Nick FesetteAssociate Professor of Theater, Oxford College
Nick Fesette directs the theater program at Oxford College, Emory’s residential liberal arts college for first- and second-year undergraduates. His teaching and research focus on acting and directing, carceral studies, abolition, performance studies, dramatic literature, and social justice.
He is the author of Performance After Policing: Abolition Dreams in Carceral America, forthcoming from the Ohio State University Press. This book engages radical Black creativity to dream a safer world. It analyzes interdisciplinary cultural artifacts—including film and photography, prison theater, #StopCopCity activism, plays by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Erika Dickerson-Despenza, and incarcerated visual arts—to explore themes of interdependence, revolution, counterhistory, and transformative justice. In part, this project draws upon his experience working with the Phoenix Players Theatre Group, a company of incarcerated writers and performers located in Auburn Correctional Facility in Upstate New York.
He has published articles in Theatre Journal, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, PUBLIC: A Journal of Imagining America, and Teaching Artist Journal, and written review essays for American Quarterly, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Performance Research. He has also contributed chapters to the edited collections Race and Performance After Repetition, Into Abolitionist Theatre: A Guidebook for Liberatory Theatre-Making, and Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Care, Community, Change.
For his next major interdisciplinary project, he is researching racialized performances of health under the medical industrial complex. To commence this work, he is developing a solo performance, John Brown Bodies™️, which was awarded a grant from the Emory University Research Committee. This piece investigates the histories of white anti-racism by using humor, poetic autobiography, and calisthenic exercise.
As a theater maker, Dr. Nick has directed, performed, or helped devise dozens of productions in professional, academic, and community-based settings, ranging from off-Broadway to a maximum-security prison. Each semester at Oxford, he directs a show featuring a student cast and crew. Recent productions include Tragedy: a tragedy, Polaroid Stories, Circle Mirror Transformation, As You Like It, Medea, Men On Boats, and Ada and the Engine.
He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University, and his B.A. from Hamilton College.
