Associate Professor of Theatre

Nicole Hodges Persley, Associate Professor of Theatre, has worked with diverse African communities for over 15 years. She has lived and worked in West Africa and has several employment experiences engaging immigrant youth. She was a cultural arts director for the African Refugee Resource Center in Los Angeles, working with Eritrean, Somali and Ethiopian youth to use film to narrate their experiences as Africans in America. She created a short documentary film, Don’t Want to Live Like a Refugee (1999) that narrated the experiences of East African youth living in LA. She also used improvisatory practices of art making with self-taught artists in Dakar, Senegal. She is the author of a forthcoming book, Sampling and Remixing Blackness, on non-African American artists in theater, conceptual art, and dance who utilize African American expressions of Hip-hop to articulate their personal narratives. She is the director of ITT- The Interactive Theater Troupe at the University of Kansas which uses improvisatory theater and performance to teach students, faculty and staff about diversity on KU’s campus.