Dr. Rashida Resario

Rashida Resario is a poet and a Senior Lecturer at the Theatre Arts Department in the School of Performing Arts, University of Ghana. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art and MPhil degrees in Drama and Theatre Studies from the University of Ghana, and a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Her research interest is in the political economy of culture with a focus on creative industries and creative labour, especially gender in creative work. She is also interested in the use of arts-based methods in interdisciplinary research. Over a five-year research project, she has co-investigated the creative industries in Ghana across multiple sectors: theatre, film, visual art, fashion, and music. Currently, she is investigating the careers and business model of an all-female band in Ghana to understand their work within the context of live music production. She is also Principal Investigator in the multi-national project “Inter-(national) audiovisual industries and religious minorities: Policy and best practices for equality, justice, and empowerment” funded by WUN.  Since 2023 she has served as Co-Convener for the African and Caribbean Theatre & Performance Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. She is currently serving on the ethics advisory committee of "Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues," an EU funded multi-country, multi-partner project focused on decolonizing museums and cultural organizations through contemporary art. Her research has been funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, DANIDA, and WUN. Her work has been published in journals such as Media, Culture & Society; Cultural Trends; Information, Communication & Society; Geoforum; Journal of Contemporary African Studies; and Business Ethics Quarterly.  

Dr. D. Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson

D. Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film, Bowling Green State University. Her research has been published in areas of African, African American, Latin American, and Caribbean theatres and performances. Her research focusses on race, gender, coloniality/decoloniality, Black feminisms, Afro Caribbean spirituality/religion, and sacred queer spaces in masquerades. Forbes-Erickson’s first book under advanced contract, Caribbean Masquerades as Palimpsests: A Chronological Survey from the 16th century to the early 21st century, traces the emergence of Caribbean masquerades from the point of contact between European conquest and Indigenous and African peoples in the Caribbean from the sixteenth century to the early twenty-first century. ​​Forbes-Erickson is the founder and artistic director of the Pan-African Theatre Ensemble dedicated to Black theatres in the African continuum featuring African, Caribbean, and African American plays and performances. She is an elected member of the Executive Committee, International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), and a co-convenor of the African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group, IFTR. Forbes-Erickson holds a PhD in Theatre: Performance as Public Practice and a doctoral portfolio in African and African American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. 

Dr. Ekua Ekumah

Dr. Ekua Ekumah is a theatre practitioner and scholar who is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, School of Performing Arts, University of Ghana. She is a trained actor, earning a BA (Hons) in Theatre Arts from Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, an MFA in Theatre Arts, from the University of Ghana, Legon. She obtained her PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London with a thesis titled ‘Theatre, Performance, Representation: African Diasporic Identity on the British Stage’. Ekua’s main area of teaching is Acting/devising and her main research interests are in African diasporic identity and performance. She has served as the Head of Department of Theatre Arts and is the immediate past Artistic Director of Abibigromma, the Resident Theatre Company of the School of Performing Arts. She is currently an elected member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR). One of Ekua’s most recent Co PI projects is an AHRC funded research titled Migrants, Queen Mothers and Gender Based Violence in Ghana. She is interested in transposing folktales onto the Ghanaian contemporary stage and adapting classic texts into Ghanaian contexts.

Dr. Sabine Kim

I research and teach Canadian studies, Indigenous literature and activism, transnational American studies, and critical animal studies. In 2017, I published some of my research in a monograph, Acoustic Entanglements: Sound and Aesthetic Practice (Universitätsverlag Winter). The book connects cultural and media histories of sound and hearing to explore how material objects are entangled with social desires; technologies entangled with bodies; and race, gender, and affect with ideologies of nation, citizenship, property and belonging. The book examines, for example, the extraordinary escape from slavery of Henry Box Brown, early performance artist, abolitionist, and mesmerist; the ways in which Emily Dickinson’s poetry and poetics participated in the emergent cultural logic of the phonograph; and the political and cultural work of memory which transnational poetic forms such as dub poetry undertake in the readings and performances of Lillian Allen.

In addition to my research and teaching, I am the managing editor with the Journal of Transnational American Studies.

