Biography
Pavithra Prasad
Associate Professor
Pavithra Prasad (Ph.D. in Performance Studies, Northwestern University) is a performance artist and scholar whose research and writing engage critical performance ethnography, postcolonial theory, and intercultural studies to explore issues in futurist imaginaries, race, and migration in the context of globalization. Her ethnographic work on rave subcultures, mysticism, and tourism in India has been published across disciplines in journals such as Text and Performance Quarterly, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, MUSICultures, Ecumenica, and Critical Arts. Her writings on South Asian queer identity and decolonial performance have appeared in QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking and Feminist Review, while her work in Communication Studies has appeared in the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Review of Communication. She serves on the editorial boards of several key journals and book series including Text and Performance Quarterly and Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.
Dr. Prasad’s research and writing is deeply tied to her performance practice. Her creative work plays across genres ranging from science fiction theatre and performance ethnography to experimental music performance and sound installation. Her most recent performance works were created on Zoom during the pandemic and can be found in the archives of CAPS UCLA (Center for Art of Performance, UCLA), Live Artists Live (Roski School of Art, USC), and the I4C Collective at Arizona State University. Her most recent sound installation work is exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego (formerly the Lux Art Institute).
Pavi is a futurist in orientation. She is committed to exploring what new or reimagined forms of communication can emerge (or re-emerge) from a deep investment in creativity, aesthetics, and collective worldmaking. As much as she takes her work in critical theory seriously, she is also a champion of deep play, humor, and pleasure as techniques of social change. Her artistic work takes place in unusual places: her bathtub, amongst wild bushes, swimming pools, and sometimes imagined in outer space. She teaches the way she creates – with curiosity about her students, respect for different styles of learning, and an energetic improvisational style that approaches teaching itself as a creative art.
Courses taught by Dr. Prasad include:
Undergraduate Courses
COMS 301: Performance, Language, and Cultural Studies
COMS 356: Intercultural Communication
COMS 360: Gender and Communication
COMS 401: Performance and Social Change
COMS 440: Performance and Cultural Studies Criticism
QS 301: Perspectives in Queer Studies (as affiliate faculty in the Queer Studies Program)
Graduate Courses
COMS 603: Seminar in Performance Studies
COMS 604: Seminar in Textual Studies
COMS 610: Current Research in Performance Studies
COMS 656: Seminar in Intercultural Communication
COMS 697: Directed Comprehensive Studies