broder
Student Bo Broder created a short film titled “Day,” which explores the pure and positive elements of love or infatuation as well as the happiness people find in one another.
Madison Good
Madison Good took an exploratory approach to her year-long thesis, that ended in this crafted question: “What skills do Vanderbilt theatre majors/minors gain from their undergraduate education that prepares them to enter any number of fields?”
Kicking off the year, Madison hosted a panel with theatre alumni where she presented them with carefully crafted questions derived from her interviews with students. She also conducted a literature review on career and job market research, research on advocation for theatre and humanities, and key takeaways from previously conducted alumni interviews. During the spring semester, she developed a workbook designed to help theatre students at Vanderbilt tell the story of their transferrable skills that they gain from the major. Madison took her workbook and brought it to life by testing it out on students during an hour-long workshop, where students connected their theatrical stories to career competencies. Key takeaways from this experience are that students want formalized career development as part of the major, we’re in a unique position as a department that’s academically rigorous and passionate but doesn’t result in a BFA, and talking to alumni improves outlooks for students about the future.
Karina Schechter
Student Karina Schechter created “Over and Out,” a soundscape/hellscape blend that aims to blur the line between reality as we know it and reality television.
The project flows between media outlets covering news regarding COVID-19 and the hosts of iconic reality programs in a way that distorts both concepts, thereby merging separate forms of reality into one and begging the question: where does the script stop and authenticity take over? Coupling the prevalence of “fake news” with the general consensus that reality TV is anything but “reality,” this soundscape embraces the semantic ebbs and flows of the “real” and highlights the malleability of everything around us.