Ryan Hartigan
Ryan Hartigan is an artist and scholar from Aotearoa-New Zealand, and PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University. He was Graduate School Fellow at the University of Minnesota 2007. His research interests include historiography, Alfred Jarry and French Symbolism, self-as-performance and everyday life, and the colonial, gendered, and intercultural legacies of the modernist avant-gardes. His MA thesis, awarded by Victoria University of Wellington, positions Ubu Roi in relation to Alfred Jarry’s performed self, and argues that the production contests metatheatrical senses of performativity in the public life of fin-de-siècle Paris. A paper generated from this research was presented as his ADSA conference debut in 2007 (later published), for which he became the first scholar from his country to win the Victoria Kelly Prize. He has also published on postcolonial performance, and was an invited inaugural contributor for the online journal Minnesota Playlist.
He is a Chapman Tripp Award-winning director and co-founder of a number of critically acclaimed performance ensembles, including the improvisation group WIT; the experimental performance group Theatre Pataphysical, and NIMBY Opera. He has studied directing in the USA with Obie-winning Lou Bellamy (Penumbra Theatre), and in NZ with the Chapman Tripp-winning David O’Donnell. Hartigan is particularly interested in developing new works, most recently directing Avye Alexandres’ “Sorting the Coats”, commissioned for Works in Progress 2008, Red Eye Theater, Minneapolis. He has taught in a wide range of settings, including Victoria University of Wellington, Massey University (where he was awarded Artist in Residence 2004-5), Wellington Performing Arts Centre, and Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School. He has taught directing, acting, devising, the literature and theatre of Aotearoa-New Zealand and the Pacific, dramaturgy of the avant-garde, and was especially sought after as an improvisation teacher and performer in Aotearoa, studying with internationally renowned practitioners such as Keith Johnstone.
Hartigan is also co-founder, and co-curator along with Elise Morrison, of Brown's very own late night Smoke and Mirrors Cabaret.
