PhD Students and Candidates

PhD students and candidates based at UC San Diego are part of a joint PhD program with UC Irvine. As part of the joint program, Theatre and Dance PhDs teach and receive funding from UC San Diego, but are able to take courses at either institution. Click on the profiles below to read more about each student/candidate. To learn more about UC San Diego's Joint PhD Program with UC Irvine, visit the PhD Program page.

Haejin Bang
Second-year PhD student with research focus in exploring ‘embodied silences,’ a cartography of collective intergenerational trauma, by exploring the affects of sound tied to body. Through the practice and performance of pansori, their goal is to both explore and create multidisciplinary resources for other diasporic folks looking to learn more about indigenous corean music, histories, and philosophies.
Haïa R’nana Bchiri
Fifth-year PhD student with research focus in Ancient Mediterranean performance, female power and patriarchal historiography in the ancient world, gender and performances of power, early modern theatre and politics, and performances of divinity.
Emma Clarke
Third-year PhD student with research focus in performance studies and dance studies with a particular interest in spectacle and spectatorship of 20th century embodied performance by women as well as the performativity of materiality and objects in relation to women's quotidians.
Michelle Huynh
Sixth-year PhD candidate with research focus in Southeast Asian performance studies, Asian/intercultural theatre, cultural studies, affect theory, ethnographic and practice-as-research methods.
Bosong Kim
Fifth-year PhD student with research focus in representations of tradition in dance performances, theorization of the body as a material heritage, culture and body as commodity and spectacle, working at the intersection of Dance/Performance studies, Cultural studies, Postcolonial studies, and Korean studies.
Kristin Leadbetter
Eighth-year PhD candidate with research focus in Acting theory, acting pedagogy, communication theory, and applied theatre.
Jazmine Simone Logan
Fourth-year PhD student with research focus in African theater, African American theater, Afrocentricity, race and performance in theater pedagogy, cultural competency, critical race theory, and social justice work in theater education.
Nic Rodriguez Villafañe
Third-year PhD student with research focus in phenomenological impacts of diaspora Boricua and Afro Caribbean performance arts.
Madison Mae Williams
Seventh-year PhD candidate with research focus in American musical theatre, the Black Power/Arts movements, horror and the uncanny, performance for children, and the films of Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes.
G Yi
Fourth-year PhD student with research focus in Performance Studies, Queer/Transgender Studies, Disability [Justice] Studies, Indigenous and diasporic Korean cultures and traditions, critical theory and decolonial thought, the pedagogy and practice of community-based embodied healing, survivorship in countercultures, theory in the flesh, and spiritual performance and transformation.
Yi-Jen Yu
Eighth-year PhD student with research focus in the convergence of performance studies, cultural studies, and material culture studies to explore the momentum of transitional justice in the texture and tactility of non-life objects.