Gifty Nunana Tay

Gifty Tay is a second-year master’s student and Graduate Assistant in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include African/ African diasporic identity in storytelling and performance, activism, rituals, and African/African American Theatre. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana with a concentration in play directing. Her recent work explores Contemporary and Traditional African Masquerade, Parades and Carnivals: A Study of the Day of Remembering at Ghana’s Chale Wote Street Arts Festival examining how the event functions as both a public performance and a sacred performance arguing that the Day of Remembering exemplifies the connection of tradition and contemporary arts, redefining urban spaces in Accra as sites of historical and cultural significance. She has collaborated on Traces of Colonialism and Faust meets Ananse (Study Program Theatre in Education/Theatre Festival) organized by Leibniz Universität Hannover, Federal Association of Drama and Theatre (BAG), Junges Schauspiel at the State Theatre Hannover, University of Ghana, and University of Cape Coast. She is passionate about contributing and advancing my knowledge in Theatre and Performance Studies. In addition to her research, she has also created other works in scene painting, acting, and costume design. She has also been a graduate student representative at faculty meetings since the fall 2024/2025 academic year in my department. She is also a member of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR).

Dr. Vanessa Lee

Vanessa Lee is an academic and playwright whose research interests include postcolonial theatre and film, gender studies, and European, Asian, and Caribbean theatres. Her monograph Four Caribbean Women Plawyrights: Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury and Suzanne Dracius was published in 2021 by Palgrave. Her articles have appeared in the Global Media Journal, The Journal of Romance Studies, Transtext(e)s Transcultures, The Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, H-France and The International Journal of Francophone Studies. As a playwright and theatre practitioner she has written and translated plays, and directed and performed in several productions in the UK, France, Ireland, and Sweden. Personal webpage: www.vanessalee.org 

Dr. Nkululeko Jama Sibanda

Nkululeko Sibanda is a National Research Fund (NRF) Y2-rated researcher and academic, teaching, and supervising research in the fields of sociology of theatre, creative economies, digital humanities and decolonial theatre practices. Nkululeko holds an MA and PhD in Drama and Performance Studies from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). Nkululeko’s research falls under the broad banner of the Sociology of Theatre in Africa – with three sub-categories: (1) Critical Reading of Creative Productions and Cultural Processes, (2) Precarity, Training and Development in the Cultural Sector in Southern Africa, and (3) Digital Humanities. Nkululeko’s scholarship is rooted at the intersection of society, people, and live performing arts from the vantage point of African visuality, aesthetics, and experiences. At its core, his work aims to develop robust and contextually grounded performance theory and practice models from within African paradigms. With over thirty peer-reviewed journal articles and ten peer-reviewed book chapters, his most recent research offering is an edited volume titled, Performance Trends in Postliberation Zimbabwe: Practices, Projections and Trajectories (2023). Nkululeko is also actively engaged in the scholarly community as an Editor for Cogent Arts & Humanities (Visual and Performing Arts), and as Open Issues Co-editor for Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance. He is a committed member of both the International Federation for Theatre Research and the African Theatre Association, where he regularly presents his work. Currently, he is an AfOx Fellow (2024–2025), hosted by Prof. Rebekah Lee at the African Studies Centre. 

Dr. Claire French

Claire French is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow in dramaturgy at Aarhus University, Denmark, and was previously Assistant Professor of Performance and Creative Practices at the University of Birmingham, UK. 
 
Her research investigates the ethics, aesthetics, and epistemologies of multilingual dramaturgies within socially engaged and ensemble traditions. With a methods-driven approach, she draws on sociolinguistics, decolonial theory, and performance studies to develop analytical strategies for identifying and rethinking how the body reproduces language ideologies. 
 
French’s work spans a wide range of making practices, including performance training, community facilitation, ensemble devising, and playwriting. Her artistic practice deepens her inquiry through roles as facilitator, dramaturg, and playwright, with recent plays including Courage Songs (2024) and The tongue / Die tong (2025) with Mercy Kannemeyer. 
 
She is particularly focused on the geo-political consequences of storytelling that misrepresents the global majority, using multilingualism as a means to expand and enrich knowledge production. 
 
Co-editor of Applied Theatre Research (Intellect) with Taiwo Afolabi and Bobby Smith, and Reading Decoloniality with Teodora Todorova and Asanda Ngoasheng. 
 
Associate fellowships at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and the University of Warwick (UK). 
 
More about Claire at clairefrench.com 

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