Meet Dean Emily Roxworthy BY ALLISON ENGEL
EMILY ROXWORTHY , whose appointment at SDA
began July 1, is a scholar-artist with degrees in theatre arts, literature, and performance studies from Cornell University (MA) and Northwestern University (BS and PhD). She was most recently on the theatre and dance faculty of the University of California, San Diego, where she also served as Associate Vice Chancellor of Faculty Diversity and Equity, Provost of Earl Warren College, and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division.
She also is the creator of an educational video game prototype, Drama in the Delta, that used digital roleplay technology to recreate life in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. Dean Roxworthy is also the author of two scholarly books, The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma (2008) and The Theatrical Professoriate (2020).
Q: What makes the dramatic arts necessary in the 21st century? Dean Roxworthy: What’s so unique about theatre is that it’s this ancient storytelling technology that just never really goes away. For centuries, we’ve been talking about the death of the theatre. It never goes away because it’s so necessary and necessary now more than ever. We always talk about the theatre as a place of healing: a spiritual, but not religious, coming together. One of the origins of theatre is, of course, ancient Greece, but one of the differences between theatre then and theatre now is that, in ancient Greece, a third of the citizens came out to each of these huge performances and today we are not touching anywhere close to that proportion of the population. We’ve learned a lot of lessons from the pandemic about ways we can provide better access and reach. [ CO N T IN U E D ]
PHOTO BY
Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging
Dean Roxworthy has a national reputation as founder and artistic director of Workplace Interactive Theatre, a company that uses roleplaying to help employees find solutions to diversity and inclusion problems in their workplaces.
Callboard interviewed Dean Roxworthy recently for the following Q and A:
DRAMATICARTS.USC.EDU
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