Welcome to ATDS
President’s Message – September 2024
Dear ATDS community,
As I reflect on my first year as President of ATDS, I am in awe of all that we have achieved thanks to our officers, partners, and members. We…
- Coordinated our first free, online symposium
- Made Conference Planner an elected position with voting rights
- Committed to publishing graduate students’ Emerging Scholar Award-winning conference papers in Theatre Annual
- Partnered with the Disability Theatre and Performance focus group on our Emerging Scholars panel
- Partnered with the Music Dance Theatre Association to host an online roundtable on new musical theatre books by scholars of color
- Raised funds for a workshop to support scholarship by contingent faculty
- Held an online session to demystify Theatre Annual and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (watch it here!)
- Hired a graduate student to correct the captions for our professionalization videos
- Organized workshops on grant and fellowship application best practices (available here!)
- Hosted a summer dissertation writing meetup
- Offered mentorship to graduate students
- Coordinated another first book bootcamp
- Gave out lots of awards to colleagues doing exciting and vital work
- Sponsored a slew of fantastic ATHE sessions alongside AAP, ATME, BTA, Directing, Dramaturgy, DTaP, LGBTQA+, LIA, MET, Performance Studies, TASC, VASTA, WTP, and Wellness, Community, and Aging
I am proud of how we have expanded upon our year-round programming and held true to our ethos in making that programming more accessible. We have cultivated a reputation as a compassionate organization serving members at all levels.
But we cannot do this work without you. Please join us or renew your membership, and please note that we are still offering pay-what-you-can membership.
We would also love to have you aboard our Board! Our Nominations Committee will be working on putting together the slate for our spring 2025 elections for the positions of Vice President/President-Elect, Conference Planner, Secretary, Treasurer, International Secretary, Graduate Student Representative/Board Member, and 4 Board Members. To learn more about these positions, check out our bylaws, feel free to reach out to current Officers and Board Members (like me!), and express interest to our VP Ginny Anderson at Vanderso@conncoll.edu.
Next, I would like to extend some warm welcomes: Welcome to Isaiah M. Wooden in joining Jonathan Shandell to co-organize our ongoing anti-racist initiatives. Welcome to Vicki Hoskins, our new MLA (Modern Language Association) Liaison. And welcome to Cătălina Florina Florescu, the incoming Associate Editor of Theatre Annual.
It’s fall, so let’s start thinking about ATHE. The ATHE 2025 conference will take place online under the banner of “The Real.” We will program with intentionality to serve our members from providing multi-level mentorship to providing spaces to exchange research and teaching ideas. Do let us know what you would like to see from ATDS by contacting our Conference Planner Samuel Yates at conference1@atds.org. We will learn more about what “Big ATHE” has in store and offer our input at the ATHE membership meeting on Wednesday, September 25th at 12pm Eastern time to which you’re all invited.
To support our journals and share your work, please consider submitting to the Spring 2025 special issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre on Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today and/or becoming a book reviewer for Theatre Annual.
Finally, let’s celebrate you and your accomplishments. Send your member news to our wonderful Digital Media Secretary Alexis Riley at digitalmedia@atds.org. Hurray for our members’ publications this year, and please don’t be shy about adding yours!
Rooting for you,
Donatella
Donatella Galella, PhD
Associate Professor, University of California, Riverside
President, American Theatre and Drama Society
she/her
Spotlight on Frick Winners & Honorable Mentions
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ATDS at ATHE 2023
The American Theatre and Drama Society stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement and with the fight for justice and equity in the United States, the American hemisphere, and the world.
We grieve George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Manuel Ellis, and many, many others. We are enraged by their murders at the hands of police officers.
We are incensed by the racialized inequity of COVID-19 and its disproportionate toll in Black communities, poor communities, and communities of color.
The U.S. has long profited from a normalized disposability of Black life; profoundly racialized economic inequity; and modernity’s systemic occlusion of its dependence on coloniality. We maintain that structural and systemic inequity connects the fight for Black life with the fight for lives of color, for lives of the global majority, for the lives of poor, trans, indigenous, immigrant, queer, female, and disabled communities in the U.S. and the world.
As an organization dedicated to the study of theatre, drama, and performance in and of the Americas, our mission demands that we face these oppressions and acknowledge our part in them.
We pledge our resources to educating ourselves; interrogating, naming, and dismantling our privileges; rooting out anti-Blackness in our field and practices; and amplifying Black voices and voices of color in our scholarship, teaching, administration, and theatre-making. We pledge to articulate actionable tasks. This statement cannot and will not substitute for action.
We recognize that the American Theatre and Drama Society is a majority white organization. We recognize that Black artists and scholars and neighbors have been doing and living this work for generations and are often called upon to educate their white colleagues. We maintain that it is white responsibility to educate themselves and each other.
Thank you to ATDS officers and board members for helping write this statement. Thank you to The Bushwick Starr, Tufts Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, and the Theater Department of Skidmore College for sharing resources and language with ATDS.
For more resources, please click here.
Black Theatre and Performance: Recent Publications
