Nick FesetteAssistant Professor of Theater, Oxford College

Dr. Fesette is a theatre artist and scholar. He has directed or performed in over 50 productions in professional, academic, and community-based settings. At Oxford, he has directed productions of Rachel Cusk's Medea, Jaclyn Backhaus' Men On Boats, Lauren Gunderson's Ada and the Engine, and Max Frisch's The Arsonists. He earned his Ph.D. in Theatre at Cornell University. He's currently revising his dissertation into a monograph for publication, titled Cagecraft: Performance, Race, and Trauma in Carceral America. This project studies modern and contemporary performances made with, by, and about incarcerated people in order to understand how the carceral state itself is a performance structure continually staging racist and classist violence. In part, this book project draws upon his five years experience working with the Phoenix Players Theatre Group, a company of incarcerated writers and performers located in Auburn Correctional Facility in Upstate New York (phoenixplayersatauburn.com).