Congratulations to Guilherme Meletti Yazbek and Tash Cole for finishing coursework in December 2025!
Congratulations to Frederick Miller and Payne Banister for successfully defending their comprehensive exams!
Congratulations to Jeremy Kahn (“Actor-Citizen: Applied Performance for the HERE and NOW”), Alison Mahoney (Nonspeaking: Performances of Crip Collectivity), and Audrey Pernell (“Tools for Ensemble‑Building through Creative Devising”) who successfully defended their MFA theses and PhD dissertations this spring!
In November, Payne Banister made their directorial debut with Iphigenia and Other Daughters as part of Pitt Stages’ main season and completed their Immersive Practice Credential in Directing. In March, they presented their paper "“To Question Nostalgia and Think of Mourning as a Joyful Thing": Staging Queer Temporality in Bathhouse.pptx" at the Mid-America Theatre Conference in Pittsburgh. Payne also was selected to participate in the Dietrich Summer Graduate Writing Scholars program. In the coming weeks, Payne is set to defend their dissertation prospectus, and they hope to be ABD by the beginning of the summer. Earlier this semester, Payne learned that they are a recipient of the Andrew C. Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, and they look forward to dedicating the next academic year to full-time dissertation research and writing. Thanks to support from the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences Summer Award and the Theatre Arts Departmental Summer Research Award, Payne will begin their dissertation research this summer.
Alison Mahoney received an Honorable Mention for the International Federation of Theatre Research’s New Scholars Prize for her paper “‘Why are they doing cabaret in the dark?’: Blindness and Simulation in Extant Theatre’s Effing and Blinding! Cabaret.” The article is now under review at Theatre Research International. Alison delivered the guest lecture “Crip-Syncing, Consent, and Censorship: Drag Syndrome in Grand Rapids" in Dr. Kareem Khubchandani’s Drag Politics class at Harvard earlier this month. This summer she will be working as Accessibility Coordinator for the musical Wholly Unwinding, in development at the Hogfish Regenerative Arts Residency in Portland, Maine.
Outside of Pitt, Frederick Miller recently served as the Interim Associate Conference Planner and Graduate Student Representative for Mid-America Theatre Conference 2026. In addition, Miller contributed dramaturgical support for musicals at University of Texas at Arlington, Cumberland Valley High School, Valley High School, Theatre Harrisburg, and the J2 Spotlight Musical Theatre Company.
Laya Shahzamani had a busy spring! She presented two practice-based research projects in 2026. She performed Remembrance at the Pittsburgh Graduate Music Conference: Sonic Power, Speculation, Surveillance and Strength in March 2026. This piece is a performative narrative exploring the question of archival memory and performed reenactments, and the interplay between body and sound. Her second project was Remnant, a 2D paper-cut stop-motion following an arts residency offered by the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Laya was exploring similar questions of reenactments of memory and ideas in a parallel world, inspired by galaxy evolution and the self-regulation of cloud gas, which is a process of circulation. She also won the Outstanding Presentation award at Grad Expo 2026 for her paper on the transformation of urban spaces through the presence of bodies.
This year, PhD student Guilherme Meletti Yazbek presented the paper “The Gayest Park in São Paulo (?): A Shiny, Colorful Ethnography” at Performance Studies international (PSi) #30, “Cruzo, Cruising, Crossroads,” held in Fortaleza, Brazil (December 2025). He also published the article “The Successful Disaster of Bodyspacemotionthings, by Robert Morris: 1971 vs. 2009” in Ars, a leading journal of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of São Paulo (USP). In Spring 2026, he taught Contemporary Global Stages: Performing (in) the City. The course approached urban space as a site of the performance of everyday life, engaging a glocal perspective and attending to dimensions such as class, race, gender, and sexuality. Through theoretical and practice-based work, students examined how bodies, movement, and public space intersect across different urban contexts. He was also awarded a Duolingo Community Arts grant for the project Voices of Place: A Pittsburgh Neighborhood Portrait & Sound Project, to be developed in the coming months.