Bio

Eunice S. Ferreira is a director, actor and playwright who combines scholarship with artistic vision and practice. She is Associate Professor of Theater at Skidmore College, where she is a recent recipient of a Mellon Periclean grant to support creative collaborations on civic engagement with local organizations. Her research, teaching, and directing are interdisciplinary, international, and intercultural in scope, with a focus on race, representation, and artists of the global majority. Areas of expertise include multilingual performance, theater history, translation studies, mixed race performance, theater for social justice and change, musical theater, new play development, and theater of Cabo Verde, her ancestral home. Her goal is to train students to be innovative theater makers who will reflect a greater breadth of the human experience on our stages. She has produced, directed, and choreographed a variety of plays and musicals, including the premiere of The Orphan Sea by Caridad Svich, with a cast and creative team representing ten different languages. She has produced, directed and choreographed a variety of plays ranging from Greek classics to musical comedy. Representative titles include Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, Molière’s Tartuffe, and musicals Once on This Island, The Wizard of Oz (incorporating Beijing opera techniques), Quilters, Guys and Dolls, and Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World, for which she and the cast did a master class and rehearsal with the composer. Her original plays include Elvis, a Harley and a Nun and Poetry in Motion. In addition, she has directed and devised plays with under-resourced youth in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. With support from the Periclean Faculty Leadership Program for civic engagement in the classroom, she has taught Theater for Social Justice and Change and brought the conversation into the community through partnerships with local groups MLK Saratoga and Black Dimensions in Art (BDA) in Saratoga Springs, New York.  

Embracing the notion of the scholar artist, Dr. Ferreira’s research focuses on the intersections of theatrical performance and issues of language, race, class, gender, culture and national identity.  Her areas of expertise include: world theater history, intercultural performance, translation studies, multilingual performance, creole and mixed race studies, transnational studies, African American theater, race and performance, musical theater, new play development, theater for social change, Cape Verdean theater, and theater of the African diaspora. She has published in English and Portuguese. Her chapter “Setting a Global Table with Multilingual Theater” is published in Casting a Movement (Routledge) and the first English translation of a play from Cape Verde [Alone Onstage (Sozinha no Palco) by Mário Lúcio Sousa, Cape Verde’s former Culture of Minister and celebrated playwright/musician] is featured in Moving Worlds. Her forthcoming books include her monograph Crioulo Performance: Remapping Creole and Mixed Race Theatre (Vanderbilt University Press) and Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Radical Imaginings for Just Communities (Routledge), co-edited with Lisa L. Biggs (Brown University). Dr. Ferreira is also working on a manuscript based on her dissertation “Theatre in Cape Verde: Resisting, Reclaiming, and Recreating National and Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Lusophone Africa,” which examines post-independence theatre in Cape Verde from 1975 to 2005. Her national leadership roles include President of the Black Theatre Association, the Governing Council of Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), board member of The Orchard Project (a preeminent artistic development laboratory and accelerator for new works), and board member of Great Minds (a Boston non-profit organization that mentors youth, especially underrepresented and first-generation college-bound students). She is also a member of the Black Theatre Network (BTN), the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) and the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). Dr. Ferreira holds a PhD in theater history from Tufts University and an MA in directing from Emerson College, and regularly presents at national and international conferences. At MIT, in addition to working on research projects, she teaches 'Black Theater Matters' and 'Mixed Race Theater & Film,' special topics courses that invite students of all backgrounds and levels of theater experience for a semester of critical engagement and creativity.

Publications

Ferreira, Eunice S. and Lisa L. Biggs, eds. Applied Theatre: Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Radical Imaginings for Just Communities. (Under contract with Routledge.)

Ferreira, Eunice S. Crioulo Performance: Remapping Creole and Mixed Race Theatre. (Under contract with Vanderbilt University Press).

Ferreira, Eunice S. "Cape Verdean Theatre: Enacting Political Theory and Reclaiming Roots for Crioulo Performance." Journal of Cape Verdean Studies 4.1 (2019): 3.

Ferreira, Eunice S. "Setting a global table with multilingual theater." Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Routledge, 2019. 117-130.

Sousa, Mário Lúcio, Christina S. McMahon (trans.), and Eunice S. Ferreira (trans.). "Alone Onstage [Sozinha no Palco]." Moving Worlds 14.1: 'African Arts: Contemporary Forms' (2014). 

Ferreira, Eunice S. "Crioulo Shakespearano and the Creolising of King Lear." African Theatre: Shakespeare in and out of Africa (2013): 111-33.

Ferreira, Eunice S. Theatre in Cape Verde: Resisting, reclaiming, and recreating national and cultural identity in postcolonial lusophone Africa. Tufts University, 2009.

At MIT

"Mapping Creole Dreams," MLK Scholar Luncheon Seminar, Institute Community and Equity Office, 2 March 2023

Mixed Race Theater & Film course (Spring 2023), MIT Music and Theater Arts

 

 

 

 

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