Dr. Mysia Anderson-White

Biography

Dr. Mysia Anderson-White (she/her) is assistant professor in the Performance Studies area in the Department of Theatre + Dance at UC San Diego. Dr. Anderson-White earned her MA and PhD from Brown University’s Theatre Arts and Performance Studies department and BA from Stanford University’s African and African American Studies program. Her work engages the fields of Black feminisms, Black Studies, Black Performance Theory, and Environmental Humanities. An artist-scholar, her multi-disciplinary works draw upon critical ethnography, oral histories, embodied practice, and archival methodologies.

Her forthcoming manuscript, Black Miami in the Eye of the Storm: Performing Black Sustainability, theorizes performances of Black survival in the midst of environmental disaster. Research for this project has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Joukowsky Institute, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Black Studies Project, the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and the University of Miami’s Center for Global Black Studies. Her work is published in the Black Theatre Review, Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas, Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Theatre Symposium, and M(O)ther Perspectives: Staging Motherhood in 21st Century North American Theatre & Performance, an edited anthology.

A graduate of the Atlantic Acting School, Mysia desires to tell stories rooted in African Diaspora world-making. Her selected credits include Jaja’s African Hair Braiding Shop, Refuse It!: A Black Women’s Guide to 21st Century Rage, White, and The Girls of Summer. She has worked as a dramaturg in collaboration with Nkenna Akunna, Ro Reddick, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Mylan Gray, and ML Roberts. Mysia is the creator of Shadows and Light: The M Ensemble Story, a multimedia play that stages the history of Florida’s oldest Black theater company.

Professor Anderson-White’s commitment to service stretches across university departmental work, community-engaged research initiatives, and leadership in the broader fields to which her scholarship belongs. As such, she is actively involved in Black historical preservation efforts in South Florida and has successfully secured funding for community-facing institutions.

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Education

Office

Galbraith Hall 329