Nick Fesette

Dr. Fesette is a theatre artist and scholar. He has directed or performed in over 50 productions in professional, academic, and community-based settings. At Oxford he has directed productions of Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation, Shakespeare's As You Like It, Rachel Cusk's Medea, Jaclyn Backhaus' Men On Boats, Lauren Gunderson's Ada and the Engine, and Max Frisch's The Arsonists, as well as two projects devised during the pandemic: a digital theatre performance for social justice, titled Fragments and Connections, and the Isolation Performance Project, a collaboratively created series of 12 original theatre experiments staged for an audience of one.

His writing is published in Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Research in Drama Education, PUBLIC, and Teaching Artist Journal, as well as in the volume Race and Performance after Repetition. His current book project examines the prison state as a performing structure that continually re-stages race and class oppression. He not only considers how performance contributes to resistant, liberatory, and abolitionist movements, but also how performance has historically served to support and circulate the logics of imprisonment. In part, this project draws upon his five years experience working with the Phoenix Players Theatre Group, a company of incarcerated writers and performers located in Auburn Correctional Facility in Upstate New York.