MLK Scholar Presentation: "Mapping Creole Dreams" with Eunice Ferreira

Synopsis: Eunice S. Ferreira maps a personal and academic journey across the Atlantic to look at theater in Cape Verde, West Africa and then back to its diasporic communities. She focuses on how Crioulo performance brings transnational notions of creole identities, mixed race, and Blackness into conversation. In mapping these relationships, she celebrates the ability of theater - from Cape Verde to Cambridge - to foster dialogue, archive cultural memory, nurture diasporic connections, inspire interdisciplinary collaboration, call for social justice, and build communities.
Eunice S. Ferreira
Associate Professor of Theater at Skidmore College
Affiliate Faculty with Black Studies, Intergroup Relations, Latin American/Latinx Studies, Gender Studies, and Media & Film Studies
Dr. Eunice S. Ferreira joins MIT as an MLK Visiting Professor 2022-23. She is Associate Professor of Theater at Skidmore College where she is a recent recipient of a Mellon Periclean grant to support creative collaborations on civic engagement with local organizations. She is a scholar artist whose research, teaching, and directing focus on race, representation, and artists of the global majority. Areas of expertise include multilingual performance, theater history, translation studies, mixed race performance, theater for social justice and change, musical theater, new play development, and theater of Cabo Verde, her ancestral home. She has produced, directed, and choreographed a variety of plays and musicals, including the multilingual premiere of The Orphan Sea by Caridad Svich. She has published in U.S. and international journals, including Theatre Journal, African Theatre: Shakespeare in & out of Africa, and The Journal of Cape Verdean Studies. Her chapter, “Setting a Global Table with Multilingual Theater,” is published in Casting a Movement (Routledge) and the first English translation of a play from Cape Verde is featured in Moving Worlds. Her forthcoming books include her monograph Crioulo Performance: Remapping Creole and Mixed Race Theatre (Vanderbilt University Press) and Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Radical Imaginings for Just Communities (Routledge), co-edited with Lisa L. Biggs (Brown University). Dr. Ferreira’s national leadership roles include President of the Black Theatre Association, the Governing Council of ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education), board member of The Orchard Project (a preeminent artistic development laboratory and accelerator for new works), and board member of Great Minds (a Boston non-profit organization that mentors youth, especially underrepresented and first-generation college-bound students). She earned her M.A. in Directing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in theater history from Tufts University. She is happy to join MIT where, in addition to her research projects, she is teaching Black Theater Matters and Mixed Race Theater & Film, special topics courses that invite students of all backgrounds and levels of theater experience for a semester of critical engagement and creativity. She also invites you to follow her teaching Instagram account @BIPOCTheatre, where you can spot the work of MIT students.