Stanford Humanities Center
Marina Johnson is a PhD candidate in Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) with PhD minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in directing and taught at Beloit College for three years.
Johnson continues to work as a director and dramaturg while also co-hosting Kunafa and Shay, a MENA/SWANA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons. During her most recent fieldwork, she directed several productions with Al Harah Theatre and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre.
Johnson’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Theatre/Practice, TDR, Theatre Topics, Arab Stages, Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities (Routledge), Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I: Performers (Bloomsbury).
SHC Project
On This Land: Palestinian Performance from 2015–2025
On This Land: Palestinian Performance from 2015-2025 highlights recent performances, spotlighting the ways that performance functions as a mechanism of rupture toward state-sanctioned violence. What do the stories that Palestinian cultural producers create and choose to tell on stage, film, and in the streets reveal about the ways that they transcend, reconceptualize, reimagine, provoke, and innovate? Who are the people performing and how do they fit into the cultural, social, and political structures of Palestinian society? How do the nuances of education and heritage shape the experiences of both performers and audience members? I am interested in the ways that Palestinian performance counteracts official narratives and creates new ways that embodied knowledge is shared kinesthetically and intergenerationally. My dissertation defines performance broadly, taking up children’s theatre, YouTube videos, circus, clowning, and other modes of storytelling to paint the landscape of Palestinian performances happening for the past ten years.
