2025 Digital Conference
Dramaturgy and Creative Infrastructure

• Caitlin A. Kane (they/she)
• Ilinca Todoruţ
• Jennifer Popple
• Sam Redway

Dramaturgs’ work on and with history provides the infrastructure for some of our most impactful artistic, civic, and cross-disciplinary collaborations. In our recently published anthology, Dramaturgy and History: Staging the Archive, we make this claim through case studies by artist-scholars working in contexts ranging from professional theatres to high school classrooms to digital archives. In this session, a panel of the book’s contributors share their projects and approaches.

LMDA President & Board Members

Thomas Underdal

This presentation reflects on my role as a dramaturg for Arizona State University’s production of Sometimes the Rain, Sometimes the Sea by Julia Izumi, where I collaborated with the director, designers, and performers to create an interactive lobby display that introduced key elements of the play. I examine the spatial design and crafted experience, illustrating how the space served as a bridge between worlds, immersing the audience in the play’s universe and preparing them for the performance. 

Eva Barrie

North American theatre has relied on the non-profit model for a loooooong time. Is it still serving the communities the companies seek to support? Does it allow for creativity to the fullest degree? How can we, as dramaturgs and arts leaders, usher in new, sustainable, anti-capitalist systems that allow makers to thrive, and audiences to feel needed in the theatre?

Sarah Johnson (she/her)

This workshop will walk participants through the submission process of the LMDA’s journal, Review, and explore the journal’s many options for sharing writing on the field and practice of dramaturgy. We will overview the journal sections and walk through the process of submitting, reviewing, editing, and publishing. The workshop will include a chance to brainstorm submissions, receive feedback from editors, and share resources for academic writing. Feel free to bring an abstract or draft of an article, an idea, or a curiosity about academic publishing. 

Emily Dzioba-Wasserman (she/her)

This presentation will highlight The Storyteller Studio at the New Jersey Play Lab as a case study and model for reimagined, holistic artistic development programming. The Studio was conceived as a radically accessible opportunity for emerging dramaturgs and writers: a virtual, no-cost space designed to bridge the gap between training and the beginning of a career. How can we cultivate meaningful artistic spaces where we focus on supporting people, their process, and developing community?

Ally Varitek

In the current Creative Infrastructures for dramaturgy, dramaturg jobs are often not a sustainable career. Finding a combination of jobs, thus, is a sustainable choice for dramaturgs, and not a failure. In this session, dramaturg Ally Varitek will present two new digital resources, one on the varied paths to dramaturgy and another on alternate paths for those with dramaturgical skillsets.

Jen Shook (she/her)

Delving into local archives, we learned that our town and town spaces once functioned more as shared audiences, but often for performances more “pageant” than “plays.” In the way that those pageants captured and perpetuated the communities’ sense of themselves and how they wanted to be remembered, we found nuances of gender, race, and other identities not evident at first glance. How can communities and institutions recuperate the less documented performative past in order to build a more collaborative future?

Michael Poblete (he/him)

Drawing from the contents of my upcoming book, I argue the studies I conducted in a Hawaiian high school indicate that dramaturgy is a unique educational tool in its capacity to promote student agency in virtual and in-person devised theatre classrooms.

• Sarah Johnson (she/her)
• Sheridan Schreyer (she/her)
• Spencer Wilkes Fields (he/him/his)
• Megan Gray Lederman (she/her)

This panel will explore the teaching of dramaturgy for diverse student populations across a department in both implicit and explicit ways. The panelists are faculty and graduate students at Indiana University’s Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance. This panel will provide practical strategies for implementing dramaturgical thinking and dramaturgy as practice in a wide variety of academic settings.

• Katy Naylor (she/hers)
• Jack Aldisert (he/him)
• Owen Kingston (he/him)

In this panel discussion, leading practitioners will explore how they employ the participatory dramaturgies of contemporary interactive theatre – which dramaturgically incorporates the contributions of audience-participants – create transformative feelings of liberation, agency and connection.

They will also share the story of grassroots interactive arts organisation, the Voidspace, which is building a mutually supportive creative community infrastructure from the ground up.

Jacqueline Goldfinger (she/her/hers)

Participants are welcome – but not required – to share up-to-three theater resources published or posted since the COVID outbreak; only one of the resources can be written/generated by you/you and collaborators. For each resource, you have two-minutes to share: title, author/generators, why it’s particularly useful at this moment, and how to access it. Goldfinger will have this session translated into Spanish afterwards and share the translated transcript as well as a list of the resources discussed. Participants leave the session with tools to move forward in their creative and academic journeys.