Portmanteaux Overflow

Patricia A. Suchy is Associate Professor and HopKins Professor of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University, where she has also served as director of the Film and Media Arts program. Her recent work, supported by the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, is ”Persistence of Vision: Antarctica,” a video installation featuring re-enacted photographs from the Heroic Age of Antarctic science. In addition to directing over 30 performances and video projects, her essays and media projects have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Annual, Southern Spaces, Folkstreams, Liminalities, On Site, CineAction, and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

Lisa Flanagan is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana. Her research and teaching interests include poetics of place, body and space; early 20th century avant-garde; visual and material culture; tourism; oral history and ethnography; performative writing and mystory; interdisciplinary, collaborative, and community based performance. She is vice chair and 2018 convention planner of the Performance Studies Division of the National Communication Association. In Spring 2018 she co-directed Institutionally Aggravated, a conversation between civil right activist Bayard Ruston and Irish poet and playwright Brendan Behan on the best path to resistance in the face of systemic social injustice.

Sarah Jackson is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Southern University at New Orleans. Her work has been published in Technocultures and Liminalities. Her dissertation theorized Joseph Cornell’s artistic processes as chronotopes of assemblage art. Her recent research and creative works revolve around the tension of environmental/cultural preservation and decay.

Ross Louis is Professor of Communication Studies and co-founder of the Performance Studies Laboratory at Xavier University of Louisiana. His recent performance work includes an adaptation of Richard Wright’s haiku (This Other World) and a series of site-specific performances in New Orleans and Montreal based on Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. He has published in Text and Performance Quarterly and Liminalities and completed a writing residency at Incident.res in Briant, France.

Lexus Dawn Jordan is a graduate student in Performance Studies at Louisiana State University. As a performance studies practitioner, her primary interest includes creating performance as advocacy and activism-centering community narratives. Her recent work in progress is a collection of short protest performances and installations drawing awareness to and speaking against specific injustices against black children in America. Her most recent community project involved facilitating a race workshop based in Augusto Boal’s Image Theatre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Tracy Stephenson Shaffer is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University where she researches and teaches courses in performance studies and film. Sheis co-author of Performance Studies: The Interpretation of Aesthetic Texts. Her research has appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Theatre Annual, and Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies. She serves as the producing director of the HopKins Black Box, an experimental laboratory theatre at LSU, where she advises graduate student work and directs original live performances. In 2015, she was awarded the Leslie Irene Coger Award for Distinguished Performance from the National Communication Association. She is the current editor of Text and Performance Quarterly’s “Performance Space.”

Kd Amond is a storyteller. After receiving a BA in English from Louisiana State University and an MFA in film production from University of New Orleans, she began working in the entertainment industry. Her pilot, The Woodshed, debuted at the International Television Festival in Los Angeles, where she won Best Director. Kd formed Some Pulp Productionsand created unscripted TV sizzle reels and pitch packages. She also worked in production for some of Hollywood’s biggest films shot in Louisiana including Terminator Genisys, The Best of Me, Geostorm, The Big Short, and Fox’s Scream Queens. Kd also worked as an editor for John Schneider Studios taking several features into their final cuts. She has directed and edited regional commercials and several music videos; the latest, Jeff Bates’ “That Thing We Do,” is currently syndicating on CMT. Kd lives in Nashville where she spends her time screenwriting, songwriting, and producing feature film and new media content.

David P. Terry is Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. His published scholarship has appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Qualitative Inquiry, Theater Annual, and Liminalities: a Journal of Performance Studies, among other outlets.